Against Irony

A new culture war is being waged against the evils of the knowing smirk — and a sincere young man named Jedediah Purdy is leading the charge. By MARSHALL SELLA Photographs by GEORGE PITTS









Jedediah Purdy at home in West Virginia with his sister, Hannah, left, and mother, Deirdre.



edediah Purdy is out on what he likes to call a ramble. Walking through the wooded hills near his family's remote West Virginia house, he snaps up wild blackberries and feels the soil that has been punished by the summer's drought. He eventually reaches a high meadow and finds a sprawling ash tree that holds special meaning for him. "I had vaguely animist sensibilities as a boy," he says, spreading his pale hand along the bark. "I used to come and drink from this tree after a rain. Water would seep from its exposed roots. I had no predictive theory of what would happen when I drank from it. I just figured I would find out." If the natural world once inspired mystical thoughts in Purdy, it now brings out his professorial side. Pausing to examine a dry stream bed, he muses: "Nature is a complicated and layered repository of human aspirations. It was a privilege to grow up in this landscape."

Though he speaks distantly about his boyhood, Purdy is 24 and looks younger. And though he speaks abstractly about nature, the real world — all that is palpable and good — is an absolute fetish for him. As he tramps through the forest, there is no vine that Purdy cannot identify. His boyhood is past, but he can still clench his feet into little foot-fists — grabbing the dirt with his toes — and walk straight down steep hills.

Purdy was home-schooled until age 13. His sudden exposure to pop culture has kindled in him a blocky notion that America is in Trouble. The country, he insists, is in the throes of corrosive irony. "It's less than a scourge," he says, "but no better than a blight." Purdy's first book, "For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today," advocates hope, politics — really, earnestness itself — all in an effort to cure a society that devalues what it should embrace.

In the book's preface, Purdy defines his project as "one young man's letter of love for the world's possibilities." For the next 204 pages, his ardor never dims. He frets terribly about the deadening effects of irony, warning that "if we care for certain things, we must in honesty hazard some hope in their defense." The thing reads like a single, protracted cri de coeur. "I cannot help believing that we need a way of thinking, and doing," he writes, "that has in it more promise of goodness than the one we are now following."

Marshall Sella, a frequent contributor to the magazine, last wrote about Ira Glass.





Jed Purdy has a wide, sensible mouth and eyes that curve downward when he smiles — which is often, for he is nothing if not a courteous young man. Newspaper articles from as early as 1988, when the boy won his state's spelling bee by nailing "blandishment," paint him much as he looks today: "a clear-speaking and polite teen-ager." After stagnating for three years at a local high school, Purdy attended Exeter and then Harvard; he is now studying law at Yale. Freshly burdened by the weight of the world, his brow is etched with new concern lines, two deep curves over the bridge of his nose that form an empty parenthetical.

"I am alarmed at how most people, including me, can open up to indifference," he says. "The ironic sensibility inhibits the act of remembering how to value what you value."

Purdy is hardly alone in his critique. These days, irony — in particular, the sardonic edge typified by David Letterman — is under siege. Steve Martin has begun describing it in print as "a virus"; The Minneapolis Star Tribune claims it is "crippling" the nation's youth. Even John McCain, the Republican Senator, rarely gives a speech in his Presidential campaign without vowing to "declare war on cynicism." A more extended consideration of irony's caustic effects has come from the novelist David Foster Wallace. In an essay included in his 1997 collection, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," Wallace writes that irony and ridicule are "agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture" — and, moreover, "enfeebling," "tiresome" and "a new junta."

Wallace and Purdy reach this common ground via two very different routes. Wallace's attack is shot through with knowing references to Garry Shandling, Isuzu commercials and "Married . . . With Children." Purdy prefers Thoreau and Montaigne, though he is equally enamored of truisms — the stunning fact that politicians "have always preferred words to deeds," for instance. Even in person, he expresses such thoughts with pure conviction. "Some judgments are right and some are wrong," he says. "Valuing the natural world is right."

lfred A. Knopf, his publisher, could not have eugenically bred a better spokesmodel for sincerity than Jedediah Purdy. In a world filled with rogues, punks and Wall Street sharpies, Purdy looks just like that Fine Young Man whom every father wishes his daughter would bring to dinner, the fair-haired boy who not only professes decency but exudes it from every respectful pore. His abnormally vast vocabulary, offset by his air of diffidence, seems to put the whammy on everyone he meets. Robert Kuttner, the co-editor of the liberal journal The American Prospect, lapses into a reverential trance at the sound of Purdy's name. "He is the genuine article," says Kuttner. "Modesty and astonishing talent are what make him . . . a star."

Kuttner met Purdy in 1997. "We were thinking of starting a fellowship," he says. "Jed walked in the door and just blew our socks off. It was hard to believe he was from Earth. He'd read so much, and wrote like a grown-up. Paul Starr, my co-editor, is not an easy man to please — but said soon after that, 'The only thing I can compare him to is a young Walter Lippmann."' Although there was no money in his budget for fellowships, Kuttner grabbed Purdy and never looked back.



Jed's letter to Santa wished Rudolph and Mrs. Claus well, before closing with the solemn declaration: 'I have tried to be good. Judge me as you will.'







After leaving Harvard, Purdy began working to expand an article on irony he had written for The American Prospect. It never occurred to him to test the waters before leaping headlong into the project. Last year, he submitted a manuscript, whole, to an agent he had met through Kuttner. It eventually landed on the desk of a 27-year-old assistant editor named Leyla Aker, who was about to consign it to the Knopf slush pile when she paged through it on a whim. Impressed, she passed the manuscript to Ashbel Green, a senior editor. "I thought we could reach a young audience with this book," Green says. "If we got lucky, and it took off, it could be a little like 'The Greening of America."'

Only later did Aker learn that Purdy was 24 and a home-schooler. "I said, 'You've got to be kidding!"' she recalls. "It may sound like we chose him from Central Casting, but that's not the way it worked. The kid from nowhere had valuable things to say." In the end, Purdy was paid a $75,000 advance for his manuscript. It was only lightly edited.

Knopf has packaged its hot new property in a cover so exquisitely plain that it looks like a high-tech Quaker prayer book, with a thin red border to suggest reliability and a sea of white space around the title. "We wanted a design that was simple," says Aker, "something that would hark back to the 18th century, when politics was a part of life." Purdy is unaware of most of the publishing decisions involving his book. He jokes that Knopf leaves him in the dark about all the sausage-factory details to keep him unsullied. "I have a sense," he says, "that they think I'm rather fragile." It wasn't until reading the book's bound galleys that he learned about his coming "four-city author tour" and "appearances including C-Span and NPR." He did not know who had been approached to "blurb" the book — or, really, how "blurbing" works. But he was thrilled when Knopf publicists told him that Bill Moyers loved his book. "Isn't that wild?" he said, in a rare departure from High English. "He apparently stayed up all night reading it. He said it was the best book he'd read in 10 years!"

he West Virginia of Jedediah Purdy's youth "was not an ironic place," as he likes to say. His teddy bear was named Teddy. His sister Hannah's stuffed bunny was called Bunny. Wood came from out back. Meat came from cattle the family slaughtered.

Jed Purdy was born three months after the resignation of Richard Nixon. He was named for Jedediah Strong Smith, the mountain man of the early 1800's who opened up the West and was killed by Comanches. His parents, Wally and Deirdre Purdy, had moved to West Virginia from Pennsylvania the previous spring to revive an agrarian ideal, to turn their backs on the hollowness of mainstream living. They were hippies then, excited to grow their own food in the wilderness and make sense out of life with both hands. As Deirdre Purdy says, "We believed what Wendell Berry wrote about — living in a certain place and making what you can of the place." Within a few years, Wally built the solid red-oak house they live in today. They got indoor plumbing only in 1989; until the late 1970's, their house was lighted solely by natural-gas lamps.









"Vaguely animist sensibilities": Purdy contemplating a jar of tea.



The younger Purdy likes to describe his rural upbringing as "gritty." Yet Jed never grew into a character as rough-hewn as his West Virginia neighbors. "I wasn't always good at encountering the fate of our slaughtered animals," he admits. "Once, we had a pig named Amigo. I won him in a greased-pig contest when I was 10. With motives I remember as being utterly nontactical, I had rubbed his snout just before the competition. I'd befriended him. So on release, he made a beeline for me. When they killed him, my father paid me $30. I was so upset that I had to leave for a whole day."

The elder Purdys had resolved, early on, to be that 1970's ideal: parents who fostered learning but didn't interfere. Wally read Jed and Hannah "The Chronicles of Narnia" and a biography of Frederick Douglass. After Jed picked up "Charlotte's Web" at the age of 6, he began reading five hours a day, devouring Laura Ingalls Wilder and countless outdoorsy manuals. He read about blacksmithing, bear hunting and gourd banjos. "The American Boy's Handy Book" taught him how to build ice boats and care for crows. "I was completely prepared to have a pet crow," he says. "I took out the entire collection on crows from the Charleston library. But I never found a nest."

For the boy Purdy, everything in life seemed a weighty invitation to self-betterment. His letter to Santa Claus, written at the age of 8, did not ask for gifts; it merely wished Rudolph and Mrs. Claus well, before closing with the solemn declaration: "I have tried to be good. Judge me as you will."

Jed could himself be a fierce moralizer. "I disliked public displays of affection," he says, carrying a bucket of pond water up to a tomato patch near the house. "I did not think people should drink beer. I was a bundle of prudish little tics."

His mother agrees. "He was born judging people," Deirdre Purdy says, laughing as she spreads dried-blood powder on the tomato plants to keep deer away. "We were chastened for every lapse! Really, it was like having a priest in the house. How would you like it?"

For the most part, the Purdys managed to steel themselves against the mainstream. "From 1975 to 1986, this family was checked out of pop culture," Jed says. "My parents say it was a good decade to miss." But even in the idylls of his prudent childhood, he had brushes with irony. "The first time I felt the force of the ironic impulse," he says, "was watching a nature program called 'Wild America.' It was a morality play involving good and bad species. There was a sustained shot of a young antelope running from a hyena. The narrator, Marty Stouffer, had a curious voice-over" — here, Purdy's voice goes high and ludicrously dramatic — in which he said: 'Run, run, little antelope, run! That hyena was born to kill, but you were born to run!' It was the first time I was embarrassed by sanctimony." He didn't quite snicker, but he thought about it.

Jed's early collisions with irony were especially jarring because of the home-schooled isolation of his past. On arrival at Calhoun County High School at the age of 13, he knew next to nothing about the esoteric codes of teen-age society. "I had no idea that kids have a pecking order, that you can besmirch yourself just by being seen talking to a certain person," he recalls. "I also didn't know that you can't just talk about whatever you're interested in — that you must choose your topics with an eye to general interest." Jed was always offering up thoughts on such teeny-bopper faves as aid to the Contras and gun control.

When Jed finally did leave West Virginia, it was for Exeter. It sounds like an oddly savvy choice, but he was fed up with life at Calhoun High, and Exeter was the only private school he had ever heard of. He didn't know enough to be daunted when he met the dean of admissions — but then, Jed had always been good at befriending grown-ups. And not surprisingly, his teachers at Exeter loved him. One wrote reports praising the boy's "maturity, fairness, dependability and judgment." Another gushed, "I feel like I have met a young William Buckley."

In 1993, Purdy headed for Harvard. His first week there, he stared directly into the face of the Beast. There is a custom at the university of screening "Love Story" for incoming freshmen, who gleefully heckle the film. You can guess the gibes: Ali MacGraw's first appearance is met with shouts of, "You're gonna get cancer!" When she steps into a cab, somebody yells, "To the morgue — and step on it!"

Appalled by such cavalier treatment of a serious illness, Purdy stomped the perimeter of Harvard Yard, then dashed off a letter to The Crimson. "I felt this was a hideous practice," he says. "Placing this at the beginning of the orientation seemed an induction of students into a cold, self-satisfied manner." Jed's war on what he calls "unchecked and unchallenged" irony had begun.

ally and Deirdre Purdy's boy is actually part of a new breed of writers. They are extremely young, aggressively publicized and seemingly enamored of lost virtues. Whether they represent a sustained cultural trend — an atavistic backlash against hip-but-directionless Generation X — remains to be seen. Either way, publishers are pleased to showcase their young-fogy sensibilities. You need look no further than Wendy Shalit, who was 23 when she wrote "A Return to Modesty," which attempted to shape a new feminism out of very old mores. Or James Prosek, who at 20 published a rhapsodic book on trout fishing inspired by his 17th-century role model, Izaak Walton.

Youth excuses prose that, in an older author's work, would look self-indulgent or disgracefully naive. But Jed Purdy is sly enough to acknowledge his innocence right up front: to dull the critics' knives by taking the easiest swipe at his own book. "Is this work a snapshot of one young man's passion?" he says. "It is absolutely! I am really in love with a lot of things about the world. The book is a kind of preface to the rest of the decisions I am going to have to make in life."

But Jed Purdy has shielded himself from this sort of abuse with an unwitting trap. It's simple: if you rail against Purdy's plea for a better world, you become precisely the lost soul for whom he grieves. "What's disappointing is how crude those readings of the book are," he says. "Wallace Stevens refers to the cynical realist who was still vital because 'under every No lay a passion for Yes that had never been broken' — but reading Hodge, it's No all the way down. It is purely and woefully an exercise in contempt."

espite those rocky first lessons of high school, Jedediah Purdy has never quite shaken his lust for off-the-cuff dissertations. Frank Pasquale, a friend from Harvard and his roommate last year at Yale, first encountered Jed at a meeting of Harvard's progressive monthly journal Perspective. "I thought: 'Who the hell is this? What's with that affected speech of his?"' Pasquale says. "It was only later, when I got to know him, that I found there was substance behind it.

"Then and now," he quickly adds, "Jed is a complete pop-culture vacuum. He's the kind of guy who reads an article by Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Review of Books and only then hears about the JonBenet murder case." Purdy's stray mentions of popular culture in "For Common Things" exhibit a similar anthropological remove: Jerry Seinfeld, for example, is admonished for "refusing to identify strongly with any project, relationship or aspiration."

Purdy just can't help writing and thinking this way; he can never resist the urge to flex his language. On any given day, he'll mention "irony and its simpler sister, cynicism," then matter-of-factly define his family dynamic as "a collaborative oligarchy with a consultative tenor." If you ask him why he knocks wood sometimes, he'll never say, For luck. He'll tell you that it is "an inchoate religious impulse, a hope that I acknowledge the dependence of my predicament on all sorts of forces."

Deirdre Purdy says that when Jed drifts into one of his orations, she commonly tunes him out; Jed's sister, Hannah, has a more severe reaction. She and her friends have a code word — Club!" — that requires Jed to remain silent, as he glumly puts it, "until I have thought of another subject to speak about." The house rule is that when Jed has been clubbed, he must spare others from his endless discursive meanderings. Explaining the tradition seems to make Jed sad.

Late one afternoon, Purdy's duties include picking blueberries from a patch out back. Dropping the berries into a Folger's coffee can, he eats more than a few, as his favorite food is "fruit that is just short of ripe." At one point, he spills his whole meticulously gathered can of berries on the hard ground. But Purdy can't interrupt his spoken essay on "the intractability of the human predicament" while he cleans up his mess. Through any number of workaday activities — bathing in the pond, looking for road signs from behind the wheel of a car — he never lets go of a rhetorical thread. Language carries him, of its own will, to the sensual warmth of its epiphany. "Your acquaintance with beauty," he says, over the light clank of blueberries hitting the metal can, "is embedded in things you first saw as beautiful, in scenes and personalities that appeal to very personal references."

Purdy is stung that some reviewers see him as a prig. "I do not hate irony, or want it to go away," he insists. "A world without irony would be colored gray on gray." His syntax can be off-putting in print, but in person, you realize that when he goes verbose on you, it's because he is intellectually excited. He is an enthusiast. And that's what the critics, those ironically distanced insiders, will never understand: that "For Common Things" is not primarily an attack on red-toothed ironists, but an affirmation of all Purdy loves in his admittedly limited experience.

Later, just before dark, we jump on his motorcycle for a tour of the countryside. As I ineptly clutch his shoulders, we veer well above 60 miles per hour along twisting roads that are posted at 25. The trip becomes a blur of white pines and rock. Occasionally, I can make out the brown smear of a cow grazing on one of the grass-bald hills.

On one especially harrowing turn, we spot a great blue heron. It is a species of bird that Purdy reveres absolutely. Confronted by one, he can't contain his joy. West Virginia is not an ironic place.

With its six-foot wingspan and endless neck, the graceful creature takes flight and begins wending its way toward a quieter stream. By coincidence, the bird's path traces the road we're hurtling down. Purdy seems to regard the heron as an emblem of meaning — as part of the common and palpable Goodness that ordinary folks could see, if only they were passionate enough to seek it out.

"It is simply a magnificent bird," he says, shouting his love of nature above the whine of the engine and the spit of exhaust. "I've never been able to follow one so far!"





Table of Contents

September 05, 1999



