The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

The Barnes & Noble Review

"What do you do all day?" children often ask their working parents. The activities of all but the most obvious occupations -- butcher, baker, candlestick maker -- can be especially mysterious and abstract, and not just to children. Brand supervision coordinator? Rocket scientist?

The question has spawned numerous books, including Richard Scarry's children's classic What Do People Do All Day? and Studs Terkel's great oral history, Working (1974). In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton explores some of the increasingly specialized fields of the workaday industrialized world -- cargo shipping, snack food product development, accountancy, airplane parts. He laments that most of us are woefully ignorant of, indifferent to, and disconnected from "the manufacture and distribution of our goods" and, indeed, from the machines and processes that facilitate our lives.

The Swiss-born, Cambridge University–educated British writer and television documentarian is the author of several quirky self-help books, including How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, and Status Anxiety, all of which strive to demonstrate that philosophy and literature can offer practical, applicable usefulness. Their overarching theme is that happiness is within reach if you're willing to employ unusual -- generally intellectual -- tools to grasp it.

De Botton's new book is more reportorial than scholarly and more peripatetic than contemplative -- but no less thought-provoking and unpredictable in its often delightfully unexpected angles and wry humor. Like his earlier books, Work is liberally illustrated, this time with black-and-white photographs of industrial sites, warehouses, office cubicles, and trade shows, mostly by his undercredited collaborator, photographer Richard Baker.

In his prior volumes, de Botton has been essentially optimistic, convinced that existence is subject to improvement through our own rational efforts. His view is less rosy in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Many of the tasks that consume a large share of workers' lives strike him as dreary and, worse, in service of trivial ends, such as the creation and marketing of McVities' new line of Moments cookies, which he follows from conception through manufacture and distribution. De Botton writes that this "disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends" can lead to disheartening "crises of meaning at our computer terminals and our warehouses, contemplating with low-level despair the banality of our labor while at the same time honoring the material fecundity that flows from it."

Yet what surfaces repeatedly in de Botton's book is the extraordinary earnestness, sometimes bordering on obsessiveness, with which workers fulfill their appointed tasks. Could this tendency to "exaggerate the significance of what we are doing" be a remarkable self-survival technique? We may be overspecialized cogs in the machine, as de Botton suggests, but we perform our assigned duties with a sense that each cog is of vital importance. This not only affects manufacturers of airplane air hoses, but the critic writing this review.

And, indeed, it also applies to de Botton's absorption in his book project. He describes languishing for days in Maldives while waiting for a fishing boat to be repaired in order to follow tuna from its source in the Indian Ocean to a Bristol supermarket. Walking the power line between a nuclear plant on the Kent coast to a substation in East London with an engineer who installs electricity pylons sparks his enthusiastic conclusion "that there were few troubling situations in contemporary life from which one could not distract oneself by wondering where the electricity had arrived from." In the Mojave Desert, he deflects a guard's verbal abuse with a bribe that enables him to poke around in an aviation graveyard while reflecting on mortality and decay, the flip side of progress. (This scene evokes Geraldine Chaplin in Robert Altman's Nashville reporting from a "graveyard" of parked school buses.)

De Botton notes that it is only relatively recently in human history that work (rather than lineage) has come to define our identity, and that self-fulfillment -- in addition to money -- has become an important motivator. Like the poet Donald Hall, whose Life Work (1993) extols the advantages of loving what you do, de Botton is among the privileged minority fortunate enough to be able to set his own agenda.

Although de Botton does consider people who are passionate about their work -- including some hopeful inventors and an artist who spends years painting the same oak tree over and over again in an East Anglia wheat field -- his primary focus is the more obscure, prosaic "limbs of industry." He clearly finds the soullessness of many jobs a source of horrified fascination -- a stance some may find vaguely condescending.

Yet de Botton is at his best when describing how the most mundane efforts result in constructs of strange power and even beauty. He is awed by the collective effort of "engineers and technicians…these new medicine men" required to launch a satellite from French Guiana into space for beaming television broadcasts to Japan: "And yet, as a non-scientist examining the rocket-assembly building, gazing at a needle of solid propellant nine stories tall, one felt that a most unmagical of approaches had nevertheless succeeded in producing a device which was not entirely free of supernatural associations."

What keeps us reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is not so much the peek into cloistered industrial zones exposed by de Botton's reporting as the freshness of his observations and the ironic bite of his language. Of a particularly bleak tea shop along the electrical route, he comments, "How cheerful one would have needed to be in such a place in order not to regret existence." He likens accountants' "labyrinthine craft" to "numerical needlework" and admires that they "have accepted with grace the paucity of opportunities for immortality in audit." He wonders whether inventors, who must demonstrate "a judicious fusion of the utopian and the practical," are perhaps blessed with "a superior capacity for dissatisfaction" that propels them to come up with novel solutions to life's problems.

As those desperately seeking employment in today's bleak economy are well aware, work itself is a solution to many of life's problems -- not just in providing financial wherewithal but distraction from greater anxieties, including mortality. Or, as the 19th-century Kansas poet Ironquill wrote:

Work brings its own relief
He who most idle is
Has most of grief.

From the Publisher

From the international bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life comes this lyrical, erudite look at our world of work.

We spend most of our time at work, but what we do there rarely gets discussed in the sort of lyrical and descriptive prose our efforts surely deserve. Determined to correct this lapse, armed with a poetic perspective and his trademark philosophical sharpness, Alain de Botton heads out into the world of offices and factories, ready to take in the beauty, interest, and sheer strangeness of the modern workplace.

De Botton spends time in and around some less familiar work environments, including warehouses, container ports, rocket launch pads, and power stations, and follows scientists, landscape painters, accountants, cookie manufacturers, therapists, entrepreneurs, and aircraft salesmen as they do their jobs.

Along the way, de Botton tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can pose about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? To what end do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also our planet?

Equally intrigued by work’s pleasures and its pains, Alain de Botton offers a characteristically lucid and witty tour of the working day and night, in a book sure to inspire a range of life-changing and wise thoughts.

The New York Times - Caleb Crain

De Botton starts with noble intentions, claiming in his first chapter to have been inspired to write about work by the intense, unabashed interest taken by cargo-ship spotters, the hobbyists who track the comings and goings of the enormous oceangoing vessels that help to make globalization possible. The spotters "know what it is about the world that would detain a Martian or a child," de Botton writes. But in his praise of their wonder, there is a note of condescension: "Admittedly, the ship spotters do not respond to the objects of their enthusiasm with particular imagination. They traffic in statistics."

Publishers Weekly

Veteran narrator David Colacci delivers an evenhanded, workmanlike performance of De Botton's philosophical exploration of the joys, pains and meaning of work. The erudite and frequently amusing meditation on vocation is accompanied by profiles of a broad spectrum of workers—employed in everything from biscuit manufacturing to rocket science, fishing to career counseling—with Colacci deftly capturing the text's perfect mix of sly humor and gravity and allowing listeners an opportunity to reflect on and question his or her own working life. A Pantheon hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 13). (June)

Janet Ingraham Dwyer - Library Journal

This exploration of how and why we labor arrives at a poignant time, as global economic turmoil cuts off countless workers from their livelihoods-and the meaning work gives them. Essayist and novelist de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life) spends time with workers in England as well as the United States, including fishermen, rocket scientists, accountants, a landscape painter, and a career counselor, in pursuit of some fundamental truth about work. His conclusion is, perhaps unavoidably, elusive; he variously seems to praise commitment to a task and to deride it, to glorify and to condemn modern industry. De Botton filters his subjects' experiences through his own; though he is a witty, engaging interlocutor, his dominant voice distances the reader from those he aims to portray. Photographer Richard Baker contributes visual images of workers and workplaces, including a photo-essay documenting the process by which a tuna in the Indian Ocean becomes dinner for an English child. Providing provocative insights on specialization and the transitory nature of significance, this is sophisticated reading on a timely subject. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/15/09.]

Kirkus Reviews

Novelist/essayist de Botton (The Architecture of Happiness, 2006, etc.) turns his inquisitive eye to the business of work. For many of us, writes the author, the "unreasonable banality" of work requires "daily submission at the altars of prudence and order," typically housed in drab, soulless workplaces. (The many photographs are striking proof.) From the beginning of his latest philosophical excursion, however, de Botton appreciates that work is a meaningful act, if only in the most elemental sense-workers need to put food on the table. Still, the author found a certain heroic beauty in many of the work environments he visited, including that of an aircraft salesman, a biscuit manufacturer, an electricity-transmission engineer, a career counselor, a painter and an accountant. In each instance, he unhurriedly poked into the workings of the job, examined the possibilities for gleaning pleasure from it and embraced the Protestant worldview that "humility, wisdom, respect, and kindness could be practiced in a shop no less sincerely than in a monastery"-no matter how clownish-looking the activity, especially in an economy increasingly based on satisfying peripheral desires. There is something to be said about the delight generated by an artist's creations, or the happy, heedless energy of entrepreneurs, who require "a painfully uncommon synthesis of imagination and realism." Work may be trivial, de Botton notes, but what's interesting is the determination and gravity we bring to it. A luminous photo-essay from a consistently fresh and noble writer.

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