What does it mean to lead a good life? How far should a person be willing to go to help others and make the world a better place? Ben Brooks brings a practiced, light touch to these profound questions, which drive his new novel, \u201cThe Greatest Possible Good.\u201d<\/p>\n
When we meet members of the Candlewick family, they are living in a posh \u201carchitectural marvel,\u201d a renovated 600-year-old former rectory in England\u2019s fashionable Cotswolds \u201cwith views like Constable paintings.\u201d Brooks clearly enjoys capturing the trappings of wealth, pouring on brand names \u2013 Louis Vuitton, Prada, BMW, Porsche \u2013 with the same heavy hand with which his characters pour expensive wines and fancy coffees. And like Alison Bechdel in her latest graphic novel, \u201cSpent,\u201d Brooks skewers his characters\u2019 healthier-than-thou meals, which feature expensive, esoteric ingredients like manuka honey.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Candlewicks are privileged yet unhappy. The parents have grown apart after decades focused on careers, and their two teenagers are courting danger as they explore different paths. They don\u2019t know it, but their family life is about to change radically.<\/p>\n
Why We Wrote This<\/p>\n
A novelist\u2019s task often involves holding up a mirror to society. By using humor to skewer pretensions, a good writer can both entertain and encourage empathy and self-reflection in their audience.<\/p>\n
This is a novel in which the characters become more sympathetic as our misconceptions about them are gently corrected. Yara, the mother, is a retired software developer who worked hard to overcome an impoverished, fraught childhood. She is a worrier obsessed with the fitness of her financial portfolios and her body. Arthur, the mild-mannered and distracted father, is about to sell his lumber company. Both parents are concerned about their children: 17-year-old Evangeline, a self-styled activist, angry that \u201cthe world she was due to inherit\u201d was built on terrible inequalities, and 15-year-old Emil, a math genius who\u2019s been dabbling in drugs.<\/p>\n
I am not spilling the protein-rich beans when I report that in the first chapter, Arthur goes missing for a few days. Brooks, whose goal is to write an entertaining morality tale, not a mystery, doesn\u2019t keep us in suspense. We soon learn that Arthur, on a late-night walk, fell into a mine shaft and sustained injuries. He comes back a changed man. Yara chalks it up to his fall, but Arthur insists that reading one of Evangeline\u2019s books about effective altruism has been a wake-up call. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Central to Arthur\u2019s epiphany is Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer\u2019s 1972 thought experiment, which posed the question: What\u00a0 would you do if you saw a toddler thrashing in a shallow pond on your way to work? Would you jump right in, or would you worry about your expensive shoes or being on time for a meeting? Singer argued that when wealthy individuals ignore the plight of destitute people, and don\u2019t donate money to help, they are essentially allowing those people to die. (Coincidentally, this controversial question and its reverberations are the subject of philosopher\u00a0David Edmonds\u2019 forthcoming book, \u201cDeath in a Shallow Pond.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Evangeline explains to her family that effective altruism, a movement that Singer sparked, involves \u201cusing mathematical models to work out how a donation can do the most good.\u201d As an example, she says that \u00a3100 \u201ccould either train one fiftieth of a guide dog in Britain, or save the sight of one thousand children through vitamin supplementation in sub-Saharan Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n
Without consulting his family, Arthur decides to give away most of his fortune and devote himself to counseling people on how their charitable donations can do the greatest possible good. He approaches everyone he meets with the shallow pond problem: \u201cI\u2019d like you to imagine that you\u2019re walking to work one day and you come upon a child drowning in a pool of water,\u201d he says. Brooks plays the repetitions for laughs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yara protests: \u201cIf we sent money to everyone who needed it, what would we have?\u201d Arthur explains one of the principles, known as Giving What We Can: \u201cIt\u2019s all about how much good we\u2019re in a position to do.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the wake of Arthur\u2019s unilateral decision, his wife and children make some questionable choices themselves \u2013 regarding partners, college, babies, and unhealthy activities. Happiness seems more elusive than ever for all the Candlewicks except Arthur, who has found his true calling. Evangeline, who still tries to uphold her ethical convictions, comments, \u201cMy father was so good he made us feel bad. He made a moral choice on our behalf and we resented him for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brooks, who aims for depth in what often feels like a shallow pond, is so determined to salvage this family that he unfortunately resorts to several schmaltzy scenes. And, aside from gentle ribbing, he all but canonizes Arthur.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Late in the book, Arthur offers this sage advice to his floundering son: \u201cI don\u2019t care what you achieve in your life, Emil. … All I\u2019ll ask is that you check in with yourself when you find your life heading in a certain direction: is this making me happy? Do I want the things that will make my life better? Or do I want the things that I\u2019ve been tricked into wanting? If the answer is yes, might I suggest you find a nice deep hole to fall into, for a little perspective.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The goal, Arthur says \u2013 and the moral of Brooks\u2019 novel \u2013 is to find \u201csomething you\u2019ve done that felt like the thing you ought to be doing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What does it mean to lead a good life? How far should a person be willing to go…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-11390","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}