I reviewed David Brooks’s How to Know a Person for the TLS:

David Brooks was raised in a Jewish family whose motto, he says, might have been “Think Yiddish, Act British.” He learned to be awkward and reserved around strangers, but also inherited a disputatious streak that saw argument as “a form of prayer”. The result, for many years, was disappointing conversations, stymied by his tendency to either clam up or overperform. More recently, though, he has been working hard on being less inhibited. Now he actively seeks out conversations with strangers and looks for ways to make those conversations an act of joint, gentle, enriching exploration.

We should all try to do this more, Brooks argues, in an increasingly fractious and divisive public sphere where millions feel invisible and excluded. Adopting a favourite word of Generation Z, he suggests that we have lost the ability to make others feel “seen” — to let them know that they have been understood. When beholding someone fully, he writes, we see “the richness of this particular human consciousness, the full symphony – how they perceive and create their life”. He agrees with Iris Murdoch that we can “grow by looking”.

The trouble is, most of us are really bad at it. Our default view of the world is naively realist. We assume that the way it appears to us is what others also see. Our brains, locked in what Brooks nicely calls the “dark, bony vault” of our skulls, offer us a highly edited, partial reading of reality. People with different life circumstances literally see different worlds. Even partners and intimate friends misread each other, because they lock in some earlier version of the other person, and that version stays set while the person doesn’t.

The solution, for Brooks, is not some vague exhortation to be empathetic and kind, but learning how to perform small, concrete social actions well. Some of his suggestions about how to do this – pay full attention to people, ask open-ended questions – are fairly obvious. Other advice is more original and useful. People aren’t specific enough when they tell stories, so probe them for details, making them “authors, not witnesses”. Paraphrase what they just said and pause to see if they agree with your summary. Break the momentum of difficult conversations, by stepping back and asking them how you got to this overwrought state together.

I was less convinced by Brooks’s formulae for initiating deeper discussions. He claims that people actually love being asked the questions we fear might be too personal. But some of the examples he gives – “If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?”, “What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?”, “What is the gift you currently hold in exile?” – would just leave me stumped.

More problematic still is Brooks’s eagerness to categorise people. In every crowd, he writes, there are Diminishers, who stereotype, ignore and make people feel unseen, and Illuminators, who shine their curiosity and care on others and make them feel lit up. Then there are the Essentialists who are guilty of “stacking”, using one thing about a person to make a series of further assumptions. And the Weavers, who build communities and drive civic life. And so on. We all know people who very roughly fit into such typologies. But can’t people also be different things at different times? I thought we were all supposed to be gloriously complicated and difficult to “see”?

Brooks justifies delineating these character traits with an analogy: just as a sommelier can judge a wine more subtly because they have a feel for qualities like “well structured” or “strong finish”, we’ll be able to see people more clearly with a better understanding of the qualities that make up their personality. He wants us to be “sommeliers of people”. But people are infinitely more complicated than wine, which is already complicated enough. This urge to label and classify sits awkwardly in a book which also argues that people often feel unseen “because somebody saw them not as an individual but just as someone in a category”.

Brooks is a chatty, likeable guide, although with an over-fondness for reheating the latest psychological research and peppering his prose with aphoristic quotations from authors who “had a famous saying” or “said it wonderfully”. I much preferred it when he suspended the supply of life hacks and wrote at more length about his own life and the people in it. One chapter covers a close friend’s depression and suicide. This chapter’s insight – that you shouldn’t try to coax someone out of depression but instead “create an atmosphere in which they can share their experience” – is not original. But it rings true because it has clearly emerged out of sustained, pained experience, rather than the urge to dispense “smart thinking” wisdom.