Jonah Lehrer has had time to work on “A Book About Love.” His schedule no longer teems with lucrative speaking engagements. He no longer writes for The New Yorker or contributes to “Radiolab” on NPR. With this project — his shot at redemption, provided to him by Simon & Schuster after his public tumble from grace — Mr. Lehrer could have written something complex and considered. Books are still the slow food of the publishing business. Yet here is Mr. Lehrer, once again, serving us a nonfiction McMuffin.
I wasn’t expecting it. I was one of those weirdos who thought Mr. Lehrer would make a respectable comeback. He’s bright. He’s a decent stylist. He languished in the public stockade for weeks for his sins. Why wouldn’t he try something personal, something soulful, something new?
No clue. But he didn’t. His book is insolently unoriginal.
For those who don’t know the author’s story: Mr. Lehrer, 35, was once one of our culture’s cuddliest pop intellectuals, specializing in neuroscience. From almost the moment he published his first book at 26, magazine editors couldn’t get enough of him. He wrote two more books and became a high-priced speaker on the guru rental market.
But in the summer of 2012, he was caught recycling old material for his new blog at The New Yorker. Then it was discovered he’d plagiarized several blog posts while working at Wired magazine. And then the journalist Michael Moynihan found that Mr. Lehrer had invented quotes from Bob Dylan for his third book, “Imagine,” and misused the words Mr. Dylan actually did say. Later investigations showed that “Imagine” contained many other factual errors. The book was pulled from shelves. So, too, was his second book, “How We Decide.”
Errors in even the finest works of nonfiction are ridiculously common. Gay Talese, who’s been writing for almost twice as long as Mr. Lehrer has been alive, just had to concede that parts of his coming book, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” could not be wholly accurate after a reporter from The Washington Post phoned to point out he’d missed essential information about his subject.
What rankled about Mr. Lehrer was his “cavalier attitude about truth and falsehood,” in the words of the writer Charles Seife, who reviewed his work for Wired.
In retrospect — and I am hardly the first person to point this out — the vote to excommunicate Mr. Lehrer was as much about the product he was peddling as the professional transgressions he was committing. It was a referendum on a certain genre of canned, cocktail-party social science, one that traffics in bespoke platitudes for the middlebrow and rehearses the same studies without saying something new.
Apparently, he’s learned nothing. This book is a series of duckpin arguments, just waiting to be knocked down. Perhaps the flimsiest: that Shakespeare’s famous star-crossed teenagers have come to define our understanding of love.
“But this description of love — the Romeo and Juliet version — is woefully incomplete,” he writes in the introduction. Love is not just lust, madness, or a great tidal flow of dopamine, he is quick to tell us. “Love is a process, not a switch.”
Fine. But is there really any evolved adult who believes otherwise? When a widow wakes up sobbing in the middle of the night, mourning the loss of her husband of 50 years, is she mourning the loss of passion, giddy infatuation and great sex?
No matter. Mr. Lehrer bangs this same note throughout the book. On Page 53, he says we wrongly assume that “what we feel at first sight” will help us predict long-term relationship outcomes; on Page 104, he reminds us that our psychological needs have little to do with the romance of country-western songs. On Page 246, he’s still saying it’s commonly believed that “once we fall in love, the love is supposed to take care of itself.” But no: “This is wrong on every level.”
You know what he says love requires? Hard work. “When a relationship endures,” he explains, “it is not because the flame never burns out. It is because the flame is always being relit.”
There’s a lot of dime-store counsel in this book, often followed by academic citations. It’s like reading an advice column by way of JSTOR.
To the extent that he has one, Mr. Lehrer’s argument is that humans crave connection. He borrows heavily from attachment theory to explain how we approach relationships. We seek secure attachments to our parents, to our spouses, even to God, the ultimate “secure base.” The more securely attached we are, the healthier and more productive we are. He then hurls one well-known study after another at us to build his case, which really never required much building.
At times, his book becomes such a dense plague of studies, I had no idea where Mr. Lehrer was heading. He devotes an entire subsection to the plasticity of our memories, noting how they alter every time we recall them. I fail to see how this relates to love, exactly. He says it’s because “if our memories never changed, then we might adapt to their pleasures.” But I suspect it’s really because Mr. Lehrer can phone this material in, having already riffed on it ad nauseam: In his first book, in a segment on Radiolab, in a number of blog posts and columns. It’s his secure base.
Most criminally: Love, we must assume, was Mr. Lehrer’s salvation during his time of crisis. But he never once explains how. He barely — and I mean barely — mentions his wife. In a couple of places, he mentions that his brief exile made him a better father, but it’s all terribly perfunctory. The most he’ll say is that he’s become “a little more aware of what matters.” He’s written a book about love that has no heart.
As for the question that’s on everyone’s mind — did Mr. Lehrer play by the rules in this book? — I think the answer is complicated, but unpromising.
In an author’s note, Mr. Lehrer says that he sent his quotes to everyone he interviewed and that his book was independently fact-checked. And it’s true that this book contains far more citations than his previous work.
But I fear Mr. Lehrer has simply become more artful about his appropriations. At one point, for instance, he writes: “We don’t love our kids despite their demands; we love them because of them. Caregiving makes us care.”
I stopped dead when I read that sentence. Reread it. And read it again. It sounds to me like a clever adaptation of one of the most beautiful lines in “The Philosophical Baby” by Alison Gopnik: “It’s not so much that we care for children because we love them as that we love them because we care for them.”
I’m pretty certain Mr. Lehrer read Ms. Gopnik’s quote. Why? Because I cite it in my own book — which he cites, twice. (Though not for that.) He also wrote about “The Philosophical Baby” for The Boston Globe.
In his chapter on memory, I noticed a similar rewrite of a phrase from Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live.” Though at least he credits Ms. Bakewell’s ideas.
These may seem like minor offenses. But what they betoken is a larger sort of intellectual dishonesty. If you squint, you’ll see that Mr. Lehrer often rehashes arguments made by others, both in structure and content, when writing parts of his book. Sometimes he credits these people; sometimes he doesn’t. But the point is, he’s relying on their associations and connections.
I’m guessing media reporters and other diligent reservists in the press corps will find a number of such examples. It suffices, for now, to say this: Mr. Lehrer devotes many pages in “A Book About Love” to how we grow and evolve. “People change,” he writes in his Coda. “That simple fact is one of the great themes of the longitudinal studies in this book.”
Perhaps Mr. Lehrer has changed — personally. But not sufficiently as a writer. I fear it may be time, at long last, for him to find something else to do.
A Book About Love
By Jonah Lehrer
288 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.
No comments:
Post a Comment