Review of Montebello by Robert Drewe (The Weekend Australian, December 2012)

Robert Drewe, Montebello: A Memoir
Hamish Hamilton; $29.99; 291pp

On 3 October 1952, Great Britain detonated its first atomic bomb in an old navy frigate, the HMS Plym, anchored in the Montebello Islands off the north-west coast of Australia. Four years later, in 1956, it detonated two more bombs in the Montebello archipelago, fallout from which spread from Western Australia to Queensland’s inland and coastal towns and out over the Pacific as far as Fiji. (Apparently, the scientists who designed the test hadn’t taken account of WA’s strong westerlies.)

The tests were hailed as a scientific success, though for the young Robert Drewe, who was nine years old at the time of the 1952 explosion, they became a source of wonder and dread. Such, indeed, is his fascination with the Montebello archipelago that in 2010 he joined an expedition to survey the fauna living there, the islands having recently become a nature reserve for species threatened by a gas mining project on Barrow Island some twenty kilometres to the south. Montebello is an account of that expedition and an exploration of the various issues – personal and public – to which it forms the backdrop.

Like Drewe’s award-winning memoir The Shark Net (2000), which yoked together family history with an account of a series of brutal murders in Perth’s coastal suburbs in the 1960s, Montebello is a beautifully crafted book. Billed as a memoir, it switches effortlessly between travel literature, reportage, local history, nature writing and film and literature criticism. Its aim is to give the reader a sense not only of the author’s formative influences but also of the natural and man-made events – from shark attacks to the mining boom – to have left their mark on the Western Australian psyche (and of two events – the nuclear tests – which have left less of a mark than they might have done).

Drewe’s method is associative. Thus the boat trip out to the islands sparks a memory of sailing from Melbourne to Perth (in 1949, when Drewe was six), which leads in turn to a memory of the author’s early life in Victoria. Only once does this approach seem forced, in a chapter dealing with the author’s experiences teaching creative writing in a British gaol, the pretext for which is the observation that islands often serve as prisons, and the slightly lame conclusion of which is that all prisons are in one sense islands. Otherwise, it works exceptionally well. The multilayered narrative develops quite naturally, and the recounted experiences are invariably vivid. Moreover, Drewe is a fine judge of tone. Even the most distressing chapters – those dealing, for example, with the death of Drewe’s mother – never descend into ‘misery memoir’, and the book as a whole is given emotional buoyancy by the author’s masterly deployment of bathos. The physical and psychical ramifications of an incident involving a wartime gasmask and the author’s still-developing scrotum are one source of (rather queasy) humour.

As the book progresses, the author’s memories assert themselves more forcefully and the expedition fades into the background. And yet the ‘desert island turned Ark’ persists – an obstinate metaphor for rejuvenation of which Drewe, who when he sets sail for the islands is trying to build a relationship in the wake of three failed marriages, refuses to make too much. Indeed, one of the joys of Montebello is the spectacle of its sixty-nine-year-old author attempting to keep his literary weight down in the face of a cornucopia of ripe analogy and delicious coincidence. The opening chapter is a case in point. Holidaying with his youngest daughter in Broken Head, New South Wales, the author’s familial anxieties are figured not only by the monsoonal weather (‘Storm-blown bougainvillea petals were streaming down the windows like gouts of blood’) but also by the presence of a (suspected) brown snake with an obvious flare for melodrama:

The snake is nosing into the doll-house’s second floor. Its coils are tipping over tiny tables and chairs and cupboards and people: little plastic mummies and daddies and children. This is overdoing the imagery. It’s like a Pedro Almodovar film about marriage breakdown.

The second Montebello test was codenamed Operation Mosaic, and it must have occurred to Drewe at some stage to title this dazzling memoir thus. Creating as it does a complex picture out of discrete though related narrative chunks, and dealing as it does with various kinds of physical and emotional fallout, Montebello is a fragmentary book but a perfectly integrated work of art. Drewe’s literary instincts are as impeccable as his ear for the English language is unfaltering, and his latest memoir has all the more force for being set down with such a delicate hand.

Best Australian Poems 2012

I'm delighted to report that I have a poem in this year's Best Australian Poems anthology, edited by John Tranter. It's entitled 'Three Apples' and can be viewed here (scroll down a bit).

And here's another (short) poem:

Oceanid

The girl is carried backwards by a wave,
set down. The sea’s webbed hands caress
her torso, lift, envelop, lave.
She wears the Indian Ocean like a dress.

Meditations of a curious polymath (The Weeekend Australian, October 2008)

Nicholson Baker, The Way the World Works: Essays
Simon and Schuster; $29.99; 317pp

‘I want to write a short book called The Way the World Works’, writes Nicholson Baker in a self-reflexive addendum to a short book called The Way the World Works, a collection of essays spanning fifteen years and containing such miscellaneous pieces as an apologia for pacifism, a tribute to the late John Updike, and a review of the ‘first-person shooter’ video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This book, says Baker, will be for ‘children and adults’ and will explain everything about ‘history, beauty, wickedness, invention, the meaning of life’. Needless to say, the actual book falls some distance short of that ambition, though as a showcase for the various obsessions to which the ambition gives rise it is excellent.

For Baker is nothing if not obsessive. In his fiction and non-fiction alike, he indulges his enthusiasms to the point of fetishism, and in novels such as Vox, The Fermata and (his latest) House of Holes indulges his fetishism to the point of exhaustion. This intermittent monomania coexists with a breathtaking range of interests. (In a profile of its current editor, David Remnick, he suggests that The New Yorker ‘is one of the three great contributions the United States has made to world civilisation’, the others being – ‘of course’ – Some Like It Hot and the iPhone.) Catholicity and meticulousness combined, Baker is a one-man Wikipedia.

Above all, and as his title suggests, he wants to find out how things work. Thus, in one of the personal essays included at the front of the book, we discover young Nicholson poring over the pocket score of Debussy’s La Mer, ‘to figure out how Debussy did it … How did he turn an orchestra, a prickly ball of horsehair and old machinery, into something that splashed and surged, lost its balance and regained it?’ Elsewhere, he tries to get to grips (and help to shape) Wikipedia itself, entering a series of esoteric frays over articles recommended for deletion (Baker is an ‘inclusionist’) and fiddling with a range of other articles besides. (‘After bovine hormones, I tinkered a little with the plot summary of the article on Sleepless in Seattle, while watching the movie. A little later I made some adjustments to the intro on hydraulic fluid …’) His enthusiasm for the process is infectious, and affecting. Wikipedia, he writes, was ‘an effort to build something that made sense apart from one’s own opinion, something that helped the whole human cause roll forward.’ It flourishes because it is ‘a shrine to altruism’.

Another reason Baker loves Wikipedia is that it combines new information technology with scholarship from older sources, fragments of which persist within it ‘like those stony bits of classical buildings incorporated in a medieval wall’. An enthusiast for fresh technology, Baker is nevertheless a champion of traditional libraries and archives as well, and a tenacious critic of the way in which libraries have set about reducing their stocks in the rush towards microfilming and digitisation. One of the best pieces in The Way the World Works, ‘Truckin’ for the Future’, is on precisely this topic, while others celebrate old newspapers (of which Baker now has his own archive), papermaking and longhand transcription. There is also an idiosyncratic meditation on direct and indirect thought reportage – on the advantages of old-style thought-as-speech (‘“I just don’t know any more,” he thought’) as against the more modern paraphrase method (‘He was no longer entirely confident that he knew’). Even here the experimental novelist cannot suppress his inner traditionalist, urging us not to ‘utterly rule out the blameless embrasure of those curlies’.

Baker’s own skill with the written word is spectacularly on show throughout these essays, which are peppered with passages of brilliant description. The most mundane experiences – unfolding a newspaper, inserting an earplug, ‘slow dancing’ a filing cabinet into place – can illicit strophes of rare beauty. Here, for example, is Baker’s description of a sewing machine in action:

When you floored the Singer’s pedal, the down-darting lever in the side of the machine rose and fell so fast that it became two ghost levers, one at the top of its transit and one at the bottom, and the yanked spool on top responded by hopping and twirling on its spindle, flinging its close-spiralled life away.

‘Poetry is prose in slow motion’, says the narrator in The Anthologist, Baker’s 2009 novel. I’m not sure that’s true, but passages such as these lend more than a dollop of credence to the position. Certainly, Baker’s descriptive prose has much in common with poetry, arresting the moment and throwing the reader into a new relationship with the world – pressing ‘refresh’, as it were, on reality.

‘Curiosity is a way of ordering and indeed paring down the wildness of the world’ writes Baker in his final essay. A testament to his curiosity, his simple euphoria upon finding things out, and his ability to communicate his findings to the reader, The Way the World Works is a marvellous book.

Cheer up, it may happen (The Weekend Australian, September 2008)

Oliver Burkeman
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
Text Publishing; $32.99; 236pp

Charles Saatchi
Be the Worst You Can Be: Life’s Too Long for Patience and Virtue
Booth-Clibborn Editions; £9.99; 159pp

The self-help genre has always had its critics. Even in 1983, before the craze for self-improvement had really got going, Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos was taking aim at its habits of mind. Then, in 1998, we got Christopher Buckley’s God is My Broker, which delineates the ‘7½ Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth’. (Conclusion: ‘The only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one.’) More recently, we’ve had attacks on positive thinking from Barbara Ehrenreich (Smile or Die), Pascal Bruckner (Perpetual Euphoria) and Susan Cain (Quiet), while the 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine features a motivational speaker whose exhortations to self-belief are spectacularly undercut by his own lack of success. If the grinning guru with the headset microphone is one of the cultural emperors of our age, there seems to be no shortage of voices happy to declare him in the altogether.

So numerous are these voices, indeed, that one could be forgiven for asking whether we need yet another tome cocking a snook at the happiness hucksters. But Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote is something very interesting: a book that argues that the self-help industry is not only ineffective but also counterproductive, and that happiness is more likely to arrive through adopting the very attitudes on which its purveyors train their guns. It’s an elegant thesis, all the more impressive for the fact that it doesn’t eschew the goal of increased wellbeing so beloved of the self-helpers.

The malaise to which this thesis is ‘the antidote’ is the ‘happiness industry’ that in the US alone is estimated to be worth over two billion dollars. Burkeman, who writes about psychology for The Guardian, argues from sound scientific principles that the solutions peddled by the ‘evangelists of optimism’ are not just vacuous but self-defeating, that ‘the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable’. What Burkeman calls ‘the white bear challenge’ – try not to think of a white bear for a minute (you will think of little else, of course) – is, in this sense, paradigmatic; remarkably, experimental subjects who are told of an unhappy event and instructed not to feel unhappy about it end up feeling more unhappy than people who are told of the same event but given no instructions on how to feel. Like a Chinese finger trap, Burkeman suggests, unhappiness only tightens its grip when we try to pull ourselves out of it.

But his is not a counsel of despair. In place of what he calls the ‘cult of optimism’, Burkeman recommends the ‘backwards law’ or ‘negative path to happiness’. This is a tradition with a respectable history – one that goes back to the Stoic philosophers, who developed ‘a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances’. Central to the Stoical view of life is what Burkeman calls ‘negative visualisation’. By dwelling on the things that might go wrong we not only lessen the shock when they do so; we also avoid ‘hedonic adaptation’, the process by which new sources of pleasure – whether minor, like an iPod, or major, like a marriage – are relegated to the backdrop of our lives. In short, by focusing on what we stand to lose we come to appreciate what we have.

The problem with motivational thinking, suggest Burkeman, is that it isn’t really about getting things done; it’s about ‘how to feel in the mood for getting things done’. Drawing on some key insights from Buddhism, he suggests that taking a ‘non-attached’ attitude to (say) work can be far more effective. In situations where you don’t feel like doing something, motivational thinking can make matters worse ‘by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you can act’. Better to disregard such thinking, embrace the negative feelings, and act.

Fundamental to The Antidote is a meditation on what Burkeman regards as the myth of an autonomous self with the power to take control of its own fate. And while many of his arguments are grounded in good sense, there are occasions on which his investigations lead him into some questionable company. (The inspirational musings of Eckhart Tolle are, I think, treated rather too charitably.) On the whole, however, he is a model of sanity. Certainly he has an eye for the detail that will appeal to those who, when they smell incense, imagine that there must be bullshit nearby. To take one example: If you find the idea that life is not a journey but ‘a dance’ a little too airy-fairy, consider the Formula One pit crew that managed to improve its performance-times by concentrating on style instead of speed. Whether Michael Schumacher won all those races by doing the same I very much doubt. But as a metaphor it works for me.

*

‘My aim in life isn’t so much the pursuit of happiness as the happiness of pursuit’, writes Charles Saatchi in Be the Worst You Can Be, thus revealing a Stoical streak of which Burkeman would no doubt approve. Not that Saatchi is seeking anyone’s approval. On the contrary, the ad man turned art collector (and current Mr Nigella Lawson) comes across as remarkably self-assured and even self-satisfied in his latest book, which is notable for its question-and-answer format, illuminated lettering, ersatz gold-leaf, double columns and black and white photographs. Be the Worst You Can Be is not without its pleasures. But don’t expect to be charmed by its author.

The questions are from ‘journalists and readers’ and range from the matter-of-fact to the whimsical to the existential to the downright rude. Saatchi’s answers are similarly varied, though a number of distinct ‘genres’ emerge. For example, there’s Saatchi the agony aunt (‘My advice is to give your [alcoholic] husband a taste of rock bottom’), Saatchi the sage (‘A sharp tongue does not mean you have a keen mind’) and Saatchi the wag (‘As you know, 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name’). This last is by far the dominant mode and is certainly the one most readers will warm to, though Saatchi’s humour is closely allied to his rather cynical view of the world. Sometimes, indeed, the humour goes missing and the cynicism is revealed in all its glory, as when the author haughtily dismisses ‘do-gooders’ for wanting to make the world ‘a better place’.

Written in lieu of the interviews its author declines to give, Be the Worst You Can Be is a peculiar book. Though often amused by Saatchi’s answers, I found myself occasionally irritated, too, and ultimately unable to shake the feeling that the author’s line in self-deprecation is really a kind of self-regard. He also makes a number of mistakes. For example, he says that ‘42.7% of statistics are made up on the spot’. As anyone who has looked into this area will know, the correct figure is 61.3%.

Review of The Harm in Hate Speech and The New Religious Intolerance (The Australian, August 2012)

Whenever there is a discussion about free speech, two things are almost certain to be said. The first is (roughly) ‘I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.’ And the second is (equally roughly) ‘Freedom of speech should not extend to falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.’

While the first sentiment is usually attributed to Voltaire, the second is rarely attributed to anyone. This is unfortunate, because the context is revealing. The source is Oliver Wendell Holmes, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, and the case on which he happened to be ruling had nothing to do with shouting ‘Fire!’ but with a Yiddish-speaking socialist who’d distributed an anti-conscription leaflet to military draftees in 1919. The socialist was being sent to gaol, not for causing a stampede on Broadway, but for protesting against US involvement in the First World War.

In The Harm in Hate Speech, Jeremy Waldron describes Holmes’s ruling, and his analogy, as ‘preposterous’. Nevertheless, his principal target is the position ascribed (wrongly but plausibly) to Voltaire. Whether in making the case against that position he opens the door to Holmesian interpretations is the key question to emerge from a reading of his book.

Waldron’s aim is a modest one. Noting that every liberal democracy except the US has laws against hate speech, he seeks not to ‘condemn or reinterpret’ US constitutional provisions but to consider ‘whether American free-speech jurisprudence has really come to terms with the best that can be said for hate speech regulations’. No doubt this tentativeness stems in part from the fact that, in the US at least, anyone arguing for restrictions on hate speech tends to generate a lot of it. Waldron notes how a critical review of Anthony Lewis’s Freedom for the Thought That We Hate earned him a tsunami of abuse in his inbox, including the pithy animadversion ‘YOU ARE A TOTALITARIAN ASSHOLE!’

The aim of hate speech, Waldron argues, is to ‘compromise the dignity of those at whom it is targeted’. In his view, hate speech should be restricted for that reason, and not because it might incite violence. As he puts it:

[P]ublic order means more than just the absence of fighting: it includes the peaceful order of civil society and the dignitary order of ordinary people interacting with one another in ordinary ways … on the basis of arm’s-length respect.

Waldron looks in particular at the case of Beauharnais vs Illinois (1952), when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of an Illinois statute prohibiting any material that portrayed ‘depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens, of any race, color, creed or religion’. This is clearly the kind of thing that Waldron would like to see adopted generally, though he notes that the chances of such a thing occurring are so small as to be invisible. Indeed, he acknowledges that if Beauharnais vs Illinois was replayed today the ruling would be different.

In working through the various objections – philosophical and legal – to hate speech restrictions, Waldron’s tone is affable, even clubbable. Indeed, one has the frequent sense of having walked in on an argument between friends, especially where other legal scholars are concerned. However, the book is marred, for me, by the suggestion of ‘bravado’ on the part of those liberals (‘First Amendment absolutists’) who take what we might call the Voltaire position. The implication is that those who argue for free speech are rarely the target of its nastier manifestations. That may be true, but the argument is reminiscent of the ‘armchair general’ accusation levelled at advocates of military intervention. In other words, it isn’t an argument at all.

Nor do I think Waldron quite succeeds where Justice Holmes so spectacularly fails. His argument that restrictions on hate speech would be aimed at preventing attacks on dignity and not at merely offensive viewpoints is subtle and even persuasive. But since those who are inclined to take offence tend not to recognise such fine distinctions, the potential for mission creep is ever present. Better, in my view, to have the argument and say with British author Kenan Malik (no armchair general, but the victim of plenty of racism in his time), ‘Free speech for everyone but bigots is no free speech at all.’

Waldron concludes The Harm in Hate Speech with a discussion of religious hatred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comparing the situation today with the one that obtained in the early Enlightenment. Similarly, Martha Nussbaum, in The New Religious Intolerance, revisits the ideas of Locke and others in her analysis of modern ‘Islamophobia’. Her book is something of a tonic to Waldron’s, suggesting as it does that the US and not Europe is better-equipped to cope with the phenomenon.

Nussbaum begins with a tour d’horizon of anti-Islamic intolerance, and suggests that three things are needed in order to counter it: ‘sound principles involving respect for human equality; arguments that are not self-serving, targeting an alleged fault in the minority that is ubiquitous in the majority culture; and a curious and sympathetic imagination.’ This is followed by an analysis of the relationship between fear and intolerance, and – what seems to be all the rage at the moment in the literature dealing with free speech and its excesses – a careful formulation of dignity. The book ends with a discussion of the controversy over Park51 or ‘the Ground Zero mosque’, when various rightwing demagogues in the US sought to use the plans for an Islamic community centre in downtown Manhattan to stoke anti-Islamic feeling and improve their own positions in the polls.

All this is done with care and intelligence, but the sense that something important is missing from Nussbaum’s analysis is too strong to ignore. That something is perfectly caught in the book’s title, where ‘religious intolerance’ could be taken to refer to both intolerance of and by the religious. But not only does The New Religious Intolerance not deal with intolerance in the second sense, it appears determined to avoid the issue. For example, when Nussbaum is discussing anti-Semitism in the context of the relationship between fear and prejudice, she remarks on its prevalence ‘in some quarters today’. What she should have added is that many of those quarters are to be found in the community for which she fears. Islamophobia is undoubtedly a problem, but we cannot begin to understand it if we do not also take account of the various ‘phobias’ engendered by Islam. Not to deal with this issue openly was, I think, an error on Nussbaum’s part.

Again, more speech – more honesty and openness – would appear to be the prescription here. Nussbaum says some excellent things, but other things are left unsaid. And though I will defend to the death her right not to say them, her book would be stronger, not weaker, if she did so.

Reviewed:

Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech
Harvard University Press; U$26.95; 285pp

Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance
Belknap Harvard; U$26.95; 292pp

Review of Dignity and Quiet (The Australian, June 2012)

Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning
Harvard University Press; US$21.95; 176pp

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
Penguin Viking; $29.95; 333pp

On 25 October 1991, the Mayor of Morsang-sur-Orge, Paris, issued an order banning a dwarf-tossing competition due to take place at a local discotheque. Invoking his police powers for the maintenance of public order, the Mayor took the view that the practice of dwarf-tossing was an affront to human dignity. Certainly the proposed event – which was to feature one Monsieur Wackenheim being thrown by competitors onto an airbed – doesn’t strike me as especially high-minded. But what of M. Wackenheim’s wishes? Is a law curtailing his right to be tossed any less corrosive of his dignity than the act of being tossed itself? Such was the question before the Conseil d’État, the court of highest instance for French administrative law, when it ruled on the case in 1995. Unfortunately for M. Wackenheim, and for dwarf-tossers everywhere, it ruled in favour of the Mayor’s decision.

‘In my opinion’, writes Michael Rosen in his beautifully written and argued book Dignity, ‘M. Wackenheim’s case shows that the ubiquity of dignity in current legal discourse masks a great deal of disagreement and sheer confusion.’ The concept of dignity is fundamental to many conventions on human rights, and yet no one seems to have a firm idea of what the concept actually entails. Nor do we tend to take account of the various ways in which dignity may come into conflict with human rights, as in the case of Wackenheim, whose desire to be thrown around a Paris nightclub was adjudged less important than the struggle for dignity within the wider dwarf ‘community’. When the Cairo Declaration of Rights in Islam asserts that women have ‘equal dignity’ but not equal rights, it behooves us to investigate the distinction being made and to ask whether secular concepts of dignity differ fundamentally from religious ones. Why, indeed, in light of this confusion, do we need the concept of dignity at all? Is it not just a pompous façade?

Not according to Rosen it’s not. Rejecting Arthur Schopenhauer’s description of dignity as ‘the shibboleth of empty-headed moralists’, he identifies different conceptions of dignity and explores the complex relationships between them. Central to his thesis is Emmanuel Kant, for whom dignity was closely related to morality. For Kant, human beings have dignity by dint of their being moral beings. As Rosen puts it: ‘The presence of the moral law in human beings has a double character: it makes human beings intrinsically valuable, while, at the same time, prescribing to them the way in which they should act.’ The dignity of morality makes human beings – morality’s embodiment – worthy of respect.

Rosen shows how Kant’s ideas, when combined with other conceptions of dignity current in the eighteenth century, leant themselves to an emerging focus on political equality – a focus that reached its apotheosis with the French Revolution in 1789. But the debate about dignity didn’t end there. On the contrary, the church continued to deploy its own idea of human dignity – the dignity of the human being in a divinely ordered hierarchy – in order to push back against democracy. And while much of this tension dissipated with the end of the Second World War and framing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, conspicuous conflicts still remain. One only need think of the different ideas of dignity employed in debates about euthanasia to see that the argument is far from resolved. Advocates of assisted suicide will talk of ‘dying with dignity’, while for many Christians human dignity gives a life a value that overrides the choices of the person living it.

Rosen does not claim to have resolved these conflicts, but he does add something significant to the debate. Appropriately, this comes in his discussion of death, in the course of his attempt to answer the question of why we should treat the dead with dignity, given that no one is benefited by our doing so. His answer, which follows from his reading of Kant, is that human beings have a duty to respect the very capacity for showing respect which they, as human beings, carry within them. Such duties of respect may be largely symbolic, but they are no less fundamental for that.

One of the definitions of dignity that emerges in Rosen’s book is the notion of dignity as self-possessed behaviour. The poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller was much exercised by this concept of dignity, and Susan Cain has perhaps missed a trick by omitting him from her sprawling homage to the ‘power’ of introversion, Quiet. After all, the two concepts – quiet and dignity – would often appear to be joined at the hip. How many times have you heard the phrases ‘dignified silence’ or ‘quiet dignity’?

Cain’s thesis proceeds from the bold assumption that ‘the single most important aspect of personality … is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum’. From here, she goes on to suggest that the US in particular is in thrall to an ‘Extrovert Ideal’ whereby the noisy prevail and the quiet go to the wall. As she puts it: ‘Introversion – along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness – is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.’

Liberally laced with psychological studies, Quiet takes the reader into the ear-splitting world of what Cain calls the ‘Culture of Personality’. Much of it reads like an introvert’s nightmare: brainstorming sessions, evangelical churches, company songs, obligatory schmoozing. One chapter recounts a semina given by the self-help guru Tony Robbins, author of Awaken the Giant Within. It lasts for four, fifteen-hour days, but the crowd is never less than ecstatic. ‘If Jesus returned to Earth’, writes Cain, ‘it would be hard to imagine a more jubilant reception.’

Against such paragons of self-exposure, Cain sets a number of quiet achievers: Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi – people for whom mildness was a source of strength. She even suggests that the extrovert West may have a lot to learn from Asia, where introversion is not so stigmatised. If so, it has its work cut out: according to some of the psychologists Cain cites, the higher instance of extroverts in the West could have a genetic explanation.

Though Cain’s book contains some interesting insights, it is marred by its rather cloying tone. Indeed, the book seems strangely in thrall to the very self-help mentality it affects to treat with suspicion. ‘If there’s one insight you take away from this book,’ Cain writes in her introduction, ‘I hope it’s a newfound sense of entitlement to be yourself.’ Sorry, but that’s the kind of sentence that should send any self-respecting introvert screaming from the room.

Wealth of material for rich to cry poor (The Australian, April 2012)

Say what you like about the Treasurer Wayne Swan – his timing is impeccable. As I was sitting down to plan this review, he was standing up at the National Press Club to attack the ‘tiny handful of people … who mobilise their considerable wealth against policies designed to benefit the majority’. Taking aim at the mining billionaires who’d campaigned against the government’s resources tax – Andrew Forrest, Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart – the Treasurer worked a rich seam of populism: ‘I think we need a lot of straight talking in this debate because it shines a light on something that everyone of us holds dear in this country: the notion of a fair go.’ [More here.]