Can the rise of literary realism, which appeared in the nineteenth century and then went on to dominate in the twentieth, be explained as a quest for advice about how to live? This is the question that drives much of Beth Blum's The Self-Help Compulsion, in which she connects not just literary realism but the whole modern history of literature—from the nineteenth century up to the present, in the twenty-first—to a markedly less respected genre, self-help literature. Blum asks whether the two modes, rather in spite of themselves, might be historically and functionally linked. She then samples from a wide, multinational swathe of modern literary products in order to arrive at an answer: yes, arguably.Blum shows how the vast majority of modern literature, like the self-help industry that would appear to comprise its inverse, appears dedicated to the policing and improvement of the self. The latter, Blum observes, “has historically been driven by an almost maniacal compulsion to negate the delusions of the imagination”—to “get real,” as the TV self-help personality Dr. Phil likes to put it (218–19). Meanwhile, a similar inquiry into how to do reality right seems to define contemporary literary fiction, Blum points out. Titles such as How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid, offer playful, seemingly ironic takes on the how-to impulse but, often, end up in rather earnest territory. Blum analyzes Heti's method of “superstitiously treat[ing] contingent details as clues to life management” (216), something that Heti herself has more or less admitted to. “I disagree when people say the book [How Should a Person Be?] doesn't answer the question,” Blum quotes Heti saying. “There are useful answers or half-answers, throughout it.” In this way, Blum demonstrates how, for Heti and other contemporary novelists, self-help amounts to more than an ironic framing and becomes a sincere enterprise, if perhaps accidentally.This is where Blum ends up in The Self-Help Compulsion, in chapter 6, but it is also where she starts out, explaining in the introduction how, over time, advice literature became conflated with more serious literary writing, especially in the eyes of middlebrow readers. By way of example, Blum mentions Cheryl Strayed, who, in addition to being seen as a serious literary figure and author of a best-selling memoir, has also enjoyed a career as an advice columnist. For years Strayed anonymously responded to readers' requests for compassion and guidance via the “Dear Sugar” column, which was published by the Rumpus until it was turned into a popular podcast produced by the New York Times. Strayed's crossover appeal provides evidence for Blum's claim, which builds onto one made previously by the critic Timothy Aubry, that “it is increasingly the case that the omnivorous readers who peruse The New Yorker belong to the same educational strata as those who enjoy Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love” (23). Blum's point is that modern literature still privileges the analysis of the self, and that this situation makes for some rather inevitable overlaps with the self-help industry and the legions of books and printed materials that help to sustain it. This is why we get books like Heti's How Should a Person Be? published alongside David Shields's best-selling advice book Reality Hunger, which reads as a manifesto for living life realistically and appeared at the same time as Heti's (222).Blum's explorations in The Self-Help Compulsion are guided by an overriding interest in modernity itself. This leads her to eschew simple periodization and to focus, instead, on a curated series of historical moments that, together, span more than 170 years. Blum justifies this method of organization, which involves “burrow[ing] in” to specific moments in time rather than “offering an exhaustive inventory” of them, as a means of narrating not the linear ascendance of self-help, but its haphazard growth as a genre, which has been prone to fits and starts. She is particularly interested in looking at the early twentieth century, the era in which “self-help began to more fully resemble the industry we know today” and went from “being a gamble . . . to a commercial juggernaut” (16). That transition, Blum argues, kicked off in 1859 with Samuel Smiles's popular handbook Self-Help, which popularized the term and was a best seller, despite having to be self-published after it was rejected by publishers. Smiles's text forms a point of origination in the story that Blum is telling about how self-help became a genre in its own right, built on “the Victorian tenets of industriousness, perseverance, honesty, and self-discipline” (13). And crucial to that overall philosophy were real-life examples from history, including the successes of “renowned authors,” that Smiles selected as evidence for his claims about the importance of independence and individualization. Thanks to Smiles and his reverence for the literary canon, self-help went from something unheard of to a mainstay of modern publishing.That transition is likewise highlighted in chapter 3, in which Blum pits literary producers against the currents of self-help that defined the early 1900s. On one side of that divide, Blum presents writers like Flann O'Brien, Edith Wharton, and Henry James; on the other, we find a range of self-help industry counterparts to these more celebrated figures, like George Gurdjieff, who pioneered a course for self-improvement and elevated consciousness called “the Fourth Way.” Through Gurdjieff and others—including the French father of positive thinking, Émile Coué—Blum sees a writer like Wharton as “lampooning the pseudospirituality of the age” (120). What's additionally fascinating is that, according to Blum, Wharton condemns self-help in a way that compares to her condemnations of literary modernism. That involves taking aim at the “the cultishness, the primitivism, the fetishism of obscurity and difficulty, the linguistic bravado, even the decadence of male ‘genius’” Blum observes (121–22). Wharton's novel Twilight Sleep, she argues, knits these two concerns together, showcasing the “correspondence between modernism's eschewal of common sense and self-help's deployment of vague and impenetrable language” (119). In other words, modernist writers' interest in creating impenetrable and unmarketable prose compared, in the eyes of realist writers like Wharton, to the vague platitudes peddled by the self-help industry and its army of questionable figureheads and authorities.Among Blum's many compelling claims is this: “Self-help is a vehicle for the romance of upward mobility” (33). Blum slowly works up to this argument, which appears in the final pages of the introduction, but the idea proves fundamental to her overall approach to reading and selecting pieces of the modern literary canon. She describes that approach as being “essentially sociological” because it is based on the idea that “situated practice is worth pursuing as an object of inquiry regardless of whether the research authorizes this practice or not” (32–3). In other words, Blum is interested in self-help as a site and source of power, if not necessarily in pronouncing judgments about its efficacy or beneficence. Casting self-help as “romantic” and as a genre that is structured by fantasy helps readers to see its downsides while grasping the “compulsory” part of its power, which lies in its capacity for seduction. The word “compulsion,” in this case, refers to what Blum labels the self-help genre's “self-perpetuating persistence” (20), its tendency always to be everywhere by appearing amorphous and without clear definition. And as a genre, it's also a perpetually valid one, since no one can object to the idea of progress or improvement, nor can anyone ever claim to be done with the work of improving the self. This is what makes the idea of self-help “compulsive,” Blum explains, noting that her use of that term descends from Jennifer Fleissner's thinking about how a compulsive will to control acts as a cover for our fears about the opposite, meaning chaos.Self-help's role in driving fantasies of upward mobility, as Blum demonstrates throughout The Self-Help Compulsion, finds its echo in realist literature because the former, much like the latter, is “inextricable from the issue of social class” (22). Self-help entices readers who are looking for a way up and a way out, and it thus gains particular traction amongst the middlebrow set. Likewise, realist literature, with its focus on domestic dramas and everyday occurrences, has also been historically aimed at middlebrow readers. This conflation of middlebrow desires coalesces, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, around notions of reform and personal uplift, with the literary canon coming into play as a possible site of that uplift. It's this idea that gives us books like Declan Kiberd's 2009 bestseller Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece, which Blum mentions at the start of chapter 4, as a launching point for mulling the complications that high modernism brings to the pursuit of literary uplift. Blum notes, for example, how reviewers of Kiberd's book “wondered why [Joyce] did not write in simpler terms” if he wished to communicate directly with middlebrow, average audiences (145). Viewed in this light, Joyce's Ulysses looks less like a manual dedicated to the “art of the everyday” and more like its polar opposite since, as Blum points out, “the self-help manual is defined by plain speech, direct address, and an appeal to common sense” (145). Blum argues, in essence, that Kiberd succeeds in bringing Ulysses under the banner of the self-help compulsion by cherry-picking samples from Joyce's masterwork in a manner that sidesteps considerations of the author's style in favor of instead highlighting “moments of universality, of quotidian intimacy and domestic wisdom” (146). Blum is suggesting that Kiberd, in reading Joyce's Ulysses selectively and through the lens of self-help, recasts a touchstone work of literary modernism and converts it into a middlebrow, realist text. This is a bold observation that stems from Blum's methodological investments in reader response, among other critical strategies.Indeed, Blum combines a sociological approach with other pieces of a disparate, but convincing, methodological repertoire. In her quest to sketch a rough genealogy of the self-help genre and place it alongside a curated history of modern literature, Blum pulls from the traditions of book-history scholarship alongside reader response, feminist critique, and even African diasporic studies. The last of these does a lot in Blum's book to expand the stakes of the discussion surrounding the compulsive quest for “uplift” that is to be found within self-help literature. Blum points to a tradition of African American thought that “advocates a version of self-help as autonomy, racial unity, and self-sufficiency” (235). Blum points to historical examples of this tendency, like Marcus Garvey and Gwendolyn Brooks, alongside more contemporary versions like the poet Terrance Hayes and Barratunde Thurston's memoir How to Be Black. Yet, pausing to read into these two examples, Blum arrives at some important conclusions about how the tradition itself has diverged over time and transformed into something different, especially for African American writers like Hayes and Thurston. “In place of irresponsible promises of material transcendence, these works are concerned with the reality of limited agency in a way that does not lead to political resignation,” Blum writes (237). This break in tradition returns us, once again, to the subject of reality and to a consideration of the role that it plays in creating fictions of what could be, or what the individual could turn into, given the right conditioning.For all its focus on progress and improvement, though, many critics over the years have acknowledged the dangers of self-help, which risks shifting responsibility onto the individual and away from a critique of the systems and institutions under which the individual is forced to live. Blum broaches this subject with respect to Donald Trump, who is a professed admirer of the self-help author Norman Vincent Peale and his work The Power of Positive Thinking. As Blum describes, “It is Peale whom Trump credits with instilling his ‘positive’ outlook and unbridled confidence in the idea that he could become anything he desired” (32). This lends a deeper, more sinister dimension to Blum's discussions of self-help. Rather than serving as a vehicle for “uplift,” self-help starts to look like a genre that was made to both accompany and excuse the occurrence of widespread systemic collapse, an idea that appears refracted through Blum's creation of a historical timeline that narrates its rise. The idea of turning to books for clues about how to mitigate the effects of institutional abandonment makes as much sense for the late nineteenth century and the Gilded Age, which first witnessed the genre's ascendance, as it does for our own now. But it also makes the ironic in-joke about self-help that is so enjoyed by contemporary literary producers—à la Sheila Heti and Mohsin Hamid—a bit less funny. The compulsion to join in on the joke and to present novels as manuals for right living might seem like a convenient way to make a case for the relevance of such literature. But, as Blum observes in this book, it risks lumping the contemporary literary arts in with a genre that has, historically speaking, preyed off of and sustained readers' fears about their own inadequacies.