All Work and No Play
By
Toby Lichtig
The Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 2009
Edited by Andy Ross
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
By Alain de Botton
Hamish Hamilton, 329 pages
Alain de Botton is not short of detractors. With his self-help approach to
philosophy and his television fame, he is frequently accused of being
lightweight, populist, smugly platitudinous. What de Botton's critics tend to
ignore is his literary brilliance. He is a connoisseur of bathos. Few
contemporary cultural critics have such a keen eye for hubris, such a witty
grasp of juxtaposition. His every observation is framed by an acute awareness of
absurdity, offset by a tenderness for human folly.
This book shows de Botton at his wry, inquisitive best. In ten short chapters he
explores ten diverse industries from accountancy to rocket science. Chatting to
deluded inventors and earnest biscuit plant managers, de Botton looks back to a
"franker, and therefore kinder" age in which our expectations were so much
lower. We had less time to "master calculus and worry about the authenticity of
our relationships" but were we any more miserable?
The Sorrows of Work
By
Naomi Wolf
The Times, March 20, 2009
Edited by Andy Ross
Alain de Botton has created a brand name for a kind of charming, discursive
travelog through such benign territory as how architecture makes us happy or
unhappy or how reading Proust can become a form of self-help. His mind is
generally original, and his prose both lapidary and easy to read. But his new
book shows all too clearly that some projects are simply appallingly matched to
their authors.
The idea was that he should follow ten tracks of labor or profession: cargo-ship
spotting, logistics, biscuit manufacture, career counseling, accountancy, rocket
science, painting, transmission engineering, entrepreneurship, and aviation. The
trouble is that de Botton often sounds as if he is poking at the idea of "work"
with a gentlemanly stick.
The book's central question is not clear, and the author's explanations shift
about, leaving the book with little forward momentum. This book's conceit
demands reporting, but de Botton is not an investigative journalist. The reader
sees fantastic stories flitting by behind de Botton's head, with the author
oblivious. Worst of all, de Botton does not seem to like or respect his
subjects. He condescends and even ridicules many of them.
Toil and Trouble
By
Caleb Crain
The New York Times, June 24, 2009
Edited by Andy Ross
Work is activity that earns money. Lucky people enjoy their work, but even they
might not do it without pay. Everyone has a price. A worker is someone who has
agreed to a number. He is exposed as someone under constraint, like a prisoner
in a stockade. To mock him for being less than perfectly free in his thoughts
and actions is easy.
Unfortunately, the British essayist Alain de Botton indulges in this kind of
mockery in his new book. By Chapter 3, de Botton has already lost track of his
initial goal. He wins points for self-satire. He soon loses them for
mean-spiritedness.
In the book's most promising passage, a career counselor invites de Botton to
observe sessions with a client, a tax lawyer. He listens as the lawyer sobs in
despair, and later as the counselor asks about what she likes and whom she
envies. But de Botton's narrative drifts, and he frets for pages about
self-esteem, worrying about feeling superior to them and undermining the chapter
completely.
This is a superficial judgment and an abdication of journalistic responsibility.
What was the counselor hoping for when he agreed to share his experiences with
de Botton? Well, de Botton reveals that the counselor hoped to publish a
manuscript and asked for the name of a literary agent. Cruelly and
unnecessarily, de Botton also reveals in the punch line that the book remains
unpublished.
Such spite would have been more understandable as a reaction to de Botton's
interview with the chairman of a large accounting firm. The executive yields
nothing but upbeat, cautious, noncommittal generalizations. De Botton decides
that he pities the man for his hollowness. But it is evident that he wasn't
prepared with questions detailed or insightful enough to oblige the executive to
take him seriously.
The book succeeds as entertainment when de Botton allows himself to geek out.
The misfires seem to come when he steps into an office. Whether that means he
desperately wants to work in one or couldn't abide to is for him and a career
counselor to determine.
Oh Dear
Edited by Andy Ross
After receiving a bad review from Caleb Crain in the New York Times, Alain de Botton left this vitriolic comment on Crain's blog:
Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and
fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like
impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and
perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are
simply extraordinary ... You have now killed my book in the United States ...
I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every
career move you make.
I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.
Nice Work If You Can Get It
By
Toby Lichtig
The Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 2009
Edited by Andy Ross
Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times
By Andrew Ross
New York University Press, 264 pages
Andrew Ross surveys the new topography of the global workplace and finds an
emerging pattern of labor instability and uneven development on a massive scale.
Combining detailed case studies with lucid analysis and graphic prose, he looks
at what the new landscape of contingent employment means for workers across
national, class, and racial lines. Developing the idea of "precarious
livelihoods" to describe this new world of work and life, Ross argues that this
"indefinite life" is likely here to stay.
Andrew Ross is Chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York
University, and the author and editor of numerous books.
Andrew Ross claims that we are all entitled to "meaningful experiential
outcomes". In fact, we need to see creative work as a basic human right. Ross
can see beauty in the mundane. Contending that even burger flippers and checkout
operators are able to perform their roles with flair and individual panache, he
argues for a culture of dignity and respect in the "precariat", an informal
labour pool subject to the hazards of "flexploitation".
Ross's "new geography of livelihoods" is unlikely to win acclaim for its
coruscating prose. But the collection is a thorough and thoughtful study of
global professional insecurity. Ross considers the industrialization of
creativity in Blairite Britain and writes intelligently about the internet's
fostering of "amateurism as a serious source of public expression".
A chapter on the Olympics shows how public money so often ends up in private
hands, and another on eco-housing laments its continued association with luxury
developments. Having discussed alienation in the workplace as an effect of the
"overproduction of dubious items", Ross examines some pioneering housing
projects in the United States, where workers participate in the building of
their own homes.
AR Dump de Botton. Read Ross.
