Dying Is Easy; Change Is Hard How We Are,’ by Vincent Deary, Mixes Psychology and Philosophy DEC. 30, 2014 In the brackish waters where philosophy meets self-help, a certain kind of unreadable book comes to spawn. It’s one that dresses up common sense in big words and, increasingly, in only vaguely understood neurobiological research. (“Give them a big, fancy neurobiological explanation,” a thwarted writer is advised in Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, “The Anthologist.” “People love fancy neurobiological explanations.”) Some of this goes on in “How We Are,” the first book from a British health psychologist named Vincent Deary. But Dr. Deary’s book — though well-meaning and not entirely softheaded — is close to unreadable for different reasons. In “How We Are,” Dr. Deary tackles a routine and age-old mental health topic: how humans get stuck in ruts in their personal and professional lives, and how they might climb out of them. Too many of us are living automatically, on tired impulses, he suggests, rather than on conscious thought. Entire wings of bookstores, back when we had bookstores, were devoted to this plight. Photo Vincent Deary Credit Jochen Braun Despite its workaday subject matter, this volume arrives as if it were grander than the average pop psychology walkabout. It caused a bidding war among publishers in England. It’s being issued here by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a house that rarely dabbles in self-help titles. It’s also the first in a projected three volumes that Dr. Deary is (modestly) calling “The ‘How to Live’ Trilogy,” as if each were a slab handed down by an executive committee of gods, philosophers and the better class of chefs, design bloggers and club D.J.s. All of this is weight this book can’t begin to bear. The fact that two more are behind it seems less like a promise than like a mumbled threat. Dr. Deary’s book belongs to a genre, like the steak and kidney pie, that has been perfected by the English. I’m talking about the literate, shyly philosophical meditation on human nature and human ambition, as delivered by writers like Adam Phillips (“On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored”) and Alain de Botton (“How Proust Can Change Your Life”). Dr. Deary’s writing isn’t on this level. He lacks Mr. Phillips’s shrewd insight, as well as Mr. de Botton’s rosy winsomeness. His book is rambling and disorganized. Flatulent lingo begins to seep in. We read about our “dance of adjustment,” our “sacred beginning,” our need to “practice mindfulness.” Clichés steal into view. (“The road begins to rise to meet you.”) We are on a long metaphorical journey with this writer, it is made plain, in status updates on our progress. (“Before we reach the summit, let us look back, and see how far we have come.”) These sorts of GPS readings (“In the next section, we will see how we don’t remember in the kind of detail we think we do”) are all over “How We Are,” and they are the sound of a writer vamping, filling dead space. It was Thoreau who said, “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” If that man were also wielding phrases like “dance of adjustment,” I suspect that Thoreau would have also carried along a sharp stick, just in case. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story Dr. Deary is not always dreary. He understands how most of us resist change of any sort. He presents disruption the way we tend to see it, as if it were a twisted creature in a drive-in horror movie. “From the moment you were born, the end of your world was heading your way: inexorable, relentless, measured and patient,” he writes. “It’s heading for you, taking its time, every day bringing it closer.” He’s talking about death, of course, to some degree, but also about the smaller ways our worlds end: in divorces, in crippling illness, in job losses. He wants us to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off. Beginnings are “emotionally rousing and preoccupying, with the heart, mind and will all in higher gear.” Dr. Deary has a lot to say about our personalities and characters in “How We Are,” about how we are less static objects than we are a series of moving parts. Character is a procession of choices we make, at every moment, about how to behave. This thinking is far from new, but the author mixes his observations with examples from culture both high and low, from Rimbaud, Wharton and Ashbery to “The Matrix” and “The West Wing.” Many of these references, particularly the recent ones, feel mishandled and out of date. There’s a lot here about “Friends,” for example, and Adam Sandler and Kevin Costner movies. There are sections in “How We Are” on race (a white academic begins to dance, ecstatically, in black clubs) and on the shutdown behavior of some Jews during the Holocaust (Primo Levi’s work is consulted) that are awkward and out of place. He skates over each in a few pages, oblivious to the jagged meanings they stir that have little to do with what he is trying to say. In a context that has nothing to do with race, he refers to “the African-American comedian Chris Rock.” Can’t we allow him to be merely the comedian Chris Rock? There’s a slight memoirish aspect to “How We Are.” We learn just enough about Dr. Deary — he is in his mid-40s in the book, has given up smoking, wears black sweaters, is single, and his teenage daughter has come to live with him — to wish he’d give us more. He’s there but not there in this book, a fuzzy sort of hologram. I fear I’ve been pretty hard on Dr. Deary and on “How We Are.” The new year is upon us, and people looking to rethink themselves can almost certainly do worse than investigate the common sense contained herein. And if 2015 goes to hell, we can take solace in the author’s sense of the long view: “The end of a world doesn’t have to be The End of the World.” HOW WE ARE Book One of the ‘How to Live’ Trilogy By Vincent Deary 262 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 07:46:31 +0000
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