BEHIND THE BESTSELLERS : A Better Life for $5.95

While you’re standing on the cash-register line at your local bookstore, waiting to pay for your Austen or Proust, you’ll spot among the kitsch impulse-buys two small plaid items by one H. Jackson Brown Jr.: “Life’s Little Instruction Book,” Volumes I (red) and II (blue). Between them they contain 1,028 succinct directives on matters practical and spiritual, trivial and all-important. No. 431: “Use club soda as an emergency spot remover.” No. 967: “Never ignore evil.” They are bestsellers.

Why? Because people desperately want to lead better lives, even to become better human beings, and while Brown is peddling nothing more than simple folk wisdom, a good part of it is useful and true. And well it might be. Like folk medicine, folk wisdom achieved its status because it worked for generation after generation.

Despite the compiler’s cracker-barrel-guru stance, though, his folks aren’t as generic or universal as you’d expect. From his advice to the masses (originally prepared for his son, significantly named Adam), we learn a lot about H. Jackson Brown Jr. in particular. The little books constitute a sort of unwitting autobiography.

Our hero is male, middle-class, heterosexual, white (I’m willing to bet), conservative, church-going, a careful businessman, a good citizen, indeed honorable in all his dealings--a fine fellow and probably a bit of a bore. He likes kids, on whom he suggests lavishing love, support and discipline--in that order. He is polite and health-conscious. He’s in favor of nature (in its tamer manifestations), reading and the work ethic. Nearly always prudent, he has a faint streak of romanticism that, alas, finds wider expression in sentimentality. He believes in small joys, but, with a single exception (No. 518--look it up), he doesn’t even consider radical ones that harbor elements of danger.

These are very American books, you see, embodying our culture’s penchant for oversimplification and its naive optimism. Brown is quietly but firmly upbeat, striving to present a cheerful, positive front not only to others but to himself (No. 188: “Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know”; No. 210: “Commit yourself to constant self-improvement”). If he has looked into the black void plumbed by, say, Dostoevsky or Sartre, he’s looked quickly away. The most he’ll acknowledge is the need to “Accept pain and disappointment as part of life” (No. 296). The tragic nature of human existence--gratuitous evil, for instance, or the fatal web of conflicting needs and desires--seems to be beyond even his imagination.

Predictably, he doesn’t reveal his vices or tell us how to deal with our own (apart from just saying the n-word). Another rather significant chunk of life he ignores is the erotic. Therefore, in the interest of the commonweal, I would like to proffer suggestion No. 1,029: Use a condom. Every time.

LIFE’S LITTLE INSTRUCTION BOOK

511 Suggestions, Observations, and Reminders on How to Live a Happy and Rewarding Life

LIFE’S LITTLE INSTRUCTION BOOK, Volume II

A Few More Suggestions, Observations, and Reminders on How to Live a Happy and Rewarding Life

By H. Jackson Brown Jr. (Rutledge Hill Press: $5.95 each, paperback)