This past summer I received a review copy of Janice Kaplan’s book The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year of Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life. I was intrigued, not because I’m an enthusiastic consumer of self-help literature but because I guessed that Ms. Kaplan must have endured some biblically proportioned misfortunes to feel qualified to write an entire book about optimism. I checked her author photo: no disfigurement to speak of, but then again it was only a head shot. Would her bio place her as a refugee, a terminal patient, maybe the victim of a Twitter shaming campaign? No such luck. She “has enjoyed wide success as a magazine editor, television producer, writer, and journalist.” She “lives in New York City and Kent, Connecticut.” The book, I thought, ought to include a disclaimer for the genuinely suffering: Your results may vary.

Looking on the bright side is easy if it’s the only side you’ve got. The useful trick if your life has really gone pear-shaped is to look not on your own bright side but on someone else’s dark side, to be grateful that at least you aren’t that guy. That is one of the more therapeutic ways to read the Book of Job, say, or the police blotter of a Florida newspaper. It is certainly the ideal spirit in which to read Steve Toltz’s hilarious Quicksand, which makes the God of Job look downright unimaginative in His punishments—though one