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John Irving has long been fascinated by the vexed relationship between art and entertainment. In his fourth novel, “The World According to Garp,” he describes the “uncanny half-light” that makes “occasional ‘serious’ books glow, for a time, as also ‘popular’ books.” In his memoir “The Imaginary Girlfriend,” he praises Trollope, Dickens, Vonnegut and Heller, writers whose “popular” books have been treated to “serious” critical attention. While he claims to have no patience for Proust, Conrad or Henry James,he is a fierce defender of Graham Greene, whose reputation as an entertaining writer, Irving maintains, “cost him the critical appreciation that is withdrawn from writers with too many readers.”
Irving’s concern about the status of fiction is central to his new novel, “Last Night in TwistedRiver.” There are two main characters in the book: an Italian-American cook who at the beginning goes by the name of Dominic Baciagalupo, and his son, Danny, who grows up to be a “world-famous,” “best-selling” author, much like Irving himself. Thanks to Danny’s profession, Irving has an excuse for writing about writing, even as he follows Danny and Dominic through 50 years of complicated adventures.
“It was a world of accidents,” Dominic reflects. The novel opens with the drowning of a young logger who is trying to free a logjam. A surly, coarse, big-hearted older logger named Ketchum breaks his own wrist trying to save him. In the pages that follow, Irving offers the back stories of scores of other accidents associated with logging. We learn that “some rivermen had drowned, or been crushed to death”; a bunkhouse roof had collapsed after a heavy snowfall, killing an Indian; Dominic had broken his ankle as a boy and was maimed for life when he was rolling logs into a mill; and Dominic’s wife — Danny’s mother — had fallen through the ice one night when she’d gone dancing across the frozen river.
In this world of accidents, Dominic and Danny struggle to find steady footing, but like the inexperienced young logger who falls into the river, they keep losing their balance. In their well-meaning effort to protect each other, they make mistakes that are sometimes inevitable, or harmlessly comical or, in the pivotal moment in the novel, fatal.
In Coos County, N.H., 1954, in a logging camp along the TwistedRiver, Dominic’s mistake is to hide the truth about his affair with an American Indian woman known as “Injun Jane” from his young son. Danny, in his youthful ignorance, walks in on his father and Injun Jane while they’re having sex. Injun Jane, like several other female characters in this novel, is distinguished by her hefty physique and, in particular, her “monumental” breasts. She also has long black hair, which Danny has never before seen unbraided. But she unbraids it that night. When Danny walks into the dark bedroom, drawn by the “violent creaks and moans,” he thinks Injun Jane is a bear attacking his father, and he hits her with an iron skillet. He hits her hard. It’s a big whoops, and it’s used to set the action of the novel in motion. Danny and Dominic will run from this mistake for the rest of their lives.
The scene is obviously improbable, and Injun Jane remains a blank of a character. Readers may not be convinced that this accident deserves to be the propelling event of the book. But there’s more at work than just plot here. At the same time that we are reading about Dominic and Danny as they run from town to town (both of them change their names along the way), we are reading about how, and why, the story came to be written. The narrator tells us, for instance, that “all writers must know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves from this and that emotional moment, and Danny could do this — even at 12.” He tells us that one day “the writer would recognize the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events — these are what move a story forward.” He explains that Danny’s novels involve “small, domestic tragedies,” in which “the villain — if there was one — was more often human nature than the United States.” After a section in which the fictional events are intertwined with the events of Sept. 11, Danny comes right out and explains, “I’m a fiction writer — meaning that I won’t ever write about the Sept. 11 attacks, though I may use those events, when they’re not so current, and then only in the context of a story of my own devising.”
Not only does the narrator explain Danny’s methods with unprovocative truisms, he also packages his characters in simplistic generalizations. In case we doubt it, he assures us that “Danny was both observant and smart.” Later on, following a trajectory that will be familiar to readers of some of Irving’s other work, Danny goes to the elite private school Phillips Exeter on a scholarship. Why is he singled out for a scholarship? Because he “simply had a gift for storytelling.” And in a passage that’s supposed to be one of the emotional culminations of the novel, the narrator explains that Danny (now a father himself) “couldn’t change what had happened to his son, the way a fiction writer could revise a novel.”
There’s plenty of evidence of Irving’s agility as a writer in “Last Night in TwistedRiver.” He is adept at following an accident through its intricate consequences. His evocations of sounds and smells and tactile sensations, especially those provoked by Dominic’s expert cooking, are tantalizing. And some of the comic moments are among the most memorable that Irving has written, including the scene when a naked female skydiver, one of the novel’s many voluptuaries, makes an unfortunate landing smack in the middle of a pigpen.
Given Irving’s skill, it’s especially frustrating to see him working so hard to spell out the import of the fiction. Even if some of the explanations are meant to be inflected with irony (we shouldn’t necessarily believe everything this narrator tells us), they still aren’t convincingly integrated with the events and characters. The coy hints of connections between the author and the narrator have been forced onto a plot that can’t accommodate them, and the fact that Danny is a famous novelist too often seems a mere contrivance, giving Irving a convenient opportunity to include rambling background information and to air his own ideas about writing. In his bid to make something “serious,” Irving has risked distracting readers from what otherwise could be a moving, cohesive story.
Joanna Scott’s most recent book is “Follow Me,” a novel.
Wednesday 19 July 2000 was the day chosen for the pageant celebrating the hundredth birthday of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. In London, the day did not begin well. There were bomb scares, the controlled explosion of a suspicious bag, and many trains were cancelled. Senior police officers considered whether the whole event should be abandoned. It was not. The celebration, on Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall, had been designed as a joyful tribute to Queen Elizabeth and the hundreds of organizations with which she was connected. In warm afternoon sunshine, as the National Anthem was performed by massed military bands, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and a choir of a thousand singers, Queen Elizabeth, dressed in pink, arrived with her grandson the Prince of Wales in a landau escorted by the Household Cavalry. After she had inspected the troops, she and the Prince sat on a flower-bedecked dais (though she stood much of the time) to watch the parade together. It began with a march-past of the regiments of which she was colonel-in-chief, followed by the King’s Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery and the Mounted Bands of the Household Cavalry. One hundred homing doves were released as a young boy sang ‘Oh for the Wings of a Dove’. Then came a cavalcade of the century, a light-hearted look at the hundred years she had lived through; more of a circus than a parade, it included 450 children and adults, with a variety of stars. Among the scenes and players who passed in front of her were soldiers of the First World War, ballroom dancers from the 1920s, a Second World War fire engine and ambulance, Pearly Kings and Queens from the East End of London, and people in 1940s dress celebrating victory in 1945. Then came a series of post-war cars – Enid Blyton’s Noddy in his yellow car, the first Mini Minor, James Bond’s Aston Martin, an E-type Jaguar. More recent – and perhaps more surprising – twentieth-century memories were recalled by Hell’s Angels on their bikes, punk-rock youths in black and the television characters, the Wombles. After this eclectic depiction of the previous ten decades, representatives of 170 of the more than 300 civil organizations, charities and other groups with which Queen Elizabeth was associated marched past her. This part of the parade began with Queen Elizabeth’s page leading two of her corgis, the breed of dog which had for so long shared her life. There were more animals: camels (ridden by members of the Worshipful Company of Grocers, whose emblem is a camel), horses, an Aberdeen Angus bull, North Country Cheviot sheep, chickens, racehorses. The groups waving gaily as they passed included the Girls’ Brigade, Queen Elizabeth’s Overseas Nursing Services Association, the Cookery and Food Association (a hundred chefs all in their whites), the Mothers’ Union, the Poultry Club of Great Britain, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the National Trust, the Royal College of Midwives, St John Ambulance Brigade, the Royal School of Needlework, the Colditz Association, the Battle of Britain Fighter Association, the Bomber Command Association and, bringing up the rear, twenty-two holders of the Victoria and George Crosses, Britain’s highest awards for heroism, followed by the venerable Chelsea Pensioners marching stiffly but proudly in their bright red uniforms. Everyone in the stands stood up as these brave men and women passed.
RAF planes from the Second World War – a Spitfire, a Hurricane, a Lancaster bomber, a Bristol Blenheim – flew overhead, followed by the Red Arrows trailing red, white and blue vapour trails. And all the while the bands and the orchestra played on and the choirs sang. Hubert Parry’s glorious anthem ‘I Was Glad’, which had been sung at King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation in 1937, was followed by First World War music-hall favourites such as ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and (nicely vulgar) ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’. Three hundred children from the Chicken Shed Company danced. Altogether some 2,000 military personnel and more than 5,000 civilians celebrated on Horse Guards Parade.
The whole event lasted an hour and a half, and at the end the Queen Mother made a short speech of thanks saying it had been a
wonderful afternoon and ‘a great joy to me’. The crowd cheered, the National Anthem was sung again, and Queen Elizabeth got into her car to make a lap of honour past thousands of happy, cheering people before driving off to St James’s Palace, where she climbed the stairs to the State Rooms and spent the next hour and a half at a reception, sitting down only to talk to the singer Dame Vera Lynn.
Two weeks later, on the morning of her actual hundredth birthday, 4 August, a large crowd gathered outside her London home, Clarence House. The gates were opened and Queen Elizabeth came out to take the salute when the King’s Troop, the Royal Horse Artillery, marched past. In front of the crowd the royal postman, Tony Nicholls, delivered her the traditional message sent by the Queen to all her subjects who reach their hundredth birthday. The Queen Mother started to open it and then passed it to her equerry. ‘Come on, use your sword,’ she said. Captain William de Rouet unsheathed his ceremonial blade and slit the envelope open. The message was written in the Queen’s own hand and read, ‘On your 100th birthday all the family join with me in
sending you our loving best wishes for this special day. Lilibet’.1 Then, with the Prince of Wales, Queen Elizabeth climbed into a
landau decked with flowers in her racing colours of blue and gold, and was driven to Buckingham Palace past the large crowds lining the Mall. The Prince was deeply moved by the rapturous reception for his beloved grandmother. It was, he thought, ‘the British at their best – and you always manage to bring the best out in people!’2 At the Palace, Queen Elizabeth appeared alone on the balcony. She waved to the crowds as she had first waved after her marriage in 1923 and, most famously, on Victory in Europe (VE) Day in May 1945. As the Band of the Coldstream Guards played Happy Birthday and the crowd roared its approval, she was joined by twenty-seven of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nephews, nieces and many of their spouses.
In her long life the world had undergone technological change with unprecedented speed, and political transformations of exceptional violence. It had moved from the age of travel by horse to that of travel through space. The First World War and the Russian Revolution had toppled the emperors of Austria, Germany and Russia. Many other European kings and queens had subsequently departed their thrones. The United Kingdom had suffered the trauma of the Great War and then faced almost continuous challenge from economic and political turmoil, from war and the threat of war – through a world slump, the
abdication of King Edward VIII, the Second World War, the Cold War. Queen Elizabeth had come to terms with massive changes – loss of empire, the growth of a modern multi-racial Commonwealth of newly independent states in Asia and Africa, and a social revolution in Britain itself which had begun with the first majority Labour government elected in 1945.
The British monarchy was not isolated from the political and social changes. Indeed the abdication in 1936 was a self-inflicted wound from which it might not have recovered. It had adapted itself, and it had survived; more than that, it had retained the consent of the people essential to constitutional monarchy. This adaptation was largely due to the efforts of successive sovereigns and their advisers. But a key question, explored in this book, is the extent to which the consent necessary for its survival was generated by the woman who was for almost eighty years at its heart – as Duchess of York, Queen and Queen Mother.
In any biography of a public person there is a danger of overemphasizing the role of the individual in shaping events. This is particularly true when the individual has, like Queen Elizabeth, great prestige but no real power. Nevertheless, it remains legitimate to ask how Queen Elizabeth responded to the great personal and public crises of her life and what wider effect this had.
How did she do it? What combination of qualities had enabled this young Scottish aristocrat to come into the Royal Family and play such a central role in the life of the nation for almost eighty years? What part did she play in her unique family, as a young married woman, as a mother, as grandmother and great-grandmother? And on the national stage, how did she earn and, more remarkably, how did she retain her popularity through all of the turbulent twentieth century? What were the drawbacks to her very particular style? What did she really contribute to the monarchy and to the nation in times of crisis and social revolution? Would the British monarchy have evolved in a very different way without her influence? And would that have helped or hindered the institution and the country? All these questions can perhaps be examined in the context of a few words from Walter Bagehot, the mid-nineteenth-century writer who is often seen as the greatest interpreter of modern monarchy: ‘The nation is divided into parties, but the crown is of no party. Its apparent separation from business is that which removes it both from enmities and from desecration, which preserves its mystery, which enables it to combine the affection of conflicting parties – to be a visible symbol of unity.’
Shortly after the British Army’s rousing triumph over Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein in November 1942, Winston Churchill warned his countrymen to avoid overconfidence. “Now this is not the end,” he cautioned. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” This sentiment, cited in William Shawcross’s Brobdingnagian official biography, “The Queen Mother,” is what many readers may feel when they get to Chapter 10 of this 1,096-page book. That’s the chapter where, after all the ripping parties and smashing card games and postprandial singalongs and first-rate trips to East Africa attended by Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes Lyon, wife of King George VI and mother of Queen Elizabeth II, Shawcross must finally turn his attention to that awful rotter Edward VIII.
After more than 300 pages of paeans to upper-class Britons, the author is compelled to introduce us to a liar, extortionist and, for all intents and purposes, traitor, a man who ditched the throne of Britain to marry a Nazi-admiring gold digger from Crabcake Corners. This is the first time the book gets really interesting. But more important, this is the first time one feels that it might be possible to finish reading it. Chapter 10 is not the end. It may not even be the beginning of the end. But it may be the beginning of the middle.
“The Queen Mother” is a labor of love, both for the author and for anyone who tries reading it from cover to cover. The authorized biography of a woman who was born as the 20th century was beginning and died about a year after it ended, it is a linear, you-are-there chronicle of the events of her life. Mostly this means lunches, balls, charity events, shooting parties. She cut cakes, she cut ribbons, she cut the rug. She was a royal. She had read the job description, first issued in 1689.
All this is communicated in a meticulous, sober fashion. Shawcross, a dutiful hagiographer, doesn’t venture very far inside his subject’s head, other than to suggest that she never forgave Edward VIII for chucking it all because it forced her husband into the family business — killing him, she believed, long before his time. Only when Edward VIII or the Luftwaffe pops in does the narrative become in any way absorbing. Elsewhere, the prose tends to run like this: “Back at the house there was tea to be taken in the drawing room, which featured an ancient gramophone with long-playing records of such old favorites as the Crazy Gang, and an equally aged television set for watching videos (rarely if ever the news). Ruth Fermoy would play the piano and Queen Elizabeth sang the old favorites — ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ or ‘The Lambeth Walk.’ ”
The queen mother, a fairy princess in her youth, a fairy queen in middle age and a fairy godmother in her later years, was a favorite of the British people from the word go. There was something about her that people liked, just as there is something about Pince Charles that people don’t like. In fact, everything. The immense affection the public felt for her antedates the central event in her life, when she and her husband refused to flee London during the Battle of Britain, a heroic, enormously symbolic act that helped pull her equally heroic countrymen through one of the darkest moments in their history. No one alive at the time ever forgot her courage, nor should anyone alive today.
That said, the queen mother was never cut from the same cloth as such stirring figures as Elizabeth I or Mary Queen of Scots or even her grandson’s wife Diana. She didn’t shape the times she lived in; she attended functions during them. Adhering to the principle that royals should be seen but not really heard, the queen mother seems to have said little that was truly interesting. She had all the strengths and weaknesses of her class, and capitalized on that weird chumminess between the man in the street and the crowned heads that has long been a puzzle to those who would like the royals to disappear. If she ever had an original thought, it goes unreported here. And while Shawcross had access to letters no other biographer has ever laid eyes on, the results are uninspiring. Elizabeth, whose dowdy attire matched her humdrum intellect, started writing vacuous letters when she was a child, and she never stopped. “One feels that occupation of a country by the Germans leaves a terrible legacy of anarchy & cruelty & a weakening of moral forces,” she wrote to her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, in December 1944. “Indeed the Nazis are the forces of Evil.” In the spring of 1939, on the eve of the war, she had apprised the same correspondent: “I am starting to read the unexpurgated edition of ‘Mein Kampf.’ Have you read it?”
“The Queen Mother” is more a document replete with data than a book designed to entertain. It’s like one of those official portraits by court-appointed painters: literal but artless. For the most part, Shawcross stays in the background, lurking behind the arras, dropping the pretense of objectivity only when anyone on the left clamors for attention. He admires Churchill (who doesn’t?), despises the Soviets and doesn’t seem to have much time for the Labour Party. Here he’s echoing the views of those he is writing about; no “official” biography of a queen is likely to be written by someone who isn’t already on the team. Sometimes his politics intrude too much: nowhere in an immense book filled with details about both world wars can he find the space to mention the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the most important battles in history. This seems willfully petty.
“The Queen Mother” has few surprises. But there are those few. Inside the family, the queen mother was known as Buffy. Her friendship with the poet laureate Ted Hughes worked out much better than Sylvia Plath’s did. The queen suffered from chronic tonsillitis. Her brother Alec died of a brain tumor resulting from a cricket ball landing on his head. The rumors that she once had a colostomy were not true. Her brother-in-law Edward, who lied about his net worth at the time of his abdication and was seemingly being groomed by the Nazis to replace his brother should things break nicely for the Third Reich, threatened to slit his throat if Mrs. Simpson deserted him. Unlike the patriotic, public-spirited, good-hearted queen mother, Edward was basically a worthless human being. But in a book loaded with references to grouse-shooting and pantomime and the Rev. Tubby Clayton and the stallions of the Royal Stud, any of his appearances is a welcome relief. Goes down a bomb, in fact.
Joe Queenan’s memoir “Closing Time” will be released in paperback next spring.
Up to Her Neck in Pink Ribbons and Smiley Faces Book Review by Janet Maslin
BRIGHT-SIDED
How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking HasUndermined America
By Barbara Ehrenreich
235 pages. Metropolitan Books. $23.
When Barbara Ehrenreich became a breast cancer patient, she found herself infuriated by the disease’s upbeat, infantilizing culture of pink ribbons and teddy bears. When she found that there were patients’ message boards that extolled breast cancer as a blessing, she signed on and expressed her indignation. Along came “a chorus of rebukes” from other patients, one of whom condescendingly addressed her as Barb. The word “barb” can be associated with Ms. Ehrenreich, but it works better to describe her favorite kind of rhetorical weapon than as a nickname.
Flinging the vituperative barb is a specialty for this writer, whose book titles include “The Snarling Citizen,” “The Mean Season” and “The Worst Years of Our Lives” (as well as the snappier, better-known “Bait and Switch” and “Nickel and Dimed”). She thrives on righteous indignation, and she may seem to have found the perfect target with “Bright-Sided.” Here is her chance to make a frontal assault on the institutionalized American version of good cheer and to wipe that dopey smile off the happy-face symbol that pervades American culture.
“Bright-Sided” does have a point to make. And it’s a point so simple that it can be aptly summarized by the book’s subtitle, “How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.” Ms. Ehrenreich thinks the prevalence of bogus optimism has weakened America, and she is willing to shoot fish in barrels to make that case. There is no shortage of megachurch preachers, self-help gurus, business coaches and positive-thinking academics whose idiocy and avarice can be exposed by Ms. Ehrenreich’s high beams.
Her argument has the makings of a tight, incisive essay. And each chapter eventually delivers a succinct reiteration of the central point. But this short book is also padded with cheap shots, easy examples, research recycled from her earlier books and caustic reportorial stalking. Ms. Ehrenreich starts out with her ideas firmly in place, then goes out hunting for crass, benighted individuals whose perniciousness helps her accentuate the negative.
There’s no arguing with Ms. Ehrenreich’s sense that false optimism is a form of stupidity. Nor is there reason to dispute her idea that such false optimism can be profitably exploited. But it’s a little late for her to tell her readers about the decade-old mouse parable “Who Moved My Cheese?,” let alone explain that corporations use that book to convince the downsized employee that losing a job is a backhanded form of good fortune. The good-cheer baloney business has long since gone on to embrace the great news that this recession can be a blessing.
“Bright-Sided” begins with Ms. Ehrenreich’s highly humanizing chapter about her illness and with her legitimate scorn for “the ultrafeminine theme of the breast cancer marketplace.” (“Certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars.”) After that it takes a downhill trajectory. The next chapter concerns the cultural validation of “magical thinking,” as in the book “The Secret,” which makes another barn-sized target. What is the real meaning of that book’s assertion that we can attract whatever we want by wishing for it? “Bright-Sided” rightly says that the meaning is twofold: that we are encouraged to override the wishes of anyone else, and that we become failures when the process doesn’t pay off.
But as part of her skewering of magical thinking, Ms. Ehrenreich digs up one motivational speaker who advises increasing business by rereading one’s mailing list and “loving each name,” and another who boastfully proclaims “my life is what I would consider the definition of success.” She is simply too smart for this bottom-feeding, just as she is too smart to be citing the number of Google searches for “positive thinking” or to be quoting something fatuous said by Larry King. Her valuable insight about the solipsism of magical thinking and about the loneliness of a world that will grant any wish is obscured by the caliber of the evidence that supports it.
This book’s chapter on the historical roots of the optimism business and on the stern Calvinist values that are at the heart of it (since the self that can be improved must be inherently flawed) is sturdy. But it gives way to a smorgasbord of sneering illustrations. The canned optimism of the megachurch minister Joel Osteen actually involves asking God for help in getting seated in a crowded restaurant (“Father, I thank you that I have favor with this hostess, and she’s going to seat me soon”), and Ms. Ehrenreich rightly wonders what this has to do with Christian values. But her own values make it easier for her to infiltrate and ridicule an Osteen sermon than to ask parishioners about their responses to such gibberish. She would rather speak for the victims of trumped-up optimism than speak to them.
In its search for egregious silliness, “Bright-Sided” also unearths an academic (who has been written about by Ms. Ehrenreich before and thus goes to great lengths to dodge her), Martin E. P. Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association, whose book “Authentic Happiness” is tailor-made for her purposes. She finds Mr. Seligman’s ideas of cultural uplift to be laughable; he plays into her hands by suggesting that they go to an art museum and look at the Monets. Ms. Ehrenreich describes trying to take notes with a pen, being told she can’t use one in the museum and thinking privately that she dislikes Monets for their “middle-class notions of coziness,” but doesn’t “hate them enough to stab them with my felt-tip pen.”
All in all, this encounter offers more caustic humor than enlightenment. And it paves the way for saying that positive psychology has become a moneymaking enterprise, which is hardly a startling observation in the midst of this book’s parade of saccharine hucksters. The more important point, which is also here but coarsened by too much distraction, is that it is dangerous to lose sight of unpleasant realities and that we have ignored too many real-world danger signals in recent years. That’s as obvious on this book’s last page as it was on the first.
Americans are a "positive" people. This is our reputation as well as our self-image. We smile a lot and are oft en baffled when people from other cultures do not return the favor. In the well-worn stereotype, we are upbeat, cheerful, optimistic, and shallow, while foreigners are likely to be subtle, world-weary, and possibly decadent. American expatriate writers like Henry James and James Baldwin wrestled with and occasionally reinforced this stereotype, which I once encountered in the 1980s in the form of a remark by Soviet émigré poet Joseph Brodsky to the effect that the problem with Americans is that they have "never known suffering." (Apparently he didn't know who had invented the blues.) Whether we Americans see it as an embarrassment or a point of pride, being positive — in affect, in mood, in outlook — seems to be engrained in our national character.
Who would be churlish or disaffected enough to challenge these happy features of the American personality? Take the business of positive "affect," which refers to the mood we display to others through our smiles, our greetings, our professions of confidence and optimism. Scientists have found that the mere act of smiling can generate positive feelings within us, at least if the smile is not forced. In addition, good feelings, as expressed through our words and smiles, seem to be contagious: "Smile and the world smiles with you." Surely the world would be a better, happier place if we all greeted one another warmly and stopped to coax smiles from babies — if only through the well-known social psychological mechanism of "mood contagion." Recent studies show that happy feelings flit easily through social networks, so that one person's good fortune can brighten the day even for only distantly connected others.
Furthermore, psychologists today agree that positive feelings like gratitude, contentment, and self-confidence can actually lengthen our lives and improve our health. Some of these claims are exaggerated, as we shall see, though positive feelings hardly need to be justified, like exercise or vitamin supplements, as part of a healthy lifestyle. People who report having positive feelings are more likely to participate in a rich social life, and vice versa, and social connectedness turns out to be an important defense against depression, which is a known risk factor for many physical illnesses. At the risk of redundancy or even tautology, we can say that on many levels, individual and social, it is good to be "positive," certainly better than being withdrawn, aggrieved, or chronically sad.
So I take it as a sign of progress that, in just the last decade or so, economists have begun to show an interest in using happiness rather than just the gross national product as a measure of an economy's success. Happiness is, of course, a slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day but then was cheered up by a bit of good news, so what am I really? In one well-known psychological experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire on life satisfaction — but only after they had performed the apparently irrelevant task of photocopying a sheet of paper for the experimenter. For a randomly chosen half of the subjects, a dime had been left for them to find on the copy machine. As two economists summarize the results, "Reported satisfaction with life was raised substantially by the discovery of the coin on the copy machine — clearly not an income effect."
In addition to the problems of measurement, there are cultural differences in how happiness is regarded and whether it is even seen as a virtue. Some cultures, like our own, value the positive affect that seems to signal internal happiness; others are more impressed by seriousness, self-sacrifice, or a quiet willingness to cooperate. However hard to pin down, though, happiness is somehow a more pertinent metric for well-being, from a humanistic perspective, than the buzz of transactions that constitute the GDP.
Surprisingly, when psychologists undertake to measure the relative happiness of nations, they routinely find that Americans are not, even in prosperous times and despite our vaunted positivity, very happy at all. A recent meta-analysis of over a hundred studies of self-reported happiness worldwide found Americans ranking only twenty-third, surpassed by the Dutch, the Danes, the Malaysians, the Bahamians, the Austrians, and even the supposedly dour Finns. In another potential sign of relative distress, Americans account for two-thirds of the global market for antidepressants, which happen also to be the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States. To my knowledge, no one knows how antidepressant use affects people's responses to happiness surveys: do respondents report being happy because the drugs make them feel happy or do they report being unhappy because they know they are dependent on drugs to make them feel better? Without our heavy use of antidepressants, Americans would likely rank far lower in the happiness rankings than we currently do.
When economists attempt to rank nations more objectively in terms of "well-being," taking into account such factors as health, environmental sustainability, and the possibility of upward mobility, the United States does even more poorly than it does when only the subjective state of "happiness" is measured. The Happy Planet Index, to give just one example, locates us at 150th among the world's nations.4
How can we be so surpassingly "positive" in self-image and stereotype without being the world's happiest and best-off people? The answer, I think, is that positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology — the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it. That ideology is "positive thinking," by which we usually mean two things. One is the generic content of positive thinking — that is, the positive thought itself — which can be summarized as: Things are pretty good right now, at least if you are willing to see silver linings, make lemonade out of lemons, etc., and things are going to get a whole lot better. This is optimism, and it is not the same as hope. Hope is an emotion, a yearning, the experience of which is not entirely within our control. Optimism is a cognitive stance, a conscious expectation, which presumably anyone can develop through practice.
The second thing we mean by "positive thinking" is this practice, or discipline, of trying to think in a positive way. There is, we are told, a practical reason for undertaking this effort: positive thinking supposedly not only makes us feel optimistic but actually makes happy outcomes more likely. If you expect things to get better, they will. How can the mere pro cess of thinking do this? In the rational explanation that many psychologists would offer today, optimism improves health, personal efficacy, confidence, and resilience, making it easier for us to accomplish our goals. A far less rational theory also runs rampant in American ideology — the idea that our thoughts can, in some mysterious way, directly affect the physical world. Negative thoughts somehow produce negative outcomes, while positive thoughts realize themselves in the form of health, prosperity, and success. For both rational and mystical reasons, then, the effort of positive thinking is said to be well worth our time and attention, whether this means reading the relevant books, attending seminars and speeches that offer the appropriate mental training, or just doing the solitary work of concentration on desired outcomes — a better job, an attractive mate, world peace.
There is an anxiety, as you can see, right here in the heart of American positive thinking. If the generic "positive thought" is correct and things are really getting better, if the arc of the universe tends toward happiness and abundance, then why bother with the mental effort of positive thinking? Obviously, because we do not fully believe that things will get better on their own. The practice of positive thinking is an effort to pump up this belief in the face of much contradictory evidence. Those who set themselves up as instructors in the discipline of positive thinking — coaches, preachers, and gurus of various sorts — have described this effort with terms like "self-hypnosis," "mind control," and "thought control." In other words, it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and "negative" thoughts. The truly self-confident, or those who have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts. Positive thinking may be a quintessentially American activity, associated in our minds with both individual and national success, but it is driven by a terrible insecurity.
Americans did not start out as positive thinkers — at least the promotion of unwarranted optimism and methods to achieve it did not really find articulation and organized form until several decades after the founding of the republic. In the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers pledged to one another "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." They knew that they had no certainty of winning a war for independence and that they were taking a mortal risk. Just the act of signing the declaration made them all traitors to the crown, and treason was a crime punishable by execution. Many of them did go on to lose their lives, loved ones, and fortunes in the war. The point is, they fought anyway. There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
Systematic positive thinking began, in the nineteenth century, among a diverse and fascinating collection of philosophers, mystics, lay healers, and middle-class women. By the twentieth century, though, it had gone mainstream, gaining purchase within such powerful belief systems as nationalism and also doing its best to make itself indispensable to capitalism. We don't usually talk about American nationalism, but it is a mark of how deep it runs that we apply the word "nationalism" to Serbs, Russians, and others, while believing ourselves to possess a uniquely superior version called "patriotism." A central tenet of American nationalism has been the belief that the United States is "the greatest nation on earth" — more dynamic, democratic, and prosperous than any other nation, as well as technologically superior. Major religious leaders, especially on the Christian right, buttress this conceit with the notion that Americans are God's chosen people and that America is the designated leader of the world — an idea that seemed to find vivid reinforcement in the fall of Communism and our emergence as the world's "lone superpower." That acute British observer Godfrey Hodgson has written that the American sense of exceptionalism, which once was "idealistic and generous, if somewhat solipsistic," has become "harder, more hubristic." Paul Krugman responded to the prevailing smugness in a 1998 essay entitled "American the Boastful," warning that "if pride goeth before a fall, the United States has one heck of a come-uppance in store."
But of course it takes the effort of positive thinking to imagine that America is the "best" or the "greatest." Militarily, yes, we are the mightiest nation on earth. But on many other fronts, the American score is dismal, and was dismal even before the economic downturn that began in 2007. Our children routinely turn out to be more ignorant of basic subjects like math and geography than their counterparts in other industrialized nations. They are also more likely to die in infancy or grow up in poverty. Almost everyone acknowledges that our health care system is "broken" and our physical infrastructure crumbling. We have lost so much of our edge in science and technology that American companies have even begun to outsource their research and development efforts. Worse, some of the measures by which we do lead the world should inspire embarrassment rather than pride: We have the highest percentage of our population incarcerated, and the greatest level of inequality in wealth and income. We are plagued by gun violence and racked by personal debt.
While positive thinking has reinforced and found reinforcement in American national pride, it has also entered into a kind of symbiotic relationship with American capitalism. There is no natural, innate affinity between capitalism and positive thinking. In fact, one of the classics of sociology, Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, makes a still impressive case for capitalism's roots in the grim and punitive outlook of Calvinist Protestantism, which required people to defer gratification and resist all pleasurable temptations in favor of hard work and the accumulation of wealth.
But if early capitalism was inhospitable to positive thinking, "late" capitalism, or consumer capitalism, is far more congenial, depending as it does on the individual's hunger for more and the firm's imperative of growth. The consumer culture encourages individuals to want more — cars, larger homes, television sets, cell phones, gadgets of all kinds — and positive thinking is ready at hand to tell them they deserve more and can have it if they really want it and are willing to make the effort to get it. Meanwhile, in a competitive business world, the companies that manufacture these goods and provide the paychecks that purchase them have no alternative but to grow. If you don't steadily increase market share and profits, you risk being driven out of business or swallowed by a larger enterprise. Perpetual growth, whether of a particular company or an entire economy, is of course an absurdity, but positive thinking makes it seem possible, if not ordained.
In addition, positive thinking has made itself useful as an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy. If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure. The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must because you didn't try hard enough, didn't believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success. As the economy has brought more layoffs and financial turbulence to the middle class, the promoters of positive thinking have increasingly emphasized this negative judgment: to be disappointed, resentful, or downcast is to be a "victim" and a "whiner."
But positive thinking is not only a water carrier for the business world, excusing its excesses and masking its follies. The promotion of positive thinking has become a minor industry in its own right, producing an endless flow of books, DVDs, and other products; providing employment for tens of thousands of "life coaches," "executive coaches," and motivational speakers, as well as for the growing cadre of professional psychologists who seek to train them. No doubt the growing financial insecurity of the middle class contributes to the demand for these products and services, but I hesitate to attribute the commercial success of positive thinking to any particular economic trend or twist of the business cycle. America has historically offered space for all sorts of sects, cults, faith healers, and purveyors of snake oil, and those that are profitable, like positive thinking, tend to flourish.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, American optimism seemed to reach a manic crescendo. In his final State of Union address in 2000, Bill Clinton struck a triumphal note, proclaiming that "never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats." But compared with his successor, Clinton seemed almost morose. George W. Bush had been a cheerleader in prep school, and cheerleading — a distinctly American innovation — could be considered the athletically inclined ancestor of so much of the coaching and "motivating" that has gone into the propagation of positive thinking. He took the presidency as an opportunity to continue in that line of work, defining his job as that of inspiring confidence, dispelling doubts, and pumping up the national spirit of self-congratulation. If he repeatedly laid claim to a single adjective, it was "optimistic." On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, he told reporters he was "optimistic" about a variety of foreign policy challenges, offering as an overview, "I'm optimistic that all problems will be solved." Nor did he brook any doubts or hesitations among his close advisers. According to Bob Woodward, Condoleezza Rice failed to express some of her worries because, she said, "the president almost demanded optimism. He didn't like pessimism, hand-wringing or doubt."
Then things began to go wrong, which is not in itself unusual but was a possibility excluded by America's official belief that things are good and getting better. There was the dot-com bust that began a few months after Clinton's declaration of unprecedented prosperity in his final State of the Union address, then the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Furthermore, things began to go wrong in a way that suggested that positive thinking might not guarantee success after all, that it might in fact dim our ability to fend off real threats. In her remarkable book, Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst, sociologist Karen Cerulo recounts a number of ways that the habit of positive thinking, or what she calls optimistic bias, undermined preparedness and invited disaster. She quotes Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsch and Michael Isikoff, for example, in their conclusion that "a whole summer of missed clues, taken together, seemed to presage the terrible September of 2001."7 There had already been a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993; there were ample warnings, in the summer of 2001, about a possible attack by airplane, and flight schools reported suspicious students like the one who wanted to learn how to "fl y a plane but didn't care about landing and takeoff ." The fact that no one — the FBI, the INS, Bush, or Rice — heeded these disturbing cues was later attributed to a "failure of imagination." But actually there was plenty of imagination at work — imagining an invulnerable nation and an ever-booming economy — there was simply no ability or inclination to imagine the worst.
A similar reckless optimism pervaded the American invasion of Iraq. Warnings about possible Iraqi resistance were swept aside by leaders who promised a "cakewalk" and envisioned cheering locals greeting our troops with flowers. Likewise, Hurricane Katrina was not exactly an unanticipated disaster. In 2002, the New Orleans Times- Picayune ran a Pulitzer Prize–winning series warning that the city's levees could not protect it against the storm surge brought on by a category 4 or 5 hurricane. In 2001, Scientific American had issued a similar warning about the city's vulnerability. Even when the hurricane struck and levees broke, no alarm bells went off in Washington, and when a New Orleans FEMA official sent a panicky e-mail to FEMA director Michael Brown, alerting him to the rising number of deaths and a shortage of food in the drowning city, he was told that Brown would need an hour to eat his dinner in a Baton Rouge restaurant.9 Criminal negligence or another "failure of imagination"? The truth is that Americans had been working hard for decades to school themselves in the techniques of positive thinking, and these included the reflexive capacity for dismissing disturbing news.
The biggest "come-uppance," to use Krugman's term, has so far been the financial meltdown of 2007 and the ensuing economic crisis. By the late first decade of the twenty-first century, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, positive thinking had become ubiquitous and virtually unchallenged in American culture. It was promoted on some of the most widely watched talk shows, like Larry King Live and the Oprah Winfrey Show; it was the stuff of runaway best sellers like the 2006 book The Secret; it had been adopted as the theology of America's most successful evangelical preachers; it found a place in medicine as a potential adjuvant to the treatment of almost any disease. It had even penetrated the academy in the form of the new discipline of "positive psychology," offering courses teaching students to pump up their optimism and nurture their positive feelings. And its reach was growing global, first in the Anglophone countries and soon in the rising economies of China, South Korea, and India.
But nowhere did it find a warmer welcome than in American business, which is, of course, also global business. To the extent that positive thinking had become a business itself, business was its principal client, eagerly consuming the good news that all things are possible through an effort of mind. This was a useful message for employees, who by the turn of the twenty-first century were being required to work longer hours for fewer benefits and diminishing job security. But it was also a liberating ideology for top-level executives. What was the point in agonizing over balance sheets and tedious analyses of risks — and why bother worrying about dizzying levels of debt and exposure to potential defaults — when all good things come to those who are optimistic enough to expect them?
I do not write this in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment of any kind, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, joy. In my own vision of utopia, there is not only more comfort, and security for everyone — better jobs, health care, and so forth — there are also more parties, festivities, and opportunities for dancing in the streets. Once our basic material needs are met — in my utopia, anyway — life becomes a perpetual celebration in which everyone has a talent to contribute. But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.
Excerpted from ‘Bright-Sided,’ by Barbara Ehrenreich, by permission of the publisher, Metropolitan Books.
How the Relentless Promotion ofPositive Thinking Has Undermined America
By Barbara Ehrenreich
235 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $23
I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.” When I was a young child, my family moved to the United States from Israel, where churlishness is a point of pride. As I walked around wearing what I considered a neutral expression, strangers would often shout, “What’s the matter, honey? Smile!” as if visible cheerfulness were some kind of requirement for citizenship.
Now, in Barbara Ehrenreich’s deeply satisfying book, I finally have a moral defense for my apparent scowl. All the background noise of America — motivational speakers, positive prayer, the new Journal of Happiness Studies — these are not the markers of happy, well-adjusted psyches uncorrupted by irony, as I have always been led to believe. Instead, Ehrenreich argues convincingly that they are the symptoms of a noxious virus infecting all corners of American life that goes by the name “positive thinking.”
What started as a 19th-century response to dour Calvinism has, over the years, turned equally oppressive, Ehrenreich writes. Stacks of best sellers equate corporate success with a positive attitude. Flimsy medical research claims that cheerfulness can improve the immune system. In a growing number of American churches, confessions of poverty or distress amount to heresy. America’s can-do optimism has hardened into a suffocating culture of positivity that bears little relation to genuine hope or happiness.
Ehrenreich is the author of several excellent books about class — “Nickel and Dimed” is the best known. In this book she also reaches for a conspiratorial, top-down explanation. “Positive thinking,” she maintains, is just another way for the conservative, corporate culture to wring the most out of its workers. I don’t exactly buy this part of her argument, but the book doesn’t suffer much for the overreaching. I was so warmed by encountering a fellow crank that I forgave the agenda.
Ehrenreich’s inspiration for “Bright-Sided” came from her year of dealing with breast cancer. From her first waiting room experience in 2000 she was choking on pink ribbons and other “bits of cuteness and sentimentality” — teddy bears, goofy top-10 lists, cheesy poetry accented with pink roses. The sticky cheerfulness extended to support groups, where expressions of dread or outrage were treated as emotional blocks. “The appropriate attitude,” she quickly realized, was “upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive.” The word “victim” was taboo. Lance Armstrong was quoted as saying that “cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” while another survivor described the disease as “your connection to the divine.” As a test, Ehrenreich herself posted a message on a cancer support site under the title “Angry,” complaining about the effects of chemotherapy, “recalcitrant insurance companies” and “sappy pink ribbons.” “Suzy” wrote in to take issue with her “bad attitude” and warned that “it’s not going to help you in the least.” “Kitty” urged her to “run, not walk, to some counseling.”
The experience led her to seek out other arenas in American life where an insistence on positive thinking had taken its toll. One of the more interesting chapters concerns American business culture. Since the publication of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” in 1936, motivational speaking has become so ubiquitous that we’ve forgotten a world without it. In seminars, employees are led in mass chants that would make Chairman Mao proud: “I feel healthy, I feel happy, I feel terrific!” Corporate managers transformed from coolheaded professionals into mystical gurus and quasi celebrities “enamored of intuition, snap judgments and hunches.” Corporate America began to look like one giant ashram, with “vision quests,” “tribal storytelling” and “deep listening” all now common staples of corporate retreats.
This mystical positivity seeped into the American megachurches, as celebrity pastors became motivational speakers in robes. In one of the great untold stories of American religion, the proto-Calvinist Christian right — with its emphasis on sin and self-discipline — has lately been replaced by a stitched-together faith known as “prosperity gospel,” which holds that God wants believers to be rich. In my favorite scene of the book, Ehrenreich pays a visit to Joel and Victoria Osteen’s LakewoodChurch in Houston, now the nation’s largest church. She arrives a week after a court has dismissed charges against Victoria, accused of assaulting a flight attendant who failed to deal promptly with a stain on her first-class airplane seat on the way to Vail. One would think, Ehrenreich suggests, that the largely working-class, multiracial crowd might sympathize with the working stiff on the plane who happened to be African-American. But no, Joel is shown dabbing his eyes on the video screen, and Victoria crows about the “banner of victory over my head” as the crowd cheers.
“Where is the Christianity in all of this?” Ehrenreich asks. “Where is the demand for humility and sacrificial love for others? Where in particular is the Jesus who said, ‘If a man sue you at law and take your coat, let him have your cloak also?’ ” Ehrenreich is right, of course, in her theological critique. But she misses a chance to dig deeper. I have spent some time in prosperity churches, and as Milmon F. Harrison points out in “Righteous Riches,” his study of one such church, this brand of faith cannot be explained away as manipulation by greedy, thieving preachers. Millions of Americans — not just C.E.O.’s and megapastors but middle-class and even poor people — feel truly empowered by the notion that through the strength of their own minds alone they can change their circumstances. This may be delusional and infuriating. But it is also a kind of radical self-reliance that is deeply and unchangeably American.
Hanna Rosin is a co-editor of Slate’s women’s Web site, DoubleX, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
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