Alain De Botton has published a self-help novel. May the Lord have mercy on us all

He's met writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards

In 2010, when we apparently had so little to worry abou we elected a Conservative/Liberal coalition out of sheer boredom, the writer Alain De Botton described his ideal dinner party for The Times. 

It was a miserable sounding affair: De Botton suggested that food was not important, so he would serve salmon fillets and ready-meal mash from Tesco. He would invite eight people, and, though he did not drink himself, his largesse would see him provide two bottles of wine - one red, one white.

Guests would be asked things like “What’s everyone afraid of at the moment?” (“Having to sit through this whole evening on one glass of wine”), “Why have you come out tonight?” (“Er, you invited me”), and “What’s the point in your life?” (“Yes, I was beginning to wonder about that myself, to be honest”).

“Good conversation,” De Botton wrote, “is when people make themselves vulnerable and reveal things about themselves that could be taken against them in the future.”

De Botton concluded by suggesting that people should leave the party feeling that they had become - at least for a few hours - part of a commune.

But what he’s talking about is more akin to entering a cult than joining a commune.  De Botton sees the party as a place where he can make demands of people and leave them vulnerable, without even peeling a fresh potato or topping up their glasses in return.

It’s an acquisitive outlook - a view of the world that is about what can be gained, rather than what can be shared, admired or appreciated.

The same spirit animates A Voice Of One’s Own, the novel published this year by De Botton’s School of Life. Though it is not credited to De Botton, one must assume that he has at very least signed it off.

The book, subtitled “A story about confidence and self belief” concerns Anna. Anna is 29, sad, and pretty -  we know this because there is a picture on every page, accompanying a paragraph of text, like a very polished Jackie magazine photo story. 

She’s a college dropout who lives, if the pictures are to be believed, somewhere off the Holloway Road (the horror!) - specifically in a “studio flat in a large, run-down tenement block”. She works in radio advertising - “she filled out invoices, co-ordinated meetings, and, latterly, helped to generate ideas” (the even more horror!).

Anna has a difficult relationship with her parents, who do awful things like ask her if she’d like to go to the pub for lunch on her birthday, an invitation Anna accepts while the narrator wisely tells us “once people tell us they love us and we believe them, we may end up doing the strangest, most counterintuitive things for them.”

She goes for lunch at her parents local in Colchester, comes back, realises her musician boyfriend is cheating on her, and has the dullest nervous breakdown ever committed to print. 

Anna finds an explanation for what is happening online, and we are treated to a few pages of text directly lifted from the School of Life website. She goes to see a psychotherapist, gets better, and meets a nice boy called Ahmed. 

Anna and Ahmed’s nights in read a lot like Alain De Botton’s fantasy dinner parties: “They became a couple who discussed sensitive topics to enormous length - long before these could become problems for them. To outsiders it might have appeared intolerable, to Ahmed and Anna, the habit was pleasingly continuous with their respective psychotherapies. What if one of them developed a desire to sleep with someone else? How did they feel about sulking? What were their attachment patterns? Did one or both of them have daddy issues? What could they do about their likely unconscious drives to repeat masochistic childhood schemas? They enjoyed analysing their stories as much as - and perhaps even more than - they ever enjoyed living them.”

I’m not risking spoilers here as you’re never going to read A Voice Of One’s Own - but everything works out fine, they move to Suffolk and decide to have a child.

Now, I love a meandering plotless dive into the imagined problems of the middle classes as much as the next man who owns more than two publishing house tote bags, but that’s not really what we’re here for. 

What’s more interesting here is the why, rather than the what of this weird little book. And helpfully, De Botton, or who ever at the School of Life wrote this... thing, has laid that out clearly too:

“Why,” the afterword asks,”have we taken the truly perplexing step of venturing into fiction? Why - of all genres - have we decided to publish a novel?”

Having read A Voice Of One’s Own, I have to admit that yes, indeed, this question has come up quite often since. Often late at night as I lie pondering the horror that we are capable of inflicting on our fellow sentient creatures. Yes, Alain, why?

“A work of fiction can be a supreme educative tool, and as adept at conveying ideas as any biography or essay.”

I suppose it can, though what that has to do with this particular work of fiction I have no idea.

“Indeed, the great novels have always carried a blend of purposes: War and Peace, The Pillowbook or Mrs Dalloway are intrinsically more than ‘entertainment’; they are evidently and plainly guides to life.”

I am not taking guidance on how to live from anyone in any of these books.

“Too often we face an uncomfortable dichotomy in a bookshop: between non-fiction that is seen as good for us but perhaps slightly hard work, and fiction that is deemed fun but perhaps lacking in educational intent.” [Italics mine because JESUS WEPT]. 

“We hope to return the novel to a more interesting and rewarding mission: that of entertaining and teaching is; of delighting and instructing us.” [Italics theirs. FFS.]

When one views works of art in this extractive way, it’s easy to understand why one would imagine one’s self capable of writing even a good novel. If War And Peace, or Mrs Dalloway, are about nothing more than self-actualisation, then why not skip out the sur or subtext and skip straight to the point. 

Have problem, read self help book, get therapy, solve problem. A story for our age indeed.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with therapy, or writing about therapy. One of my favourite novels of the last few years, Christine Smallwood’s The Life Of The Mind, features a protagonist heavily dependent on not one, but two therapists. Hilarity and profundity ensue. (I conducted a pathetically fanboyish podcast interview with Smallwood for Little Atoms.)

Where the issue arises is the idea of literature as merely therapy. Literature as a form of self care. Literature as something that can be taken from, rather than experienced; the idea that a book must not just mean something to you, it must do something for you.

In 2014, De Botton curated a show at Amsterdams’ Rijksmuseum, in which his diagnoses of modern malaises were placed next to the museum’s works, in place of interpretation cards. “The labels tell us what’s wrong with us, and how the artworks and artefacts they accompany can cure our ills” as the Guardian’s Adrian Searle wrote despairingly at the time.

The show and accompanying book were titled, with soul-crushing directness, “Art Is Therapy”.

This is how the De Botton mindset approaches the wonders held at the Rijksmuseum: viewing the Night Watch, say, and not wondering at the literal and metaphorical light and shade, or inquiring about how it was made, but only engaging by bringing it down to his level. The same goes for the immersive joy of great fiction, or the pleasure of sharing food and wine.

It really is no way to live.

PS: This is not De Botton’s first foray into fiction. In 2014, as part of his Philosopher’s Mail project - an attempt to make a newspaper, except [even more] weird and boring - he published a “thought experiment” that consisted of a diary of an imagined relationship with Jennifer Lawrence, then at the height of her fame and the subject of fevered Cool Girl fantasy the world over.

In Jennifer Lawrence Is My Girlfriend, the author, managed to make going out with Jennifer Lawrence sound miserable, by dragging things down to his level with lines like “The problem is, after we've argued, she doesn't want to have sex for ages. I feel I'm being punished twice and that makes me edgy and even more likely to create another conflict”, and “Jen's really homey, but then around money she turns into some kind of authoritarian accountant.” Read the whole thing. It’s short, and very strange.