Which books do you think capture the current social and political moment in America?
I’ve been aching over Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” for two years straight. It was widely praised, but still not enough. We ought to be talking constantly about the troubling data Professor Putnam has uncovered. There really are “two different Americas,” but not in the way the phrase lingers in our ears because of how John Edwards’s presidential campaign in 2004 branded the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Putnam shows that the troubling resurgence of socioeconomic class in America centers primarily around the divide between the mobile educated elite (31 percent of our neighbors, according to Putnam) and the majority of America — the 69 percent of kids he says are born into a house with no college graduates. These children have collapsing family structures, decreasing socioeconomic mobility and rapidly thinning networks of kith and kin. I like J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” but Putnam’s work is, I think, the big backdrop for understanding the vicious cycle of how declining economic opportunities for the non-educationally credentialed and family and neighborhood collapse are becoming mutually reinforcing for broad swaths of America.