THE SELF-HELP COMPULSION

Blum (English/Harvard Univ.) argues that a literary perspective offers crucial insight into the ongoing appeal and evolution of modern advice books.

In this erudite volume, the author suggests that “self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.” The genre has operated “as an alternative pedagogic space to the academy—one whose breezy, instrumental reading methods contrasted with the close, disinterested paradigms” of the university setting. Self-help has a long history—as Blum notes, “what is…Ovid’s Ars Amatoria but an ancient Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus?”—and it offers a reminder of the promises of transformation, agency, culture, and wisdom that draw readers to books. Moreover, there is the issue of self-help’s “overlooked embroilment in speculation, imagination, the fantastical, and counterfactual.” In exploring both the history of self-help books and their continued rampant popularity, Blum often wades through thickets of academese—“the self-help hermeneutic binds in unexpected ways a nonsynchronous, cross-cultural community of practical readers”—to get to a point. But the points are well taken. Self-help books have a history of being promoted as antidotes to intellectual bombast and aesthetic idealism, whereas serious literature has railed against instrumental pedantry. However, that doesn’t have to be the case. Indeed, self-help can display emancipatory potential and tap “a progressive, even radical, agenda.” Blum offers close analyses of selected works of a wide variety of authors—including Flann O’Brien, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf—to discover “the troubling affinities between charismatic literary authorship and the spiritual manipulation of popular guides.” She uncovers the influence of early self-help on the literature of James Joyce—the modernist critique of instrumentalism is a thread through the book—finds interesting parallels in the work of Samuel Beckett and Timothy Ferriss, and examines how modern fictional works use “self-help as an opportunity to modernize a potentially maudlin textual ethics.”

A deep scholarly probe into self-help’s inextricable influence on the history and future of literature.