Taking the fun out of enjoyment

Is it at best unreasonable to expect of a work entitled Enjoyment, that it actually be enjoyable to read? I say, at best, because some might think this speculation merely trite, prosaic, or facilely reductive. For those who presume the latter, insisting that Enjoyment should be delightfully absorbing would be akin to expecting of the Director of the Institute of Directors that he be a perfect exemplar of administrative leadership, or cavilling at the failure of professional domestic cleaners to keep their own homes tidy.

And yet... and yet... there is something very disappointing about a book called Enjoyment that is, frankly, a bit of a bore. Not that its author, an eminent US academic called John Kekes, is a slouch - far from it. He is erudite; his views are just, his exposition is clear. His thesis: that to have an enjoyable life is a key component - if not the essence - of being a good person, not only has respectable antecedents, but apart from fundamentalist God-botherers (among whom I include hard-line 'rationalists' of the Dawkins/Hitchens axis; atheism being, after all, only another Christian heresy), and nihilistic romantics, it's hard to think of anyone sane or reasonable who would dissent that strongly from its melioristic morality.

So, Enjoyment is anodyne ­ and that's not what we expect of having a good time at all. But Kekes doesn't really mean 'having a good time' when he seizes upon enjoyment; what he means is rather having such a 'style of life', or manner of living, that one retains one's integrity: one's means and ends remain congruent, one is whole, with a personality that is charmingly consistent. It says 'Kekes' at one end of the stick of rock, and strike me pink! When you break it open half way along it says 'Kekes' there as well.

Kekes's enjoyable livers are, again, not likely to be contested: Montaigne and Hume, good; Mishima and Cato the Younger, bad. And yet... and yet... you don't need to be either a morbid romantic of the Mishima school, or a rigid moraliser like Cato, not to find something rather unsatisfying about Kekes's 'style of life'. The more I read about this 'enjoyment' of which Enjoyment speaks, the more it seemed like a staple of existence: sorghum for the soul.

I think, in part, the problem is endemic with all these one-word summations. Kekes wants to write an all-embracing work about moral theory - something, perhaps, of the reach of Alastair MacIntyre's After Virtue, but by pegging his ruminations to the word 'enjoyment', he inevitably heightens our expectations.

It's like this friend of mine who's been trying to write The History of Fun for the past decade or so. It goes without saying that fun, of its very nature, is a state of mind that's atemporal, and therefore a history of it is a contradiction in terms; but beyond this there's the inescapable feeling that this, of all books, should be the one blurbed: "You'll have as much fun reading it as it's author did writing it!" Whereas, the truth is that writing about fun has proved nothing but a millstone around the poor man's neck, and at times he's verged on the suicidal.

It has to be the same with Kekes. The image of his partner coming home of an evening, to find him still labouring away in his study on the difficult ­ and surprisingly technical - Enjoyment, and calling out gaily, 'How's it coming on, John darling?' only to be met with a harsh growl, savage cry, or dispirited moan, is too choice to resist. And yet... and yet... I don't think this is either mean or trivial: if a man doesn't truly know something about ­ and therefore is, ipso facto, unable to convey ­ enjoyment, how can we take anything he has to say on the subject that seriously? ·