Status Anxiety: Reviews

Jon Garelick in the Boston Phoenix, 20 June 2004

In the late ’90s, after publishing three well-received novels, Alain de Botton began writing book-length non-fiction essays on a variety of topics. To How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, and The Art of Travel he’s now added Status Anxiety. The first of these books was a kind of breakthrough for de Botton. His work had always hovered around non-fiction anyway; his first novel, On Love, with its numbered paragraphs and graphs and diagrams, was a pastiche of the romantic novel and an academic report. How Proust Can Change Your Life was a literary appreciation disguised as a self-help book.

De Botton has found a groove with these non-fiction pastiches. Besides the graphs and diagrams, he uses black-and-white photographs, often taken by himself, and reproductions liberally drawn from art history, in a way that recalls the prose-collage combinations of art critic John Berger and novelist W.G. Sebald. Moreover, his insights float on a kind light irony that he creates by mixing a mastery of English prose sentences with lemon-twisted locutions that sound translated — like pixilated Barthes. (De Botton was born in Switzerland in 1969.) At the beginning of The Consolations of Philosophy, he interrupts a sentence about his discovery of Jacques-Louis David’s La mort de Socrates to point out that he had been looking for the museum’s cafeteria, “where I hoped to buy a glass of a certain variety of American chocolate milk of which I was at that time extremely fond.”

Rather than being a digression, such serendipity is the very stuff of de Botton’s prose. His “arguments” don’t come to any radical conclusions (“Art is good for you”?). Rather, the pleasures of his prose come from following the play of his mind, the vast erudition, the succinct paraphrases, and vivid, often lyrical physical descriptions. That glass of chocolate milk (de Botton includes a photo of a carton of Nesquik) is as important as the David, because that’s how he got there.

Status Anxiety provides yet another angle from which de Botton can criss-cross the history of Western civilization, the book neatly divided between “Causes” (Lovelessness, Expectation, Meritocracy, Snobbery, Dependence) and “Solutions” (Philosophy, Art, Politics, Religion, Bohemia). Making the case that “Our ‘ego’ or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect,” he takes in Marxism, the lives of the saints, modern advertising, and such unexpected juxtapositions as a convention of Heinz-ketchup salesmen in Chicago in 1902 and Herodotos’s account of Xerxes’s invasion of Greece in 480 BC. He also makes use of the word “loser” in a way that’s laugh-out-loud funny.

But, no surprise, it’s art where de Botton finds the ultimate transcendence. In the book’s final chapter, he addresses “Bohemia.” Beginning with a photographic parody and celebration of a common bohemian theme, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, shot by Lee Miller in 1937 that’s replete with a wry-looking Man Ray and two topless females, he goes on to discuss those whose “allegiances were to art and emotion rather than to business and material success.”

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