Mr. Brooks's miracle elixir.

• Author: Gray, John
• Position: The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement - Book review

David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York: Random House, 2011), 448 pp., $27.00.

David Brooks is not the first contributor to the airport book stand to whom our leaders have turned for enlightenment and instruction. In the search for insight on the issues of the day, the politicians who are meant to be guiding us toward a better world have nudged, blinked, pirouetted on tipping points and anxiously pondered the wisdom of crowds. Yet none of these brightly packaged manuals has proved to have the practical usefulness that was promised. But not to worry, those who govern us are invincible positive thinkers who will never give up the hope of finding someone who will tell them how to conjure away all our problems. The political appeal of Brooks's book The Social Animal has been nowhere more pronounced than in Britain, where the youthful David Cameron leads a rebranded Conservative Party in a coalition government. Having instructed all members of his cabinet to read this best seller, Cameron then sought the author's counsel when Brooks was promoting the book in the UK. A seminar at 10 Downing Street was duly arranged and the prime minister's media advisers seem to have been much impressed by Brooks's performance. Not to be left on the sidelines, the Labour opposition leader, Ed Miliband, also met the writer. What is it about the New York Times columnist's book that gives it such an irresistible appeal to politicians?

"This is the happiest story you've ever read. It's about two people who led wonderfully fulfilling lives. They had engrossing careers, earned the respect of their friends, and made important contributions to their neighborhood, their country, and their world." These first lines go a long way toward explaining why Brooks's book litters the desks and bedside tables of elected officials.

For what Brooks is attempting to sell the world is his brand of positive thinking, a vision of the power of the individual as an emotional being with the capacity to lead the ,good life," all the while bettering himself and those around him by empowering his mind with the definitive knowledge of what it means to be "moral." Presented in the form of a life history of two fictional characters, Erica and Harold, it ends with Harold's death and a capsule version of Brooks's message. Harold reaches the end of his life on earth satisfied that he "had achieved an important thing in his life. He had constructed a viewpoint. Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls." Despite its pretensions to realism, Brooks's account of Harold and Erica's journey is a morality tale of the most transparent--and unconvincing--kind.

So we see the attraction of Brooks's fable to politicians in the face of overwhelming difficulties and Brooks's promise that all will be well if they place the burden of responsibility on the individual and small communities. Our rulers are noted for their adamant protestations of unconquerable hope; but the precise content of that hope is nebulous, if not wholly indeterminate. It is not hard to discern that those who govern us--along with sizable sections of those they govern--are actually becoming just a little desperate. A fable of happiness is never more appealing than in circumstances such as these, when the future seems to have become dauntingly problematic, and from one point of view The Social Animal can be seen as an early-twenty-first-century version of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life--a tale in which a decent, ordinary guy ends up happily reconciled to the world. One difference between Capra's film and Brooks's book is that the hero of the movie is saved from disaster by a miracle--it is supernatural intervention, not his own sterling qualities, that allows the central protagonist (magnificently played by James Stewart) to prevent his savings-and-loan company from going under. The charm of Capra's film comes from the fact that it is a fairy tale in which the fatal chain of events is broken and shattered lives are made whole again by magic. In Brooks's novelettish study in pop psychology, by contrast, there is nothing that can remotely be seen as miraculous. The two central characters spend their lives striving for a remarkably insipid version of self-realization, which despite setbacks--such as a spot of infidelity by Erica, which she soon regrets--they succeed in achieving. "Harold and his friends were not rebels," Brooks writes. "By and large, they still wanted a stable marriage, two kids, a house in the suburbs, and a secure income." The trouble with this vision of the good life is not only that it is beyond the reach of growing numbers of people. It is also a vision that many of his readers will not share. Where are the millions of happy singletons and gays and cheerful individualists in Brooks's "happiest story"? It is in fact an unrelentingly banal tale, lacking not only the charm of Capra's narrative but also the compelling interest and unexpectedness of ordinary human life.

When Capra's film was released in...