In the summer of 2020, I was reading in a laundromat in Pomona, California, when a fellow patron raised her voice above the whirr and clink of the dryer to ask a surprising question: “Is it helping you?” I glanced up, and she gestured at the book in my hands, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh’s darkly comic novel about a college grad who tries to sleep for a whole year to avoid the pain of grief and loss. I realized the woman had guessed from the title that I was reading self-help. “Too early to tell,” I said, smiling, trying to be convivial, though in truth I hoped for a swift return to reader-friendly silence. We had a brief exchange touching on mindfulness, CBD oil, and the day’s pandemic numbers. She asked if I had ever considered psychedelic therapy; I answered in the negative. When her tossing garments fell still, she didn’t bother to fold them. She just carted them out like a lover’s corpse and heaved them into the trunk of her car. I was glad to be alone again, but her question lingered in the air. The novels I was reading—were they helping me? I had no idea.

It occurred to me that I should have an answer to the question. After ten years as a corporate hack, ghostwriting for business schools, startups, and other clients, I had finally resigned myself to the fate of the English major and accepted a job teaching literature at a private school in Claremont. My first year was a difficult one. My closest teaching partner, a man in his fifties, died of cancer. A brilliant student dropped out for mental-health reasons. Then, in March, Covid struck, and we all retreated to our solitary realms of remote learning: online classes, Zoom reading groups, YouTube lectures, podcasts, Substacks. Reading, the school counselor said in her cheerful weekly email, was a tool in our wellness toolbox. 

Is that why I was reading Moshfegh, for wellness? My Year of Rest and Relaxation, for all its spleen, is a beautiful book, a novel with exquisite prose and sly but genuine pathos. The two friends at the heart of the story are pushed to absurd extremes as they navigate an empty, decadent, pharmaceutical culture, but the ending is surprisingly and thrillingly redemptive. I never spoke to anyone about my reading experience, which is typical of my approach. If I’m not teaching a novel, I will tend not to interpret it. “In place of hermeneutics,” Susan Sontag writes in her famous essay “Against Interpretation,” “we need an erotics of art.” I agree.

My understanding has always been that people fall in love with books and only become professors or critics in order to spend more time with them. In college, I felt closest to the scholars who shared this basically affective view of literature: Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty. These teachers treated literature as a higher form of therapy: a training ground for emotions, a study in human virtue. I recall being perhaps inappropriately moved by Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love,” a commentary on King Lear that helped me think differently about my own relationships. Ditto Murdoch’s “Against Dryness,” in which she argues that novels help us countenance reality and reject “consolation.” Adam Phillips, the writer and psychoanalyst, was helpful, too, first because he expressed himself in a literary register, and also because he was friendly toward the human imagination—a legacy of his intellectual forebear Donald Winnicott, who claimed that art was a site of healing, a place where one prepares, as Olivia Laing puts it in her book The Lonely City, for “the dangerous, lovely business of intimacy.” It’s a nice idea. And it resonates with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy (that it purifies the soul) as much as Freud’s idea of transference (that all of our relationships are at least in part fantastical). 

Fiction has power, in other words, because, for better or worse, we are all each other’s surrogates and will therefore find compelling archetypes in vivid characters. In a more expansive mood, I might even claim, as Marilynne Robinson does in “Imagination & Community,” that fiction exercises our capacity to love, or that novels contribute to social hope (as Richard Rorty puts it, in a more secular register) or that characters are important sites of readerly compassion, as Zadie Smith argues in her own recent defense of the genre, “Fascinated to Presume.” Maybe it’s grandiose to suggest that what I was really doing in that laundromat in Pomona was attuning myself emotionally to the democratic ideal. But it’s also not impossible.

My English major was useless, of course. After college, I went to work and learned that nobody reads Iris Murdoch anymore. Instead, they all read self-help and gauzy genre fiction. I worked with intelligent people. They were consultants, psychologists, engineers, economists, and policy wonks. They spoke fondly of charismatic humanities professors, and they often watched videos from The School of Life or other sources of lifelong learning. Wellness apps and podcasts were more popular than novels. One had to be a sport about this cultural defeat, but the odor of cliché was at times overpowering. A book my colleagues couldn’t seem to stop recommending to me was Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, which promised “modern truth” and “ancient wisdom.” Happiness was big in the aughts and early 2010s; the positive psychology movement had learned how to market the work of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Martin Seligman. Harvard and Yale both hired happiness professors. In 2011, happiness was a topic of discussion at the UN General Assembly, and in 2012, the first World Happiness Report came out. 

The problem with books like Haidt’s, at least from my point of view, is that they were almost always addressed not to Aristotle’s suffering crowds or Winnicott’s social organisms or Rorty’s hopeful citizens or Robinson’s noble souls but to optimizing meritocrats angling for leverage. In early press interviews, Haidt recommended Benjamin Franklin’s self-improvement regime, which I took to be a bad sign, for I had come to think of myself as a budding Emersonian. My colleagues, of course, were Franklinites, even the ones who had taken Interpersonal Dynamics, the “touchy-feely” class offered at Stanford and other business schools. Their reasons for wanting to cultivate emotional intelligence had little to do with virtue or love; the point was simply to outperform one’s peers in the boardroom. This atomizing tendency manifests today in a certain brand of Stoicism—what the scholar Beth Blum calls “apathy prestige.” (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is one example.) Critic and essayist Becca Rothfeld and historian Madeleine Baker have been pushing back in recent years against that phenomenon, which they trace to the founding of New Thought, a nineteenth-century spiritual movement advocating “mind cures.” In All Things Are Too Small, Rothfeld’s book of essays, she argues against the alienating effects of corporate mindfulness, recommends long jogs and even longer novels (especially Mating by Norman Rush), and suggests that William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, may have been too tolerant of New Thought charlatans at the turn of the twentieth century: “Perhaps because my soul is sick, I cannot share James’s sanguinity about mind cure.”

I understand where she’s coming from. I, too, am a jogger and a fan of Norman Rush. However, there have been times in my life—especially in my twenties—when I would have accepted the first plausible mind cure anyone offered me. Hydrotherapy, hypnotherapy, mindfulness, minimalism, a full transfusion of consciousness. Surprisingly, what helped most was reading James’s compassionate taxonomy of the suffering of other people’s minds. Varieties is, among other things, a thoroughly humane book. In James, as Patricia Lockwood says, “the wound of experience is presented, open.” She calls his curiosity a “lively and solemn gift.” Phillips, too, finds much to admire in William James. In his new book, The Life You Want (the title flirts with self-help enough to boost sales), he expresses admiration for the professor’s receptivity and anti-essentialism, principles that inform his own analytic practice. But Rothfeld isn’t wrong to question James’s credulousness.

Henry, his brother, teased the famous pragmatist for being a little too solutions-oriented. It makes sense—novelists tend to refuse easy solutions. As it turns out, their correspondence represents a fault line between literature and self-help. Henry, the novelist, excavated the infinitely subtle and contradictory life of his characters with devastating irony. William, the psychologist, explored the same inner terrain with ecumenical earnestness, suspending judgment of all attempts to ease human suffering—even the ones that carried a whiff of intellectual fraudulence. It’s why Elizabeth Hardwick called him “a sort of Californian.”

This tension between literature and self-help carried on into the twentieth century, as Blum describes in her book The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature. Readers in 1925 who weren’t prepared for the modernist techniques of Mrs. Dalloway or Franz Kafka’s The Trial could instead pick up Abraham Myerson’s study of anhedonia, When Life Loses Its Zest, which was published the same year. (As a sort of Californian myself, I probably would have tried all three.) Samuel Beckett and Katherine Mansfield both sought treatment for creative insecurities, Beckett with the analyst-turned-mystic Wilfred Bion (himself a Californian after 1968), Mansfield with Émile Coué, a French hypnotist popular for his autosuggestion method. Arnold Bennett, the prolific British novelist who wrote between the 1890s and 1930s, published a handful of best-selling self-help books during his time: Literary Taste: How to Form It (1909), Mental Efficiency (1911), and How to Make the Best of Life (1923). Virginia Woolf despised those books and mocked Bennett repeatedly in her diaries, letters, and essays. As a partisan of the novel, I’m officially on Team Woolf, though I do pause to remember that when life lost its zest for her, she walked into the nearest river.

I didn’t tell my students this when we read Mrs. Dalloway upon our return to campus, but they found out pretty quickly (“Bro, she put rocks in her pockets?”). I wanted them to focus on the ecstasy and joy in the book as much as the mental suffering of its traumatized characters, who, like us, had recently emerged from a global pandemic. And they did. Most of them read the book; a few of them even enjoyed it. But the scene that baffled all of them was the one in which the narrator rants against “Proportion,” a “divine goddess” worshipped by the callous, inept psychiatrist who treats Septimus Smith. I tried to explain that Woolf was likely satirizing what she viewed as a patriarchal, domineering, pseudoscientific field obsessed with order and blind to the poetry of human consciousness. 

But my students were used to hearing about their wellness toolbox. “Proportion” sounded normal to them, like “balance” or “equilibrium.” They didn’t understand why Woolf was so antagonistic to the whole idea of therapy. When they “searched it up” online, they discovered that Woolf had only ever really been offered the “rest cure” to assuage her depression. She knew and even published Freud but remained rather skeptical of psychoanalysis. I had to tread carefully. On the one hand, one must not defend the stubbornness of a suicide to seventeen-year-olds. On the other hand, given our culture is rife with labels, personality tests, and new syndromes, I hoped that students would pause to acknowledge the value of Woolf’s resistance to those limiting abstractions. I hoped that they would appreciate her devotion to experience, to the overwhelming swarm of life, what Wittgenstein, in his later work, called the “hurly burly.” I actually spoke this phrase aloud. The students teased me mercilessly. “Sorry I’m late,” one of them said the following week. “Hurly burly.”

It’s hard to keep up with all the overlapping crises. There’s the crisis of democracy, and the mental-health crisis, and the crisis of the humanities, and the death of the English major, and the spread of AI tools through the education system and the publishing industry. My sense is that these crises have an element in common: the refusal of experience. Ideology is one way to refuse it. Social-media use is another. (Haidt, to his credit, calls Instagram an “experience blocker.”) Formulaic self-help and fantasy might qualify, too, since those books fail to engage the moral imagination, relying instead on stereotypes and clichés to build a fan base. One has to be suspicious when a genre attracts pundits. David and Arthur Brooks are both riding the self-help gravy train, and Ross Douthat is serializing a fantasy novel on Substack. None of them seems to have read much literary fiction. Ditto our tech overlords, whose lists of favorites always include the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, both of which they misread fairly catastrophically.

Can literary fiction solve the polycrisis? Probably not. But it might not be a bad idea to preserve its place in the culture, even at the risk of sounding cringe or lame or snobbish. In my own feral reading life before I became a teacher, I was interested in the novel’s therapeutic and civic potential, as I know many others were. Jon Baskin wrote a whole book about David Foster Wallace’s “therapeutic fiction,” including The Pale King, a novel that shows the spiritual complexity of boredom and the quest for immersive experience (it’s a story about the IRS). Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? raised similar questions in the context of an artist’s life. And Elif Batuman’s The Idiot crackles with the exasperation its young, brilliant narrator feels toward the chasm between her literary study and her sad, messy life. “There was no way the professor was going to tell me anything useful,” declares Selin, a Harvard freshman. She reads Bleak House and Against Nature; she attends a lecture on Bergson. Her mother, more down to earth, speaks for the self-help reader when she explains that Anna Karenina is about how there are two kinds of men. Clear advice and moral instruction are weirdly hard to come by. The most practical knowledge Selin gains in her first year of school is that smoking a cigarette stops the crying.

The comedy of self-improvement has fueled the novel ever since the origins of the genre, whether one traces it back to Don Quixote or Confessions. George Eliot’s characters are always seeking virtue in their hearts and in their communities. Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet follow amateur scientists who embark on absurd but ultimately moving quests for how to live. “Who does science belong to?” these novels seem to ask. “Who, if not the Church, will be the authority to guide our lives?” I read these books in 2015, at the height of the so-called “replication crisis” in social science, and I can’t help but think of Bouvard and Pécuchet as podcast bros “doing their own research.” Their experiments in gardening, husbandry, chemistry, and spiritualism are silly and disastrous. (At one point, they use the gastric juice of a duck to “produce digestion artificially.”) If the novel had been written today, its wayward bourgeois characters might have tried shakes and supplements, like the narrator of Jordan Castro’s recent novel Muscle Man, a disillusioned English professor who copes with the absurdities of the modern university (“People wanted clear-cut moral lines, like cocaine on a mirror”) through a strict regime of powerlifting.

Given how obnoxiously reductive self-help can be, it’s tempting for the discerning reader to mock the whole industry and even, at times, the impulse. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, published in 1966, Philip Rieff does so on behalf of moral order. Douthat, drawing on Rieff, bemoans what he calls the “Oprahfication” of Christianity. In Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy, addressing himself to the “post-religious technological society” of 1983, satirizes the genre with deranged glee; each chapter ends with a silly quiz or thought experiment. 

But the industry is one thing, and the impulse is another. A management consultant once told me she was reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Why not read Proust himself? Because that would be an experience, and what my colleague wanted was a few key takeaways. I, too, have browsed the shelves in search of key takeaways. Last year, when my daughter was born, I did so rather desperately. Yet the books that meant the most to me were still novels and memoirs: Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature; Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors; and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a story of early motherhood that quotes Proust and Edith Wharton between descriptions of sleep training and horrifying play dates. This memoir taught me nothing, but I highly recommended it. There was something about the experience.

In May, during an audience at the Vatican, Pope Leo connected the practice of serious reading to the “culture of encounter.” I find this phrase useful for explaining what I value about the transfer of consciousness between an author and a reader or the deep sense of compassion one can feel for a fictional character. The problem with self-help is that in offering solutions, diagnoses, boundaries, and methods, it protects suffering readers from a genuine encounter. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn calls that tendency in therapeutic culture “gnostic escapism.” In Ars Vitae, a book that attempts to wrest philosophy back from the corporate festival crowd and YouTube intellectuals, she makes a persuasive argument against that ancient heresy, which claims to offer access to a secret knowledge beyond the “hurly burly” of human experience. Gnosticism, or “knowingness” (the red pill, the life hack, the silver-bullet insight) “destroys revelation, and revelation is the necessary ingredient to transform the constitution of a self to a soul.” For Lasch-Quinn, the antidote is Neoplatonism. In particular, the work of Plotinus, who accused the Gnostics of arrogantly treating life as a puzzle they could solve instead of the mystery it is. The same accusation could be leveled against the authors of many popular psychology books.

Can a novel really offer the kind of revelation that transforms a self into a soul? A version of this question came up recently on an episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy. At the end of a conversation about religion and politics, cohost Sam Adler-Bell admits that he would be worried “to a theological degree” about the humanity of someone who’s incapable of reading a novel. Half in jest, his cohost Matt Sitman recommends the Bible. “Well, let’s start with Tolstoy,” answers Sam (Matt is a practicing Catholic and a former editor at Commonweal; Sam is a secular Mets fan with a serious interest in Freud). The episode ends with a quote from Marilynne Robinson, a shared touchstone. What occurred to me in the moment (I was jogging on the treadmill) was that Robinson, in her latest book, Reading Genesis, invites us to consider the fact that Tolstoy and the Bible offer similar spiritual benefits. 

The Old Testament, in Robinson’s view, is a kind of realist novel featuring complex characters, high stakes, a narrative arc, comedic tension, and carefully chosen imagery. “The remarkable realism,” she writes, “is a product of the interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature.” Of course, there are genre elements—trickster tales, flood narratives, threats of human sacrifice—but ultimately, the Bible has a deep concern for the psychological nuances of life. In this sense, it achieves a higher literary quality than the tales and myths from which it emerged, just as Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, turned tabloid gossip into art through the force of his authorial attention, or as Dostoevsky used the popular structure of a trial in The Brothers Karamazov. Whereas self-help offers insight and fantasy offers what Iris Murdoch calls “consolation,” a good novel requires us to transcend our atomized, alienated condition and allows us to perceive the world precisely and humanely. It also helps us pass the time between loads of laundry.

Encouragingly, the self-help crowd, including the happiness warriors, are suggesting that we ditch our phones and pick up books instead. Haidt, in particular, has identified the loss of immersive reading as a problem as severe as teen depression. But Haidt is a social psychologist employed by a major business school. As much as I support his recent antitech crusade on behalf of young people, I would not want to entrust him with the power of recommending which books they should read when they turn off their devices. I imagine the list would include more formulaic guides to life than challenging modernist novels. I imagine they would be the kind of books that only help the self.