Book review: Smile or Die

Published on Sunday 3 January 2010 10:55

SMILE OR DIE Barbara Ehrenreich Granta, £10.99

WHEN Barbara Ehrenreich became a breast cancer patient, she found herself infuriated by the disease's upbeat, infantilising 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.

That is appropriate, as flinging the vituperative barb is a speciality for this writer, whose book titles include The Snarling Citizen, and The Mean Season (as well as the snappier, better-known Bait And Switch and Nickel And Dimed). Here she makes a frontal assault on the institutionalised American version of good cheer to wipe that dopey smile off the happy-face symbol that pervades American culture.

Ehrenreich's message is in the book's subtitle, "How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World", 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 is exposed.

Her argument has the makings of a tight, incisive essay. But it is also padded with cheap shots, easy examples, research recycled from her earlier books and caustic reportorial stalking. 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 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.

Smile Or Die begins with Ehrenreich's highly humanising 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? Smile Or Die 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, 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.

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, and 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 her search for egregious silliness, she also unearths an academic (an old Ehrenreich target who goes to great lengths to dodge her), Martin EP Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association, whose book Authentic Happiness is tailor-made for her purposes. She finds 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. 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 humour than enlightenment. And it paves the way for saying that positive psychology has become a money-making 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.

&#149 This article first appeared in Scotland on Sunday on 3 January, 2010