This passage also sparked serious cognitive dissonance for me:

The C.E.O.’s that are most likely to succeed are humble, diffident, relentless and a bit unidimensional. They are often not the most exciting people to be around.

For this reason, people in the literary, academic and media worlds rarely understand business. It is nearly impossible to think of a novel that accurately portrays business success. That’s because the virtues that writers tend to admire — those involving self-expression and self-exploration — are not the ones that lead to corporate excellence.

The alleged logic here is so convoluted that trying to straighten it out feels futile, but here goes anyway. In plain English, Brooks argues that:

CEOs are boring.
Writers do not admire boring people. Instead, they admire “self-expression and self-exploration.”
Writers write only about things and people they admire and understand.
Conversely, if a subject appears in a novel, it must be something the writer admires and understands.
Therefore, if a writer admired or understood business, he or she would certainly write a novel about it.
However, Brooks cannot think of a novel that “portrays business accurately.”
Conclusion: writers–and academics and the media–do not understand business.

*sproink*

I’m not sure Brooks sees the distinction between understanding a subject and choosing to write about a subject. His “logic” here depends heavily on a perversion of the write-what-you-know doctrine. But I think it’s safe to say that most writers–and most fiction readers–understand quite a bit more than Brooks appears to in this op-ed. Like Anne, I’m glad our president, at least, is a novel-reader.

(And, because I am suffused with writerly empathy, I’m tempted to send David Brooks a novel to help him achieve some “greater psychological insight.” Suggestions, anyone?

“Literary culture has thrived in Boston, New York and on campuses. Political culture has thrived in Washington.”

I know an awful lot of DC authors who prove that untrue again and again, and anyone who’s ever checked out the schedule at Politics and Prose knows that literary culture is FULL of politicians and journalists writing everything they can think of, including novels. What a lame argument.