Humankind's happy misery: Review (The Silence of Animals, by John Gray)

This book develops the ideas from John Gray's 2002 book Straw Dogs, although there is no need to have read the earlier book in order to understand or appreciate this book.

In Straw Dogs, Gray set out the notion that human beings differ only from other animals in that they convince themselves that they are superior beings destined to conquer the earth and rule over all other life forms. In The Silence of Animals, he delves behind this conviction, looking at the myth of human progress that supports our false hopes for ourselves - the hope of reaching some kind of utopian salvation. A key thread in the book is the religious nature of all movements and philosophies, with humanists coming in for a particularly heavy going over - "humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in civilization is an act of faith" - and atheists being asked to ask a much bigger question of themselves than those they ask of belivers: if God does not exist, why do so many people feel a need to have a faith in one? It is this idea of faith that Gray is really interested in, and he brands humanism and atheism as "secular faiths" that take humankind as their God, with the myths of progress as their testament.

The idea that we need a faith to soothe us through the thorny discomforts of life is nothing new - Marx said in 1843 that religion is the opium of the people - but what elevates this book to another plane is that Gray dissects why human beings are so reliant on myths in order to give their lives meaning - effectively reaching a conclusion that "a life without myths is itself the stuff of myth" - and why we feel the need to give our lives meaning at all. He quotes a plethora of poets, memoirists and thinkers along the way (most commonly Wallace Stevens, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche - although strangely Albert Camus does not get a mention, despite his The Myth of Sisyphus treading ground very close to that which Gray passes over here), as he pushes toward the idea that people "find meaning in the suffering that the struggle for happiness brings", that we are "attached to nothing so much as this state of happy misery". 

From this idea he picks up Freud, asking why we need to pursue an idea of happiness - fundamentally reaching the conclusion that we do so in order to distract ourselves from our lives ("from the internal monologue that is the dubious privilege of human self-awareness") - and then asking why we cannot simply be happy to exist and experience life.

The book then moves into its final part, where Gray joins hands with Samuel Beckett to question the use of language (how it gets in the way of our simply existing and experiencing life) and J.A. Baker, whose book The Peregrine saw him attempt to understand the silent existence of a peregrine falcon. While animals appear content simply to exist, the human's problem is the constant quest to give meaning to existence - a meaning universally underpinned by the myth of progress.

Gray asks us to essentially take a step back from existence, to stop interfering with the world, to stop building false constructs within it and our minds, to "look with eyes that are not covered with a film of thought". It is thought, the one thing we think we have that makes us superior to animals, that is in fact our undoing - we think ourselves to death, or at least out of life.

Gray comes close to reaching the same conclusion in this book ("Contemplation can be understood as an activity that aims not to change the world or to understand it, but simply to let it be") as he did in Straw Dogs ("Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"), but he adds a final kicker in this book: "There is no redemption from being human. But no redemption is needed."

In the context of the book, this rings an optimistic note - that humans can reach this point of not feeling the need for redemption - but the more realistic conclusion seems to be reached 10 pages before the end: “Man, much more than baboon or wolf, is an animal formed for conflict; his life seems meaningless to him without it.” After all, we attached to nothing so much as this state of happy misery.

Review: The Middlesteins, by Jami Attenberg

As Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina: "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".

In Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins, every member of the eponymous unhappy family is unhappy in his or her own way. The book revolves around Edie, the chronically obese grandmother who simply can't stop eating. Orbiting around her are Richard, her ex-husband hunting down new love in his 60s, her son Benny, who hides from the world through his nightly spliff (much as his mother finds solace in food), her daughter-in-law Rachelle, whose life is controlled by the need to appear the perfect Jewish mother and to stay as slim as possible, and her daughter Robin, drifting between places, drifting between childhood and adulthood, unsure of who she is and where she belongs.

The book declares towards its end that life is "full of layers and nuances, coloured all shades of gray", but unfortunately for this novel those shades of gray weren't quite nuanced enough. While there is some grayness about Edie - her family might want her to lose weight, but she doesn't seem particularly interested in doing so, and shouldn't she be left free to eat herself into the grave if she wishes? - the rest of the characters and plot feel very one-dimensional. Rachelle is almost a parody of the good Jewish wife, and even Richard (probably the second main character) doesn't feel like he has much depth to him, other than half a chapter on his arrival from Ukraine and establishment of his pharmacy store (seemingly pulled from the pages of a book - The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Theethnic history of Chicago) - read for research and mentioned in the acknowledgements).

I enjoyed reading The Middlesteins, although I felt that I came away from it with very little, other than the "morals" that family is the most important thing in life, at the centre of everything, a source of sometimes unlikely bonds between two individuals with little else in common; and that people find solace from life in all sorts of things - food, drink, drugs, organising b'nai mitzvahs - and just because one person's way of dealing with life is more socially acceptable than another's, it doesn't make them a better person.

The book is a very easy and very quick read, which might make it nice to flick thorough on a commute, but the reader's eyes glide across the words in the same way that the author glides across the surface of a lot of big issues - at no point does she let you fall into the gaps between the words and the characters' actions and find the difficult meanings, the nuanced grays, hidden in between.