If happiness, as National Public Radio correspondent Eric Weiner’s own research suggests, is primarily connected to our ability to have intimate and nourishing relationships with loved ones, Weiner seems doomed from the get-go.
He set out to explore 10 bizarre and exotic locations around the world hoping to find clues between contentment and geography. His goal was to examine the relationship between a physical place and a sense of well-being, and this inevitably led him to consider the connections between happiness and everything else: love, money, spirituality, expectations, meaningful work, religion, nature and the freedom one feels to behave in a moral manner.
Weiner spent a lot of his time hanging out in local cafes and pubs mingling with locals and American expatriates. He is an ambitious, curious, intense and intelligent man, and sometimes a very funny one, but it always feels as if he is shouldering a burden.
Restless and wired, he is a born traveler. The reader can easily imagine how he has spent his past two decades crisscrossing the globe reporting on one tragedy after another.
Happiness and the pursuit of understanding its underpinnings poses a greater threat for him; it is unfamiliar terrain. A self-confessed curmudgeon, he says, “I have the embarrassing tendency, for instance, to sigh heavily. I do this constantly, while writing, driving and even in meetings. People assume I am bored or agitated, but that’s not true. It’s just my way of relieving the pressure that has built up inside of me.”
Weiner seems to have trouble making conversation. He simply asks people if they are happy. This kamikaze approach doesn’t give way to more nuanced dialogues.
He also seems reluctant to expose himself; mentioning only once in the entire book a sentence or two about his wife and 2-year- old daughter, whom he has left for a year to pursue this odyssey.
The responses he gets often seem contrived. How many people are just saying they are happy because they feel ashamed to say otherwise? How many are lying? How many are responding to cultural cues not to complain? How does happiness differ in the minds of various people?
It is all so subjective and difficult to quantify, but the reader senses that a gentler and more sensitive interviewer could have yielded some nuggets of truth instead of the psychobabble his discussions often seemed to degenerate into.
Weiner begins in the Netherlands where he visits The World Database of Happiness. The director, an aging hippie, shares his findings with him. Much of it we would probably guess on our own: “Extroverts are happier than introverts; optimists are happier than pessimists; married people are happier than singles, though people with children are no happier than childless couples; Republicans are happier than Democrats; people who attend religious services are happier than those who do not; people with college degrees are happier than those without, though people with advanced degrees are less happy than those with just a B.A.; people with an active sex life are happier than those without.”
The author continues his journey and does offer some interesting cultural observations. He is besotted with the people of Switzerland and envious of their obvious pleasure in living a low-key life aimed at not promoting envy in others. He is enamored with their love of place and their attachment to the land.
In the incredibly oil rich country of Qatar, he finds a corrupted and morally drained population living without a vibrant culture or dreams for their own betterment. In Bhutan, he is swept up by a spirituality that almost feels infectious, and in Thailand he finds himself suspicious and jealous of the seeming lightheartedness that surrounds him.
In India, he is dazzled by the population’s embrace of opposing ideas; the country is a cauldron of contradictions and conflicts that somehow manage to mesh. In Iceland, he is soothed by the persistent darkness that somehow envelops him like a tranquilizer, allowing him to slow down and sleep longer, and take careful notice of his surroundings.
Although timid at emotional exploration and riddled with blind-spots, Weiner’s writing holds your interest, even as he annoys you. He may remind some readers of the kind of guy you go on a date with, and you know the entire evening he is not the one and you probably aren’t going to go home with him, but somehow you still don’t want the evening to end.
There is an endearing quality to his hardheadedness; he is flirty and provocative and keeps reeling you back in. Maybe you just want to figure out how to make him happy.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
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Nonfiction
The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, by Eric Weiner, $25.99
