People just love books about creativity and the imagination and how to be better or smarter or more efficient. And when I say people, I mean me. I am ripe, frankly, for wholesale improvement and upgrade, right across the board – physically, emotionally and spiritually, you name it. I want to know, Molesworth-like, How to be Topp. I would love to wake up fizzing with ideas, overflowing with insights and determined beyond all reasonable determination to share my extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, my art, with the world. No one wants to be a Fotherington-Thomas – a wet. Or a schlub, a has-been or a never-was. It’s just a shame, then, that most of the books which promise to tell us how to be top are absolute garbage.
Two new books, by two very different people on a similar theme, promise the usual self-improvement Holy Grail: drink the Kool-Aid from this cup and you too can be creative and imaginative in abundance. In fairness, both books contain a few drops of invigorating liquor for those of us desperate for succour and insight – which is probably as good as it gets, because there is no Holy Grail. There are only drops and dribbles – so let us be grateful for the faintest trickles from on high.
Adam Gopnik is the Ted Lasso of glossy magazine writing. A staff writer for the New Yorker, he is supremely confident, ever-so-slightly irritating, hard to love but impossible not to like. You have to admire the sheer audacity – the low cheek, really – of a book with the title The Real Work, which is in fact a rework, a cut-and-paste of previous magazine articles, dressed up to look like a big ideas book.
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