The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

I recently saw, on an old paperback, the phrase: “Everyone reads Danielle Steele”. Well, “everyone”, surely - in a certain demographic. Go up that demographic ladder several substantial steps and, well, everyone loves Alain de Botton.

I love Alain de Botton. He has, through several of his previous books, created a brand name for a kind of charming, discursive travelogue 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 - which is a terrific combination these days, when there are few real “public intellectuals”. One can read him with pleasure but without intellectual guilt. But 40 pages into his newest offering I was ready to hurl it across the room. By page 95 I was holding my head miserably in my hands. Halfway through the text I was reading the most infuriating bits out loud, as one does, to a friend, when one can't bear to hold the turmoil decently within.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work shows all too clearly that some projects are simply appallingly matched to their authors. De Botton shines when he is handling pure intellectual history, pure literature or pure theory. But either de Botton himself, in what seems to have been some sudden awkward pressure of social conscience, or an editor who has seen too many reality TV shows, had the ill-considered notion that he should go out into what is very much the real world - the world of electrical pylons and tuna fishing boats and low-income-female focus groups - and do hands-on reporting, which was supposed to lead to meditative exegesis on the meaning of work. The idea was that he should follow ten tracks of labour or profession: cargo-ship spotting; logistics; biscuit manu- facture; career counselling; accountancy; rocket science; painting; transmission engineering; entrepreneurship; and aviation.

The overall trouble with the tone of this text is that it reads in many places as if someone had sent Oscar Wilde to investigatethe meat-packing industry in Chicago. De Botton often sounds as if he is poking at the idea of “work” with a gentlemanly stick, or peering at it under a bell jar; a curiosity of interest mostly to others, not a source of ambition or dread or survival - or money. In short, this book examining “work” sounds often as if it has been written by someone who never had a job that was not voluntary, or at least pleasant. Proof? After examining scores of tasks, trades and professions, the man does not make a single mention of an annual salary number.

Next problem: the book's central question is not clear, and the author's explanations shift about. Is he immersing himself in the task of following a tuna from the Indian Ocean to a British supermarket to illustrate the anomie of alienated labour? Or to glorify and honour what he often describes as humble and overlooked tasks? Or is he investigating the nature of vocation? Or illustrating the glittering diversity of globalised industrialisation? Or actually, no, deploring that industrialisation? All claims are made at various points in the book, leaving it with little forward momentum.

Then there is the tedium inherent in much of the material itself. Some of the subject matter is so innately deadening - which is one of De Botton's main points, that in industrial globalised economies we are alienated from our work and doing repetitive, sterile, meaningless tasks - that it reads as if De Botton has set himself the challenge of making the most tedious possible material glow from the sheer lucidity and elegance of his prose. To his credit, there are moments when he manages this - he can be extraordinarily funny, as when he wishes there could be a code of shorthand emoticons for emotional states such as wanting to be liked by people one dislikes oneself - but only moments.

The next flaw feels churlish to mention, but it is important. When De Botton is in the drawing room sipping sherry with the reader, he doesn't have to do slogging, unglamorous things such as interview subjects; transcribe their quotes; figure out who they are; or explain accurately what is happening. This book's conceit, which could yield genuine riches, demands reporting. De Botton is many lovely things but he is not an investigative journalist. Ironically, for a book about work, this particular flaw manifests sometimes as simple laziness. Not in his movement around the globe - the man went from Male, the capital of the Maldives, to French Guiana to witness a TV satellite launch, then to Liège to watch the manufacture of Moments biscuits. Rather, in his shrugging-off of the journalistic labour that lets us know the people he meets. So you get fleeting gestures that leave you thinking, “What was that?” “I met a Turk who was driving a consignment of dates from Izmir to Copenhagen.” A “Turk”? Who? Why?

Other times the reader sees fantastic stories flitting by behind de Botton's head - with the author oblivious. In the Maldives, a caption to a photo notes that all the fish handlers in the plant are widowers, since they were once fishermen whose families were swept away in the Sri Lankan tsunami. He passes right by this, noting that “the boss of the tuna plant”, a brown-skinned man named Yasir Waheed, “picked up a bluetooth wireless mouse for his Apple Cinema”. At this point the reader practically wants to shout at de Botton: “Alain! Alain! Behind you! The widowers!” But not only does de Botton walk right pass the roomful of extraordinary human tales, he keeps on walking: noting in passing that Waheed “took pity on the men” when he saw them weeping on TV. What kind of man is that, who would staff his whole enterprise with workers in grief? How utterly fascinating ... but we will never know, because de Botton is focused on how striking it is that this dark-brown-skinned figure on a remote, non-European island actually owns branded computer hardware.

Since at times he is not able to see his subjects very well, what he misses can be stunning: at one point, at an entrepreneurs' conference, an Iranian inventor, Mohsen Bahmani, who, enchantingly, developed shoes that can walk on water, is, de Botton is told, unable to join the author for lunch because he has been detained at Heathrow “on the suspicion of importing bomb-making equipment and taken for questioning to an immigration centre in Hounslow”. Does de Botton try to reach Bahmani, call an attorney, try to get to Heathrow himself? No, he simply invites the other Iranian - the one who brought him the message - to sit down to lunch and be interviewed instead. We never hear what became of the hapless, newsworthy first inventor again.

Which brings us to the most serious flaw of all, the one least susceptible to being swept under the critical carpet. De Botton does not seem to like or respect his subjects. Correction: he condescends and even ridicules many of his subjects who are non-white, or working-class, lower-middle-class or of the naff managerial class, and so writes about them in a flat, alienated, unengaging way. He writes with admiration and respect - and hence skilfully and vividly - about many subjects of his who are European, highly educated, artistic or of the professional elite. This turns out not only to be a moral failing, but a writerly one. Because there is no way a nonfiction writer is going to be able to elicit a sense of connection and attachment between his reader and his subject if he can't bring himself to be civil to them sometimes in the first place.

Some of the ways this shows up are trivial, but telling: a dentist's wife is “Susan” and a Brazilian waiter is “Guilherme” and a factory worker “Hassan”, but the head of the satellite project, educated at the National School of Aeronautical Engineering in Toulouse, is “Dr Thierry Proudhon”. In an unpleasant setpiece that recurs several times, de Botton will give a florid exposition of some complex theoretical premise to a low-status employee and that person will be dumbfounded or flee: “Renae had little to add to this analysis. A terrified expression spread across her features and she asked if I might excuse her.” She might have had much to add - if he had been listening.

The last argument I have with this project has to do with belatedness. As I read, I kept having a sense of déjà vu: de Botton invokes voices from the 1840s and 1850s - Whitman and Marx and Emerson. It was a familiar asset of anxieties: would industrialisation kill the spirit? Is there beauty to be seen in pylons and factories? Can we not privilege handmade craft?

I realised that I had heard all of this in undergraduate literature classes on the period 1840-1920. Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins worried about how “all is bleared with trade; smear'd, sear'd with toil”; D.H.Law- rence reviled the mass production of the suburbs and Whitman sang the glories of the technology of the Brooklyn Bridge. Then, wasn't the anxiety of alienation of labour and industrialisation addressed by the craft of William Morris and sublimated by the technology-worship of the Dadaists and the Futurists? Didn't we do this already? We did, which is why de Botton's central argument feels more than a century too late. You want to say, “Alain, you're worried about the wrong things - our industrial base is collapsing and we are postmodern now, remember? Those are our problems.”

And you want to say, “Alain, try this again more deeply next time. But first, why not try to do what Renae or Hassan does for a month?” You want to say: “Dear Alain, go get a job.”