Book of the week: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

(Pantheon, 327 pages, $26)

An understanding that work is essentially a miserable use of one’s time was for centuries “one of mankind’s primary bulwarks against bitterness,” says author Alain de Botton. There’s no such defense against the misery of the modern workplace. Thomas Jefferson captured the recalibration of work’s standing in the post-Enlightenment West when he described the young American nation as “an aristocracy of talent and virtue.” Ever since, what each of us does for a living has been an expression of identity and a measure of worth. Unfortunately, says de Botton, that’s a recipe for widespread disappointment. We should simply be content, at the end of our lives, to say that the toil that occupied so many of our days “kept us out of greater trouble.”

“Yes, he’s heavy,” said Michelle Conlin in BusinessWeek. But de Botton, the Swiss author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and a handful of similar “philosophical tone poems,” is frequently very funny, too. In the latest of his idiosyncratic meditations on the human heart, he plays tourist inside 10 professions, beginning with cargo-ship spotter and ending with corporate accountant. He offers no decisive advice because he’s too pessimistic to spot any career path terminating in rainbows. But his pessimism is fuel for one well-turned line after another, as he gently mocks both a landscape painter who spends years studying “how best to render the movement of wheat” and cookie executives laboring to address their customers’ “feelings of emptiness” with fresh combinations of sugar, fat, and flour.

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Oddly, de Botton doesn’t seem to ask the workers under scrutiny about their own lives, said Tom Lutz in the Los Angeles Times. “Like a novelist, he observes people and imagines their thoughts” instead of recording them. When de Botton writes that today’s workers are prone to falling into “low-level despair” as they toil at their computer terminals, he is “developing a genre of his own, a kind of speculative nonfiction.” The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is truly “a puzzle at times,” following no clear line of inquiry, said Kirk LaPointe in The Vancouver Sun. Still, “each reader will take something out of it.” Its many aperçus add up to one of the “most richly insightful” books yet written on a subject at the center of all our lives.