The Social Animal by David Brooks

The glue of any book are the characters. You can have a great plot and wonderful prose, but if I don’t care about the characters, it’s going to fall apart. In fiction that is no revelation, but in non-fiction it is more surprising. That is because often the characters in non-fiction are most times less obvious. They might be the earth, an animal or the reader. “The Social Animal” by David Brooks is an odd book because it is both non-fiction and fiction at the same time.

That may sound confusing, but it’s not really. The largest part of “The Social Animal” is the life story of two characters. Each section of the story tells about some important part of their life and it’s all effectively fiction. What makes it non-fiction is that the point isn’t really the story, but how the things that happen to them form their unconscious mind and change how they see and interact with the world. This is interspersed with sections that explain what is happening, and why it is happening outside of the story of the characters of The Social Animals.

What is most strange about this book is that I cared more about Harold and Erica than I have about characters in many fiction books. This is odd, because the book most definitely ignores almost every rule of writing fiction. It tells as often as it shows, it has almost no plot, and an absurd amount of exposition. Worse than that, in several places I saw the hand of the author moving the characters into situations to explore the psychological aspects of that realm of human experience are obvious. But after all that said, I felt enough of a connection to feel loss at the end.

I have yet to get into the details of the philosophy of this book. It is really a fairly simple idea. That the unconscious mind has far more influence on us than we think. As this is a story more than a textbook. It displays how our experiences change who we are, and I think there are a lot of excellent things a person could learn from this book. That said, if you really want depth on many of the ideas you must read other books.

While I enjoyed the story, I found myself more resistant to some of the ideas in a book I think I would have been had the ideas been given in a more direct manner, and there are a few places where I feel the authors bias can be seen in what is seen as the best outcome and while in fiction I rarely mind if the author pushes for his version of a happy ending in non-fiction it feels forced.

I enjoyed “The Social Animal” by David Brooks far more than I had expected. I almost didn’t read because of the length. I like a long fiction book, but with non-fiction, I want people to get to the point. But parts of this book could have been longer, and I hope that some other people who want to teach about the way humans act will use this method because it was effective.