Colorless, Tasteless but Not Dangerous

by Dwight Garner,
New York Times, Published: November 15, 2010

WHITER SHADES OF PALE

The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast, From Seattle’s Sweaters to Maine’s Microbrews
By Christian Lander
Illustrated. 232 pages. Random House. $15.

“Being white these days is not what it used to be,” Nell Irvin Painter wrote near the end of her monumental survey, “The History of White People,” published earlier this year. Ms. Painter, an emeritus history professor at Princeton University, noted the achievements of the Obamas and Oprah Winfrey and many other blacks and Latinos and asked, tongue only slightly in cheek, “Is this the end of race in America?”

Not in bookstores it isn’t. So many volumes about race and its discontents are published each year that you could keep a specialty bookstore stocked with them. In the back of that imagined bookstore (where the “adult” stuff used to reside) there’d be a selection of vaguely self-loathing books you’d be tempted to label Ironic White Studies.

In 2010 these books have included “True Prep,” Lisa Birnbach’s sequel to “The Official Preppy Handbook,” and on the other side of the intellectual spectrum, “What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation,” published by the literary magazine n + 1. This lofty and invigorating book is in part, as one of its editors writes, “a parody of academic proceedings.”

Then there’s the book in front of us today, Christian Lander’s low-key but preternaturally excellent “Whiter Shades of Pale.” It’s a sequel to his first book, “Stuff White People Like” (2008), which was issued with a pleasantly biting subtitle: “The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions.”

Mr. Lander’s books — like Ms. Birnbach’s and the n + 1 volume — are as much about class as they are about race. They’re about that demographic slice of educated (or self-cultivated) people who are drawn to places where the good cheese stores, coffee bars, bookshops, art movie houses and indie bands are — places where, perhaps as importantly, there are plenty of other people pretty much like themselves.

Full review at NYT.