All I know is that I’ve had awful things said to me, as have all people, yet I would never “hate someone till the day I die” let alone say this. But if that’s the consolation of his philosophy so be it but I find it sad, as I loved his writings. Hating is prevalent, and destroys the soul.

It seems to me that ADB’s response confirms Crain’s sense of his tone in that if de Botton really did respect the workers he profiled (people with menial jobs), he’d understand that being an independently wealthy, well-known author means you never get to bitch about a bad review ruining three years of your precious labor. Please.

Our reptilian brain is at work in these impulsive responses. I’ve done it, too, both on blogs and in email. It was so much easier to rely on the difficulty of writing a letter, putting it an envelope, finding a postage stamp and affixing it, going to the nearest mailbox, etc. – because it allowed time for reflection and cooling off.

Having had two books reviewed in the New York Times Book Review – both, I’d say, mildly favorably, somewhat more positive than negative – I have to say neither seemed to have any effect on my meager sales. But that probably isn’t true for well-known writers with major books like this author’s.

Thanks, Ed, for this.

If he could go back in time, he would “put this message in an envelope, not on the Internet.”…

Anyone who cannot detect the snobbery and indeed condescension in the book must be a condescending snob. But who bakes their cookies, clubs their tuna to death, balances their books, and outfits their “aeroplane” interiors?

And there is at least some literature out there that takes account of our work lives. Off the top of my head: the granddaddy of them all, “Bartleby the Scrivener”; Orwell’s bookshop scenes in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; James Gould Cozzens’s WWII novel Guard of Honor; and of our current office-bound life, Ed Park’s Personal Days and Joshua Ferris’s And Then We Came to the End. {Actually, now that I go looking, this is a solid roundup of fiction about work.}

For what it’s worth, many of Crain’s objections seemed legit to me.

“I think that a writer should respond to a critic within a relatively private arena. I don’t believe in writing letters to the newspaper. I do believe in writing, on occasion, to the critics directly.”

Not everyone agrees with this. An articulate, heated (and therefore sincere) exchange between intelligent enemies can be rich/ enriching. The over-mediated speech of Commerce (and Politics) is an empty form.

Make your case in a public forum: it should be part of the job. Resting on your laurels in an ivory tower of your agent-and-publisher’s making won’t do. Even Nabokov swung hard at silly Wilson… right in front of everyone. Are you fancier than Nabokov?