Hint: It's Not Plastics

By Lev Grossman

SOME PEOPLE HAVE ALL THE LUCK. One day a minor government functionary named Saul was on his way to Damascus when God leaned down and politely informed him that his purpose in life was to serve Jesus. Saul the Pharisee promptly fell off his horse and got up as Paul the Apostle. He had it easy--except for the falling-off-the-horse part--but for those of us who don't have the benefit of divine career counseling, now there's Po Bronson's What Should I Do with My Life? (Random House; 370 pages).

Bronson, 38, is a successful journalist and novelist best known for writing about Silicon Valley, but when he started What Should I Do with My Life?, he was asking himself that same question. The dotcom boom was over, he had a child on the way, and the TV show he was writing for had just been canceled to make way for Temptation Island. He was at a crossroads. So he began telling everybody he met that he was looking for tales about how people found their purpose in life. Relying entirely on a grass-roots, and-they-told-two-friends network, Bronson started collecting life stories. Two years later, he had interviewed about 900 people.

The result is something more than the usual self-help guff. What Should I Do with My Life? is closer to the oral histories of Studs Terkel or This American Life than to Tony Robbins. What ties Bronson's subjects together is that most of them never got that Pauline postcard, that mystical memo telling them what they were here for. They had to figure it out the hard way. Many pulled courageous, tire-screeching, midcareer 180s, like the miserable marine biologist who threw away his Ph.D. to become a deliriously happy dentist, or the hard-charging vice president at First Boston who chucked it all to raise catfish in the Mississippi Delta.

Some of the stories are inspirational, like that of the unlettered electrician who bootstrapped his way to the head of his own solar-power company. Some are bizarre: Bronson talks to a Tibetan refugee who received a letter telling him he was the reincarnation of an ancient Buddhist spiritual leader. Some are bathetic: Carl Kurlander, the screenwriter responsible for the callow 1980s hit St. Elmo's Fire, abruptly left Hollywood for his native Pittsburgh, Pa., in search of his lost artistic integrity; he didn't find it. What Should I Do with My Life? is an old question borrowed from a sacred context, but Bronson is asking it in a modern, secular age, when the voice from on high has been replaced by one from inside. But now, as then, not everybody can hear it.

Bronson doesn't have Terkel's gift for conveying character through dialogue, and he can be very, very earnest. It would try the patience of a saint--be it St. Paul or St. Elmo--to listen to the overachieving ballet dancer--runway model--M.B.A. who moans on and on about how empty her life is. Maybe Bronson puts up with it because, even with the hopeless narcissists, he knows he's on the trail of something real: by and large, the interviews are scarily honest, with people sweating and crying and popping antidepressants as they fight to find themselves.

So what do we learn from all this? Quit school? Go back to school? Walk away from our comfy, high-paying job? Run away to a Caribbean island? Bronson's subjects try all these solutions and more, but he has the good grace to spare us easy answers. The fact is, we already know from self-help gurus what to do. Follow your dreams. Never give up. Believe in yourself. The answers to the ultimate question are often cliches, and that doesn't mean they're wrong--they're just not very helpful. What's helpful is seeing that other people are trying too, even if they're failing.

Bronson is a fan of failure. "Failure's hard," he writes, "but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever." Bronson believes, and his stories prove, that failure is how you eliminate the wrong turns on the way to the right one. And that when you fall off your horse, sometimes all you get is a bruised rear end, but sometimes the horse is trying to tell you something.