Building on success

Alain de Botton has done it again and I hate him. A few years ago, I decided to make him my friend as a way of warding off the bitterness and jealousy I might otherwise have felt about his increasingly nauseating success. And for a while it worked.

He still is a friend, up to a point. We still have dinner together; we still fancy each other’s wives; we could still conceive of having a gay relationship together if, one day, we end up stranded for ever on a Lost-style island or we’re the only people to survive the Apocalypse; we still ring each other up now and then to bitch about all the successful writers we hate, and about how vile writing for a living is and how much more fun it would be to be entrepreneurs. I do very much fear, though, that with his new book, The Architecture of Happiness, and tie-in TV series, The Perfect Home (Channel 4, Saturday), the gap between us has grown too large to stomach.

The mistake I made with Alain, I now realise, is to have assumed that, like me, he was just another sweet, charming, bumbling fellow trying to make a living by his pen as best he could in a cruel, uncaring world. But in fact it’s not luck that has got him where he is. Nor, though he is very clever and writes beautifully, is it talent. What’s really made him so successful are the business qualities he has presumably inherited from his father — a canny understanding of how markets work and an utter shark-like ruthlessness.

I saw some of his sharkiness in action when he gave a lecture the other day at the Royal Institute of British Architects.