Photo courtesy of Alain de Botton.
Over the last decade, British author Alain de Botton has built an empire out of his cotton-candy approach to big ideas. In a fistful of hits—including Status Anxiety, The Architecture of Happiness, and The Consolations of Philosophy—as well as numerous BBC and PBS documentaries, he’s offered a clever look at Western civilization, all from the mercilessly pragmatic perspective of what helps people live more fulfilling lives. But while his style has certainly sold books—more than 5 million worldwide—it has also drawn gob-smacking levels of professional scorn. The New York Times’s Jim Holt called his work “piffle dressed up in pompous language,” feminist critic Naomi Wolf wrote that “40 pages into his newest offering I was ready to hurl it across the room,” and Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker described de Botton as “an absolute pair-of-aching-balls of a man—a slapheaded, ruby-lipped pop philosopher who's forged a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious in a series of poncey, lighter-than-air books.”
Earlier this summer, de Botton finally lashed back, writing on a reviewer’s blog: "I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.” He later apologized for the outburst, but the message was clear: de Botton, now 40, is tired of getting dumped on.
Which makes his latest literary outing all the more surprising. In August he spent a week as the first ever “writer-in-residence” at London’s Heathrow Airport, where British authorities paid him to tap away at a desk and make art out of the humdrum bustle of the world’s busiest international hub. Not surprisingly, critics pounced. But last week de Botton faced a still pricklier audience: air travelers. In a cross between performance art and self-abuse, he read excerpts from his new book A Week at the Airport over the loudspeakers at Heathrow, a move that pitted him against security announcements, gate-change calls, and thousands of shuffling feet. So why do it? De Botton explained his thinking to Pop Vox.
Why read your work in an airport?
The fun of it is to interrupt the normal noise of the airport, to interrupt the anonymity of the terminal, and for a brief moment bring a touch of humanity to it. I think it’s fun because it’s doing something that all artists probably crave at one point or another: it’s getting out of the narrow artistic ghetto in which they tend to operate and speaking to a wider audience. And you can’t really get a wider audience than in an airport terminal. The very incongruity was kind of exciting to me.
But how was the actual experience?
Very odd. The room in which I read has a bank of television screens [showing security-camera footage] where you can actually see what people are doing all over the airport, and when I started reading I could notice people look up and start to look around for where this voice was coming from. So it was rather bewildering to see this bank of 25 screens and be reading at the same time.
Air travelers aren’t exactly known as patient people who are begging for art. Weren’t you worried about being ignored or flogged?
Well I was protected in the sense that people didn’t know where the voice was coming from. I think if I had been in public I would have been a bit more worried.
Early this year you addressed a still less-receptive audience when you hit back at a reviewer. Only this wasn’t exactly your first bad review. Why did you snap when you did?
Good question. Some of the reasons have nothing to do with the review, and have more to do with exhaustion. I think because it seemed so willfully to misunderstand what I was trying to do. There are many reviews that say "I don’t like this book" or "I don’t like his style" or whatever, and that’s fine. It doesn’t get a response from me. But when you feel that someone is almost going out of their way to get the wrong end of the stick, that is upsetting. I should quickly add that the only plausible response to a bad review is a Buddhist one, and one must never reply to anything. [In the case you mention,] I replied in what I thought was a semiprivate forum that was quickly broadcast to the world.
Your reviews seem to have had a particularly mean-spirited and personal quality to them. Why do you think that is? Why do you think critics make such sport of your work?
I’m an ambitious writer in the sense that I deliberately set out to speak on big topics—what is love, what is death, what is it to be human—and that ambition can really annoy some people. If you stick your head above the parapet, you’re going to get hit more than if you hunker down below. If I had written books on archeology in the 18th century, no one would particularly feel that they have something invested and need to react. So I think it has something to do with the topics I address and the inclusiveness I aim for, which can then be very strongly rejected.
You have books that address love, travel, work, art, status anxiety, philosophy—aren’t you at risk of running out of aspects of human experience? I mean, what’s next?
I am working on something, but it’s unfortunately still at a semisecret or private stage. It is, for better or worse, a large topic.
