“He is a happy man who can once and for all avoid having to do with a great many of his fellow creatures.”

“A happy life is impossible; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.”

“Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.”

Irvin Yalom’s The Schopenhauer Cure is the story of Julius, a prominent 65-year old San Francisco therapist, who finds that he has melanoma, and maybe one good year to live. After the initial death-panic, Julius seeks out one of his greatest “failures,” Philip Slate, a former patient who suffered from sex addiction and got no better under Julius’s care. Julius, unsure of his own motives, seeks out Philip and finds him dramatically changed. He is no longer a sex addict and has cured himself through his study of great western philosophers, most notably Arthur Schopenhauer. That meeting leads to the two striking a deal that they hope is to their mutual benefit- Julius will supervise Philip so that Philip can get his counseling license, and Philip will attend Julius’s group therapy meeting for six months. It is those meetings where Yalom, a psychotherapist, wants to go, and it’s there where some of the most interesting sparks fly.

This is not, however, a traditional linear narrative. In between the narrative chapters, Yalom interjects Schopenhauer’s life story, with commentary on that life and some of his work. Each of these chapters acts to inform or underlie the subsequent chapter, as characters in some way illustrate the ideas inherent in the previous chapter. And so, it’s a novel of ideas delivered by a therapist who writes like a therapist about the best approach to the human condition. It is a series of conversations about ideas with only the most skeletal narrative lines to hang it on, so do not go here if you’re looking for art. There is none to be found. And don’t go here if the idea of observing group therapy sessions and all that group therapyspeak sends you reeling for the porcelain. There are enough “How do you feel about what she just said?” moments to have you puking for weeks. But as an accessible look at some of the big questions and for insight into one of the world’s most radically pessimistic approaches to facing the existential dilemma, you could do worse for mind candy. In the face of an indifferent universe in a life that ends in a death that makes that life just a spark between the blankness before you were born and the blankness after you’re gone, should you withdraw from the world or throw yourself into it? Should you avoid the pain of human relationships or commit yourself wholly to them? Would your tombstone read, Never Again, or Hit Me Baby One More Time? Yalom ultimately comes down on one side of these questions, and it’s not a surprising one. But Schopenhauer’s case gets its airing, and it’s one that describes the world as accurately and honestly as any I’ve ever encountered. How you choose to confront that world becomes the next question, so let the debates about what “happiness” and “heroism” and “misery” mean. I’ll be the one in the teal jersey, clutching a Drake's, yelling at the TV.