It is a truism of the psychologizing age that a book tells us as much about its author as about its subject. And the authentic power of For Common Things resides not in the originality of Purdy's thesis but rather in the not-at-all-incidental portrait of Jedidiah Purdy. The book is filled with autobiographical detail, and with confessions that spring from a mind uninterested in artifice and concealment: it is the example of Purdy's love of common things, rather than his sometimes boring case studies in the downfall of public culture, that proves effective.

In the course of his slim book--For Common Things runs to 207 pages--Purdy spends altogether too much time on what he openly admits are his pet issues: the miasma of confusion that is eastern European public life after 1989, and the ecological disaster of strip-mining in West Virginia. And Purdy admits, too, that his notions of the direction in which public life should move are highly derivative--although his chapter on the pervasive effects of irony and its corrosion of popular culture is original, very sophisticated, and compelling. But if you can cut through the occasional tediousness, what is left is the author as powerful exemplar of embodied faith and conviction, his emotion rousing correlative emotion in the reader. There is remarkable moral force behind Jedediah Purdy's introspection; a generation could do worse than to be moved by the example and the lucid expression of his passion.

Hodge has not read Purdy carefully enough to express himself coherently on the topic, but one senses that Hodge's criticism is built upon umbrage at the fact that For Common Things, at its heart, is not about intellectual arguments but rather about Jedediah Purdy's passionate hopes. The instance of an idealist is offensive and risible to the ironic mind that can not stand to see ideals expressed or fulfilled: "our being human," writes Purdy, "has become a strong argument against cleaving to demanding values, or respecting them in others." One can sense in Hodge the resentfulness born of this attitude, as Hodge castigates Purdy more for who he is than for what he believes: "Apparently because we're all too ironic or falsely spiritual to believe in anything as simple and real as the value of living on a hillside farm in West Virginia, we lack a politics that functions as a repository of our hopes and dreams." Even to a reader less self-consciously worldly and less corrosively bitter than Hodge, Purdy's tone and substance--the fact that this book is about Jedediah Purdy, and that any power in the book springs from his unshakeable convictions--may seem narcissistic; and his tendency towards moralistic aphorisms, towards a Thoreauvian epigrammatic style, seems a little bit pompous.

But I think any such judgments must be preceeded by an attempt to understand where this book comes from. For Common Things is remarkable for, among other things, its fidelity to the tradition of American environmentalist writing in particular. Since its beginnings, American writing has been infused with the conviction that the personal must somehow stand for the nation. It is characteristic of what has been called the American Self that the particular events of the individual life are understood to somehow trend towards universality.

Perhaps this tendency of the American Self evidences itself nowhere more clearly than in environmentalist literature and eco-criticism. It wasn't narcissism but selflessness--in the most authentic sense of the term, the vanishing of the self--that led Thoreau to tell us about his life in the woods: it was his conviction that individual choices possess some kind of cosmic exemplary significance. Walden is a sort of spiritual biography of man in Nature, told through Thoreau's experience in the woods. The notion is that experience is transcendent of the personal, and indexes the general.

And similarly with the great environmentalist writers of this century--Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Doug Peacock and many more like them--who feel compelled to tell us about their lives to an extent that often becomes deadening. Peacock has spent the years since his return from a deeply traumatic stint in Vietnam photographing and following brown bears from unimaginably unsafe distances: what lurks behind Peacock's lengthy exposition of his Grizzly Years, though, is not the implication that his set of unusual experiences are unique but that somehow they partake of the universally shared history of the relationship between man and Nature. The naturalists resolve the paradox between the necessary subjectivity of experience and the importance of nurturing a public that believes commonly in the good of environmentalism--a public that can never share the precise set of experiences that led the naturalist himself to his environmentalist beliefs--through the figure of the representative individual, not self-absorbed but rather allowing the self to absorb into the fabric of the common.

Purdy is certainly heir to this tradition of highlighting the exemplary individual, and what is remarkable is the extent to which he seems to understand and to successfully employ the techniques and the tropes of American environmentalist literature. What these techniques come down to, at bottom, has always been the recognition that logic will not suffice in altering the common perception of human responsibility.The environmentalist's have believed that, ultimately, it is not logical consideration that brings people to hopeless irony, and that redemption too will be effected not through logic but through passion and commitment.The use of the exemplary self is the attempt to convince not through argument but through moral suasion: if I can act this way or believe these things, the speaker suggests, so can you. And aphorism does not necessarily proceed through channels of reason but rather through inspiring an emotional response of identification, an instinctual rather than an intellectual yes.

Purdy's book is in its way strikingly mature and knowledgeable, extraordinarily well crafted, and in the end profoundly meaningful. This does not mean the book is flawless. It simply means that in the sum of things Jedediah Purdy has written a book that, in its example of a person who is unafraid to express out loud his delicate loves, richly deserves fulfillment of its modest request: "I cannot help believing that we need a way of thinking, and doing, that has in it more promise of goodness than the one we are now following. I want to speak a word for that belief, in the hope of an answer."