Tag Archives: de Botton

Briefly noted: The Course of Love — Alain de Botton

June 24, 2016 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Fiction, Reviews Tags: , , Leave a comment

You don’t need to read The Course of Love: instead read Mating in Captivity or Neil Strauss’s book The Truth or even Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which, despite its murder premise, is truer to modern relationships than The Course of Love. You may be tempted by The Course of Love because of de Botton’s charming, hilarious, earlier novels On Love and Kiss & Tell. You’ll recognize callbacks to On Love; the new novel mentions a Chloe who the narrator broke up with, and the love interest in On Love is conveniently named Chloe.

Still, those novels work because they’re funny and this one you will forget because it’s not. There is a lot of tedium in sentences like “At the center of Kisten’s love is a desire to heal the wound of Rabih’s long-buried, largely unmentioned loss.” The characters never stop saying things like, “Everything around here is deeply sensible, rational, worked out, policed—as if there were a timetable all laid out from now till the moment we die.”

Perhaps the point is that we never emerge from our adolescent philosophical stupor, when people complain about sensible, rational, worked out lives—the sorts of things that many modern Syrians would probably like.

The good news is that the last pages work. The bad news is that neurotic humor is missing, and so is a real understanding of male-female dynamics. There are some good inversions of conventional thinking, as when Kirsten seems to think, “she knows, better than most, that there is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.” But most of it is closer to the banal sentences quoted previously. One hopes for Flaubert and gets this. Wasn’t it Flaubert who said that every writer should write with a hard-on? Or is that a spurious quotation? Regardless of its genesis, one senses few if any hard-ons inspired this novel, to the novel’s detriment given its subject matter.

Maybe it is not coincidence that in the first sentence of this post two of the better-than suggestions are nonfiction. If you’re militantly opposed to nonfiction, maybe The Course of Love is okay. For anyone not so militantly opposed, you can get similar subject matter that’s actually better written on a sentence by sentence level. Too much of the book feels like an amalgamation of nonfiction trend pieces and books rather than a novel. Here is one sample, chosen at random: “I Can’t Stop Bashing My Husband to Other Moms, and I’m Sorry.” Kirsten has problems bashing her husband to her friends and her husband’s response is basically to shrug. Perhaps the lesson is “Don’t get married” (or expect to grind it out if you do). That may be a valid reading of the novel. Rabih’s improbable affair may be the high point.

Unlike in, say, Michel Houellebecq, the sense of fiction never overwhelms the sense of outside reading in The Course of Love. Much of it feels ripped from time-wasting websites or New York Times trend pieces. I’ve followed de Botton for years and his books vary in quality from the sublime to the wasteful. His nonfiction, except for How to Think More About Sex, is fun and informative. One wishes for more of the good here.

There is too much good stuff for The Course of Love to matter.

If someone is angry you may be doing something right: Alain de Botton edition

May 26, 2014 By in Academia, Books, Nonfiction, Philosophy Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Early negative reviews of his work [How Proust Can Change Your Life], by Proust professors and philosophy dons, devastated him, admitted de Botton. “It was very surprising and upsetting. Then my wife, who is very wise, said to me, ‘It’s obvious, this is a fight.’ This is a turf war, and the battle is about what culture should mean to us.”*

If you’re a) doing significant work and b) making people angry, then you may c) be doing something right. I think the first component is particularly important because it’s easy to needlessly or cruelly piss people off—through rude remarks or punching someone, for example. We’re taught that making other people angry is a bad thing and in most contexts it probably is, but in some it isn’t and may actually be a sign of importance.

Anger is a powerful response and a common one to someone who feels threatened: suggest to a public school teacher that teachers shouldn’t be granted de facto lifetime employment after three years, or that teachers’ unions are serious impediments to education, and you’re not likely to get a reasoned discussion about policy. You’re likely to be treated as someone who violates taboo. To most of us discussions about education policy are benign, but to teachers they’re often sacred (the “benign-violation theory” of humor is similar, as discussed in The Humor Code).

I’ve gotten weirdly vituperative responses from English professors about this blog. Usually those responses are couched in language about being unprofessional or low quality or a waste of time that could be better spent advancing my career. In that worldview, having anyone read your work doesn’t matter. At first I took those responses at face value, but now I’m not so sure: they might have been unhappy that I think most English journals bogus and, worse, treat them as such. It’s dangerous to have people work outside the system they’re highly invested in. If you don’t have the apparatus of peer review and journals and so forth, what separates paid professors from blogger rabble? Some answers to that question may be terrifying.

Philosophers probably guard their jewel basket carefully because there is nothing inside.

To return to de Botton, I also think he calibrates his work towards accessibility. It is easy for a normal person to understand what he says and to judge its truth value. Many philosophers seem to take pride in doing the opposite. In addition, de Botton reaches for a relatively low-knowledge audience; I found his book about architecture charming, for example, but How to Think More About Sex was inane, mostly because of it lacked any familiarity with evolutionary biology. Over the last couple decades, that’s been where the action is. Writing about sex without reading evolutionary biology is pointless, and I know enough to know that. Alternately, even compelling writers produce some bad books, and this could be de Botton’s off book.

* From “The empire of Alain de Botton.”

Lisa Levy, Alain de Botton and the meaning of intellectuals and their relationship to sex

June 7, 2013 By in Books, Culture, ideas, Nonfiction, sex Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Lisa Levy’s How to Be a Pseudo-Intellectual (actual title: “How To Think More (But Not Better): Alain de Botton’s School of Life”) isn’t really about de Botton’s How To Think More About Sex so much as it is about throwing rocks at de Botton’s intellectual middle road from the high road where most supposed scholars are unread, unloved, and unsexed.* It’s true that How To Think More About Sex is de Botton’s weakest book, to the point that I didn’t bother reviewing it because it’s so bad; any pop evolutionary psychology book from the last ten years offers more and better information, and sex is arguably the field least informed by the philosophy and philosophers most often in de Botton’s purview.

But his other books are fun and informative. Levy writes that “he often seems like a grad student who shows up to seminar having done just enough of the reading to participate by jumping on other people’s comments, but who never makes an original observation of his own.” Maybe “an original observation” is overrated in philosophy, especially compared to accessibility. Levy writes that “he tends to meander and summarize after a quotation rather than using it to drive his own argument forward,” but if de Botton meanders in an interesting way—which he usually does, in books like The Architecture of Happiness and his novel On Love, which is charming (a word that never appears among academics trying to prosecute dubiously original arguments)—then he’s at least doing one thing better than 90% of those allegedly being original. For one thing, he’s writing clearly enough to make a judgment about originality; how many doctoral dissertations and tenure books are written in impenetrable, deliberately misleading jargon, such that it’s difficult or impossible to tell whether an argument is original?

Most people trying to make “an original observation of [their] own” don’t seem to make actual original contributions but do bloviate quite a bit. If more people admitted to synthesizing and fewer had to pretend to originality, we’d probably live in a better original world. Levy says that “he’s not exactly Michel Foucault,” and I’d call that a very good thing.

That being said, however, Levy is right that “This might in fact be the most boring book ever written about sex.” Sex might also be the field that, of all that de Botton has addressed, philosophy is the least well-equipped to handle, especially compared to current psychology and biology.

Still, the funniest bits of The Consolations of Philosophy concern the number of aged philosophers in their twilight years who fall for vapid but hot teenage girls and adult women, which could arguably tell us more about the nature of life than all of their books combined; actions speak louder than words, as the cliché goes, and what one wants in the midst of composing a monumental manuscript may be different from what one wants when confronted with real people. De Botton describes how the 43-year-old Schopenhauer “turns his attentions to Flora Weiss, a spirited girl who has turned seventeen,” and feels “revolted” by his gift of white grapes. Nietzsche, similarly, faced rejection from “a twenty-three-year old, green-eyed blonde” named Mathilde Trampedach. From there, “a succession of similar rejections took their toll” in his marriage proposals, caused in part, perhaps, by “his extraordinarily large walrus mustache” and “his shyness.” Later still, he chased around a twenty-one-year-old hottie (my word), who “was more interested in Nietzsche as a philosopher than a husband.”

Perhaps we should consider philosophers’ work in light of their lives, and the lessons we should take are not necessarily those entombed in The World as Will and Representation or On the Genealogy of Morality. Alas, however, that de Botton might have instead worked to write original observations that go unread in a university library somewhere instead.

* Hannah Arendt and a few others famously excepted.

We lack perspective: notes from Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

October 13, 2011 By in Life, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order – and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface.

1) A lot of engineers like their jobs and look at them as solving a series of puzzles: “theses on the velocities of scanning machines” are only as banal as you make them. In addition, even if you do find them banal, if you can make a faster scanning machine and sell it for a lot of money, you may not care when you retire to paint water colors for the rest of your life.

2) Fights say more about the dumb fighters than about the human condition.

3) Humans might simply never be, as a group, overtly happy in whatever conditions we experience; realizing this might release us from unreasonable expectations. A cultural fixation on happiness might paradoxically prevent us from experiencing what we think or imagine we most want or desire.

4) Related to three, people who leave work to drink on the weekends are probably intentionally looking for fights: I doubt the behavior can be blamed solely on alcohol. Many people seem to undergo a two-step process: they consciously drink so they can unconsciously act out in the ways they’d actually like to. My question is simple: why not just go to step two and be intellectually honest with ourselves?

5) Stumbling on Happiness discusses how and why we feel unhappy when we compare ourselves to others. Most of us don’t compare ourselves to people in the “Middle Ages;” we compare ourselves to our wives’ sisters’ husbands, to paraphrase that famous aphorism (switch gender roles as appropriate to you, the reader, and your gender / sexual orientation).

6) We submit “at the altars of prudence and order” because the alternative is often worse. That being said, I think Western society underestimates the power and importance of trance, ecstasy, transcendence, atë—all things that, denied and repressed, seem to manifest themselves in unusual ways (see The Secret History for more on this. Still, if the alternative to prudence and order is chaos, no iPhone, longer commutes, and living a dicey part of town, prudence and order sound pretty good—as does self-imposed “incarceration.”

7) The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is, like much of de Botton’s work, nicely balanced between readability and intellectual engagement, reasoned and learned without being pedantic. These are harder notes to strike than may be obvious at first.

We lack perspective: notes from Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

October 13, 2011 By in Life, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order – and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface.

1) A lot of engineers like their jobs and look at them as solving a series of puzzles: “theses on the velocities of scanning machines” are only as banal as you make them. In addition, even if you do find them banal, if you can make a faster scanning machine and sell it for a lot of money, you may not care when you retire to paint water colors for the rest of your life.

2) Fights say more about the dumb fighters than about the human condition.

3) Humans might simply never be, as a group, overtly happy in whatever conditions we experience; realizing this might release us from unreasonable expectations. A cultural fixation on happiness might paradoxically prevent us from experiencing what we think or imagine we most want or desire.

4) Related to three, people who leave work to drink on the weekends are probably intentionally looking for fights: I doubt the behavior can be blamed solely on alcohol. Many people seem to undergo a two-step process: they consciously drink so they can unconsciously act out in the ways they’d actually like to. My question is simple: why not just go to step two and be intellectually honest with ourselves?

5) Stumbling on Happiness discusses how and why we feel unhappy when we compare ourselves to others. Most of us don’t compare ourselves to people in the “Middle Ages;” we compare ourselves to our wives’ sisters’ husbands, to paraphrase that famous aphorism (switch gender roles as appropriate to you, the reader, and your gender / sexual orientation).

6) We submit “at the altars of prudence and order” because the alternative is often worse. That being said, I think Western society underestimates the power and importance of trance, ecstasy, transcendence, atë—all things that, denied and repressed, seem to manifest themselves in unusual ways (see The Secret History for more on this. Still, if the alternative to prudence and order is chaos, no iPhone, longer commutes, and living a dicey part of town, prudence and order sound pretty good—as does self-imposed “incarceration.”

7) The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is, like much of de Botton’s work, nicely balanced between readability and intellectual engagement, reasoned and learned without being pedantic. These are harder notes to strike than may be obvious at first.

Thoughts on James Cameron's Avatar and Neal Stephenson's "Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out"

December 27, 2009 By in Culture, Essays, movies, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 72 Comments

Despite reading Greg Egan’s brilliant review of Avatar, I saw the movie. The strangest thing about Avatar is its anti-corporate, anti-technological argument. Let me elaborate: there are wonderful anti-corporate, anti-technological arguments to be made, but it seems contrived for them to be made in a movie that is, for the time being, apparently the most expensive ever made; virtually all mainstream movies are now approved solely on their profit-generating potential. So a vaguely anti-corporate movie is being made by… a profit-driven corporation.

The movie is among the most technically sophisticated ever made: it uses a crazy 2D and 3D camera, harnesses the most advanced computer animation techniques imaginable, and has advanced the cinematic state-of-the-art. But Avatar’s story is anti-technological: humans destroyed their home world through environmental disaster and use military might to annihilate the locals and steal their resources. Presumably, if Avatar’s creators genuinely believed that technology is bad, the movie itself would never have been made, leading to a paradox not dissimilar for those found in time travel movies.

Avatar also has a bunch of vaguely mythical elements, including some scenes that look like the world’s biggest yoga class. The Na’avi, an oppressed people modeled on American Indians, or at least American Indians as portrayed in 20th Century American movies, fight against an interstellar military using bows, arrows, horses, and flying lizards. They live in harmony with the world to an extent that most Westerners can probably barely conceive of, given that more people probably visit McDonald’s than national parks in a given year.

So why are we fascinated with the idea of returning to nature, as though we’re going to dance with wolves, when few of us actually do so? Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness may offer a clue: he cites Wilhelm Worringer’s essay, “Abstraction and Empathy,” which posits that art emphasizes, in de Botton’s words, “[…] those values which the society in question was lacking, for it would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply with in itself.” We live (presumably) happy lives coddled in buildings that have passed inspection, with takeout Chinese readily available, and therefore we fantasize about being mauled by wild beasts and being taken off the omnipresent grid, with its iPhones and wireless Internet access. We live in suburban anomie and therefore fantasize about group yoga. We make incredibly sophisticated movies about the pleasures of a world with no movies at all, where people still go through puberty rituals that don’t involve Bar Mitzvahs, and mate for life, like Mormons.

Neal Stephenson wrote a perceptive essay called “Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out,” which examines the underlying cultural values in the older and newer Star Wars films. I would’ve linked to it earlier but frankly can’t imagine anyone returning here afterwards. Therefore I’ll quote an important piece of Stephenson:

Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents – not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology – and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work – as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

The tedious particulars of modern technological life are both embraced and avoided in Avatar too. The villain, rather than being political chaos, organized oppression, ignorance, entropy, or weak/ineffective institutions, to name a few of the real but abstract contemporary bad guys, is instead replaced by an army / mercenary commander who might be at home in Xe Services / Blackwater USA. The military villainy and disdain for superior firepower in Avatar is especially odd, given that the United States has held the technological advantage in major wars for at least a century; the people watching Avatar are probably also the ones who support our troops. The studio that made Avatar probably cares more about quarterly statements than about the environment. The movie villains, however, apparently aren’t being restrained by an intergalactic EPA.

Avatar is really a Western about the perils of modernity, but it gets contemporary politics utterly wrong—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that contemporary politics are utterly absent. There is no intergalactic criminal court or committee for the protection of indigenous peoples, which seems like a probable development for a race nursed on Star Trek and post-colonialism and that is advanced enough to travel the stars. In the contemporary United States, a bewildering array of regulations govern activities that might have an environmental impact on communities; the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), for example, requires that federal agencies to monitor and report on their activities. Such regulations are growing, rather than shrinking. They’re a staple bogeyman of right-wing radio.

But in Avatar, decisions aren’t made at the future equivalent of the Copenhagen summit. Instead, they’re fought in battles reminiscent of World War I, or the Civil War, leavened with some personal combat. The battles are jarring but anachronistic, although maybe Iraq War II: The Sequel would’ve turned out better if George Bush and Saddam Hussein had dueled with swords, but that’s not how wars are fought any more. And when one side has machine guns and the other side doesn’t, you get something as nasty as World War I, where all the élan, spirit, and meditation in the world didn’t stop millions of people from dying.

My implicit argument isn’t perfect: Avatar does criticize our reliance on oil through the parable of the cleverly named “unobtainium,” but the thrust of the movie is unambiguous. We want to fantasize that solutions are as simple as putting a hole in the right guy, which will make things right again. That’s probably a comforting notion, and an easy one to fit into a two- to three- hour movie with a three-part arc, but it’s also a wrong one, and one that ignores or abstracts the world’s complexity. The people who tend to rule the world are the ones who pay attention to how the world really is, rather than how it was, or how they would like it to be. The real question is whether we are still people who see how the world is.

Why de Botton (and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work)

December 22, 2009 By in Culture, Philosophy, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work has two wonderful passages on page 27: the first, concerning ship spotters—or those who watch and log ships coming in and out of a harbor:

They behave like a man who has fallen deeply in love and asks his companion if he might act on his emotions by measuring the distance between her elbow and her shoulder blade.

The ship spotters focus on statistics in large part because statistics can be found more readily than, say, aesthetic theories, or meta ideas about why we like spotting, or statistics, or fountain pens. Why do some of our activities, like ship spotting, dwell in the countable, while others, like love, tend to dwell in most people’s minds in the land of emotion? I say “most people’s mind” because some writers, like Tim Harford in The Logic of Life, have brought game theory to bear on love in the group sense in order to see what one might see.

De Botton has a partial answer:

It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved.

He’s right, and I think this is why many book blogs tend pay disproportionate attention to, for example, the publishing industry or a writer’s habit than the works that the industry publishes or that the writer writes. It’s simply easier, to steal de Botton’s accurate word, to deal with systematic issues than to analyze why de Botton’s simile of the lover works so well, which at bottom might be simply “because it does,” or an unattractive analysis of how something is both like and unlike something else. Like explaining a joke, such an analysis might render the subject being analyzed dead, and thus no longer worthy of analysis.

Last Night at the Lobster — Stewart O’Nan

September 13, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster reminds one that small can be engrossing and that real stories often underlie the vast news that floods our lives. One of the two epigraphs for Last Night at the Lobster says “Darden Restaurants, Inc., raised its outlook and expects full year 2005 diluted net earnings per share growth in the range of 22% to 27%….” Normally we’d skip by that headline on page C7 of the Wall Street Journal.

But underneath the earnings reports, sometimes far underneath it, are the people doing the earning. In this case it’s Manny DeLeon, who’s managing (Manny? Manage? Get it?) a Lobster joint closely modeled on a Red Lobster as it closes permanently. He’s self-aware enough to know that his activities aren’t likely to shake the counsels of the great, but he’s also trying to do what he can to do well for its own sake—in this respect, he’s like a writer with a limited audience who nonetheless takes pride in the craft itself. Furthermore, Manny seems human, aware, as when he’s pondering a perhaps finished affair with Jacquie one of the waitresses. The specifics fall away, and “All he can recall are still images—her black hair wet and heavy from the shower, her stockings laid over a chair, the glass of water on the floor by her bed holding the light from the window—yet instead of weakening with time, they’ve grown more powerful, liable to paralyze him if he dotes on them too long.”

Those images aren’t susceptible to the moves of the stock market or socioeconomic positioning: once they’re Manny’s, they’re his forever. If that were somehow the “lesson” of Last Night at the Lobster, it wouldn’t be much of a book. It’s more of a slice of life, or a whisper about an event that one can’t entirely make sense of: one has to run the Lobster on the last day of its life, but how does one draw any larger ideas from that? And if one can’t, does it matter? The classical economics answer would be “no,” but the answer for Manny is yes.

If it weren’t, his non-relationship relationship with Jacquie would be equally empty: they have nothing to commit themselves to one another outside of wanting something to commit to. If I were more fond of grandiose pronouncements, I might say that Last Night at the Lobster is about finding a place to anchor in a transitory, bottomless society, where the tides now rearrange the world faster than people can keep up. Hence the failing Lobster in the failing mall in the failing town where people nonetheless do what they can, even if it’s not enough. For it to be enough, you have to be a master of abstraction, creativity, computer science, unusual skills, and more: yet most people aren’t up to that. They’re still people, even as they shake downwards to the Lobster, where they can still succeed on different definitions than what social cues shout success is.

For all this commentary, the narrative tension in Last Night at the Lobster is slack and the sense of anything major being at stake is absent; Manny’s soul is muted and confused more than tortured, and in this sense the book might be a defining work of realism, since it seems that few go through life with Nietzschian-esque metaphysical worries. Last Night at the Lobster also reminds me of some of the European novels that I called sheer and taunt; this book is equally short, and if it’s more explanatory than In our Strange Gardens or The Reader, there nonetheless isn’t a tremendous amount of emotional energy invested in its characters, who are nearer to short story sketches than to round, novelistic heroes or anti-heroes. But the moments and images tide the novel, as when “The guy with the bow tie nods as he passes, one boss to another, as if Manny’s done all this for him.” There’s so much in the line that I stopped and pondered it, asking too: how often have I been the guy in the bow tie? Manny? The crew that set up?

I don’t see too many novels like Last Night at the Lobster. As Mark Sarvas and Alain de Botton have pointed out, books about work are fairly uncommon. I hadn’t noticed till they observed it, but I find innumerable books on my shelves about love, affairs, geography, family, and destiny, but few about what people do to support those other endeavors. Perhaps that’s because writers are deracinated from the larger work world, as de Botton has suggested, or perhaps that’s because work can seem too mundane or not worthy of literary fiction’s point of view and linguistic pyrotechnics or genre fiction’s suspenseful plots. In The Grapes of Mild Outrage, Mark Athitakis writes that “… though O’Nan has admirable respect for his characters, the overall tone is one of defeat—the Red Lobster in which the novel is set is about to close forever, the snow outside is miserable, and nobody cares to thinks much about the restaurant itself.” I’m not sure if the tone is so much one of defeat as of recognition. And isn’t self-recognition part of what the novel is supposed to lead us to, and what life is supposed to be about?

On a final, structural note, I was ready to pass on Last Night at the Lobster till positive recommendations rescued it—most notably Terry Teachout. Book publicists occasionally ask me how they can get me to read their books or what kind of books I pick up, and the short answer to both is often that if they get Teachout, Sarvas, Nigel Beale, Tyler Cowen, Kate Sutherland, John Scalzi or a handful of others I’m no doubt forgetting to write favorably a book, the probability of me reading it skyrockets—as does the probability of me getting something from the book, even when I don’t necessarily like it without reservations; this happened with two books Sarvas liked, including The Gift and Nobility of Spirit, both of which were not self-critical enough and overly indulgent despite having powerful messages to avoid the cynicism that’s par for the contemporary course. In terms of books, I often look for social proof: the idea that, if others whose opinions I trust recommend a book, I’m more likely to read it. I still at least begin everything I’m sent, and I’m only too happy to find a book delightful—like the recent Carlos Ruiz Zafon novel, The Angel’s Game, which I need to post about shortly—but it doesn’t hurt to let in some air from elsewhere too.

Life: Occupation and metaphysics edition courtesy of Alain de Botton

June 11, 2009 By in Life Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

“[The accountant] has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people – and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her – that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe.”

—Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

(The obvious question arises: can’t you be both a Business Unit Senior Manager and a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe? In any event, you can read more of his thoughts on work in his article “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Data-Entry Supervisor: It’s time for an ambitious new literature of the office.”)

Barney’s Version — Mordecai Richler

July 21, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Barney’s Version isn’t always clear or pretty, whether he’s portraying himself, his friends, his quasi-loves—whether Barney genuinely loved anyone aside from himself is uncertain, with claims otherwise of dubious merit—and his enemies. These categories blend into one another with alarming and realistic regularity. The novel is also seriously fun rather than funnily serious, in the tradition of excessive, bombastic, narcissistic personalities too eccentric for politics but otherwise cut out for that field, like the narrators of Martin Amis’ Money and many of Saul Bellow’s novels, but most notable Seize the Day and Herzog.

Social impropriety binds those characters together and is abundant in Barney’s Version. In a rare moment, Barney Charnofsky is “Bingeing on respectability, I was not determined to prove to Clara’s ghost that I could play the nice middle-class Jewish boy better than she had ever dreamed.” He fails, and trying to prove anything to a ghost is ridiculous, but I love the inversion of the typical mode of bingeing as negative, recalling Richard Feynman’s comment, “So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility […] It’s made me a very happy man ever since.”

One character says to Barney, “Now will you please be quiet and stop making an exhibition of yourself.” He doesn’t, of course, since he’s spent his entire life making an exhibition of himself, perhaps explaining the irritation verging on envy that he feels toward a successful acquittance. Barney says of him, “But, after all these years as a flunk, my old friend and latter-day nemesis has acquired a small but vociferous following, CanLit apparatchiks to the fore.” I wonder what he would think of me becoming such an apparatchik by way of coming to Barney’s Version through the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge, Eh?. Nonetheless, publicity, however minor, on my part gives Barney more of a chance to make an exhibit of himself.

He doesn’t do so in a simple manner, either. Chapter four begins by saying, “What follows appears to be yet another digression.” The whole novel is a digression—this post mimics its structure—which makes a certain amount of sense because most people’s entire lives are one long digression, or a series of them, and the narrative cohesion usually given to them by biography and the like is more an effort to impose order on chaos, like selecting a line to fit to a series of data points regardless of whether the line has any meaning.* For such a novel to work, it must nonetheless tell a story with some kind of beginning, middle, and end, even if those elements aren’t in their usual order, and Barney’s Version succeeds as a novel despite and because of its narrator’s protestations.

We’re also not sure when to trust Barney, especially because a would-be editor keeps inserting footnotes. Elsewhere, Miriam, the perhaps love of Barney’s life, says “I believe you,” when Barney denies killing his somewhat friend who might’ve slept with his second wife and might’ve been set-up to do so by Barney himself as a way of getting Barney a divorce (got all that?). He says, ” ‘I’ll be out of here in a week,’ […] hoping that saying it aloud would render it true.” Many of his hopes are improbably rendered true, and his belief in his own belief is somewhat perplexing. As for Miriam, believing a liar might also not be a great idea, but then Miriam might not know Barney’s a liar, or she merely expressing optimism to a man she doubts. It’s not clear what. A lot of Barney’s Version is humorously unclear. In other words, you get a lot of narrative play and epistemological complexity among your laughs. If there’s a better way to get said fiber, I’m not sure of it, and I like mine with sugar much more than vinegar. Life, after all, is pretty funny, and seeing that reflected in books is a relief. Mild offense sometimes blends into hilarious social commentary, as when lawyers are “[…] perhaps mollified because parents of the accused had promised to endow a chair of visible-minority social studies at the college.” That could be a line from Francine Prose’s Blue Angel. Later, we find in Barney’s Version:

I don’t hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you.

Usually the third in that opening series isn’t placed with the other two, but the structure is an effective way to express Barney’s low opinion of someone trying to help him. Fortunately, the psychiatrist doesn’t take much offense, as Barney has low opinions of many people, places, and professions, as well as, at times, himself. He also demonstrates obvious allusions in a novel filled with them, some subtle and some not, and his ability to go from hockey to Shakespeare and back impresses. Speaking of hockey, at one point a long-winded girlfriend causes him to start reading about sport in lieu of her, a feeling I remember well, as when I found myself in such a similar low-signal-to-noise-ratio circumstance, the New Yorker was my outlet of preference, causing a roommate to remark once, “I could tell you were on the phone with her because normally I hear you talking.”

I’m tempted to go on about Barney’s Version—there’s a murder plot, an unreliably unreliable narrator, jokes from fading memory, an intrusive editor, family squabbles, drinking problems/solutions, none of which have been fully discussed in this sketch of a sketch—and the more I consider it, the more I realize its easily missed depth and the more I’m inclined to recommend it, given its paradoxical ability to be both light and heavy at the same time, like a character who’s finally reconciled The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Barney’s Version has the magic of a novel that wiggles out of description with such finesse that I barely realize what’s happened, and I’m not reading about the world, but Barney’s version of it.

* Alain de Botton’s fabulous Kiss & Tell is the most successful mockery of biography I’ve read. It also comes with the sanction of the American lit apparatchiks, who put it on my senior year AP English test.