Alain de Botton is a cottage industry unto himself, straddling something that his website call ‘the philosophy of everyday life.’ His popular books have examined love, status, art, anxiety, architecture and Proust. A couple of years ago, I read an article of his that surveyed the nature of work, and I recall being quite taken with one point he made, namely that many people should not seek the ideal job but should work because they have to. Of course I grabbed The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work as soon as I could.
de Botton knows no fear, certainly not of hard work or boredom. To examine diverse examples of humans at work, he tracks fish across the globe, climbs all over a biscuit factory, follows a career counsellor around, and observes the launch of a satellite for Japan’s first satellite TV station, among ten activities that range from oddball to prosaic to obsessed. As with all his books, the production is immaculate, with art-quality pages and photographs every two to four pages. His imagination is fecund – wherever he goes, whatever is under his microscope, he muses with a refined sophistication that should illuminate.
The trouble is, his mind seems like a butterfly, flitting from one notion to another without forming a discernible path. If I should have learnt from The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work anything profound about work and its effect on us humans, well, I missed it among the endless sidelong thoughts or diarised emotions. There seems no thread that binds the observations and no useful summary or conclusion results. In fictional terms, his characterization is fine but his plot is suspect. Often, too, he comes across as caustic about the very lives under his microscope, in a way that detracts. I ended up enamoured with some sections, especially those on a painter, the careers counsellor, and a pylon obsessive, but others left me cold. Overall, I can only call this book a hit-and-miss collection of observational essays, imparting mild interest but little reward to the reader.