Daniel Kahneman was the world’s greatest scholar of how people get things wrong. And he was a great observer of his own mistakes. He declared his wrongness many times, on matters large and small, in public and in private. He was wrong, he said, about the work that had won the Nobel Prize. He wallowed in the state of having been mistaken; it became a topic for his lectures, a pedagogical ideal. Science has its vaunted self-corrective impulse, but even so, few working scientists—and fewer still of those who gain significant renown—will ever really cop to their mistakes. Kahneman never stopped admitting fault. He did it almost to a fault.
And so modern Stoicism finds itself somehow settling into Successories-style aphorisms, screw-your-feelings machismo and the ends justifying the means. This is many things, but it’s not a coherent moral philosophy.
The narrative spine of "Wild Houses" has all the trappings of a thriller, but the nighttime quarry scene should give readers pause. Barrett, a native of Ireland’s County Mayo and now based in Toronto, is more interested in character than plot, and his story’s scaffolding is largely an excuse to delve into the psyches of Dev, Doll, and Nicky, Doll’s 17-year-old girlfriend who works at a nearby pub called the Pearl.