Zoë Heller reviews Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. As a Brit, she challenges what she sees as Senior’s American approach to the question:
Parenthood curtails the pursuit of certain kinds of pleasure, she observes, but it also puts those pleasures in perspective, by revealing the deeper, more meaningful satisfactions of connection, attachment and service to others:
Indeed, one could argue that the whole experience of parenthood exposes the superficiality of our preoccupation with happiness, which usually takes the form of pursuing pleasure or finding our bliss. Raising children makes us reassess this obsession and perhaps redefine (or at least broaden) our fundamental ideas about what happiness is. The very things Americans are told almost daily to aspire to may in fact be misguided.
This is a troubling paragraph. It seems reasonable enough for Senior to want to correct some of her fellow Americans’ more callow, entitled attitudes. And she is not to be faulted for pointing out that fun is more usefully regarded as an occasional by-product of experience than as an end in itself. (British readers, who tend to have more modest expectations of life’s fun quotient, may be forgiven for finding her progress towards this revelation a little ponderous.) But there’s something grim about asking parents to resign themselves to the end of paltry bliss-seeking in order to concentrate their energies on the higher satisfactions of duty, service and sacrifice. Let’s by all means concede that parenthood isn’t a trip to the funfair, but does it have to put the funfair off-limits? And can it only be appreciated if the funfair is dismissed as having been a rather childish and squalid diversion?
The Dish 