Books: Optimist In a Jaded Age

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In conversation, Purdy is hardly humorless. In fact, he's downright funny, even absurd. Cherub-faced, with a bowl-shaped haircut unsullied by the professional stylist's scissors, he gives off a dual impression of utter youthfulness and uncanny erudition. He uses the word ontology as naturally as other young men say "dude," but he's quite capable of vivid straight talk. Of his idealistic upbringing he says, "There are families that eat hot dogs and families that don't. We were a family that didn't." And his complaint about a tedious party thrown by his publisher to introduce him to New Haven, Conn., bookstore owners sounds a bit like Letterman: "One of the nice things about West Virginia is that you could comb the entire state and not put together a roomful of booksellers."

The better world that Purdy fondly hopes for is based in part on the world his parents gave him. His father Wally was raised a farmer, but when the family's ancestral acreage was taken to help expand the Pittsburgh, Pa., airport, Wally dropped out of mainstream agriculture and moved with his wife Deirdre, a graduate student in philosophy and a restless child of Delaware suburbia, to the West Virginia hamlet of Chloe. Alongside what Purdy estimates were a few hundred other local neohomesteaders, the family grew its own tomatoes, slaughtered its own cattle, and kept in touch with the wider world almost solely through National Public Radio. "Those utterly sober, almost somnolent male voices always seemed very homelike," Purdy recalls, perhaps revealing a central influence on his own hypercivilized diction. When the family broke down and bought an old TV set to view a hotly contested World Series one fall, the device ended up in the basement, and the children allowed themselves to watch it only as payment for completed chores. "My sister and I devised a system of viewing credits," Purdy remembers. He recalls that his credits were never used up.

A walking advertisement for home schooling, Purdy received no formal education until the age of 13, when a casual meeting with an admissions officer landed him a coveted place at New Hampshire's Phillips Exeter Academy. Before this--except for "an hour or two a week" of what Purdy archaically calls "arithmetic"--his lessons came from random, heavy reading. He devoured everything from Hardy Boys mysteries to chunky tomes on European history. "We made pretty serious raids on thrift-store book supplies," he says. After a brief, unfulfilling interlude in the local public school, Purdy headed up to Exeter, where he both found himself intellectually and met the cultural enemy: prep school irony.