Reading the first pages of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, you would not guess that it has spent more than 120 weeks on the bestseller list. Bestselling books, generally, are in the business of telling people what they want to hear. To judge by the most recent New York Times list, people want to be assured that true love will triumph, that justice will be served, that kids look at their damn phones too much, and that the government has been covering up evidence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. The Midnight Library, a novel published in 2020, does not begin like such a book; its main character, already grieving her parents and several failed relationships, becomes so crushed by a fresh rash of losses that she tries to end her life.

But you don’t sell 10 million copies of an unmitigated downer, and by the end of The Midnight Library, the suicidal 35-year-old Nora Seed has learned a bucketful of life lessons that rescue her from her terminal self-loathing. So has the reader; whatever they’re facing, they might come out at the end of The Midnight Library with a few aphorisms to help them through the day. Call Haig’s book a therapy novel: not fiction about a person’s experience in analysis, but a story that serves the same purpose as therapy—to help readers work out their problems.

Now, with The Life Impossible, his follow-up—also featuring a depressed heroine, although this one is twice Nora’s age—Haig attempts a new riff on this market-proven premise. While it is surely easier to administer helpful guidance than to write a novel as great as, say, The Great Gatsby, the therapy novel has its pitfalls. A great novel just needs to be itself, but the therapy novel is only as valuable as the counsel it doles out. Granted, the audience for such books rarely demands more than platitudes, but as Haig demonstrates, the quest for easily dispensable wisdom has a way of leading the unwary writer astray.

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The Midnight Library belongs to that long tradition of bestselling novels that serve as parables for the perplexed or despairing. Suspended between life and death, Nora finds herself in an infinite library whose every book but one recounts a life she might have led if she had made a different choice at some pivotal moment. The sole exception, a tome called The Book of Regrets, lists everything she wishes she’d done or not done, and she can barely stand to read more than a few lines of that one at a time. But as Nora opens various books in the Midnight Library and is transported into her alternative fates—as an Olympic swimmer, a glaciologist, a rock star, and a pub owner, to name but a few—The Book of Regrets grows lighter, its pages gradually erased. She realizes that every life path involves concessions and losses, and many of those paths are not as satisfying as they might appear from the outside: The Olympian’s identity is defined by the crudest notion of success; the rock star loses her brother, a member of her band, to an overdose, etc. If the concept of visiting the what-might-have-been sounds vaguely familiar, you’ll note the name of the dull market town in the English Midlands where Haig situates Nora: Bedford, a reference to Bedford Falls, the setting of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Books of this type provoke strong feelings. Some readers—a lot of them—have found The Midnight Library (or Jonathan Livingston Seagull or The Alchemist or Ishmael) transformative, while others seem to detest them with a passion. (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Siddhartha, and The Little Prince are less polarizing.) Haig didn’t start out writing in this vein. His earliest novels, although fantastical, were hardly heart-warmers. They often grafted sardonic gothic devices onto the banality of British suburbia. In 2006’s The Dead Fathers Club, a riff on Hamlet, an 11-year-old is charged with avenging his father’s murder by the uncle who wants to take over the family pub. A grieving father possessed by his dead son tyrannizes the boy’s twin sister in 2008’s The Possession of Mr. Cave. Haig has an eye for evocative detail, and his writing is humorous, wry, and literate—he scatters references to Italo Calvino, Foucault, and theoretical mathematics throughout his novels.

It was with 2015’s Reasons to Stay Alive that Haig had his first bestseller, and with it caught a glimpse of how he might become more than a magic-realist Nick Hornby hovering in the liminal space between YA and midlist adult fiction. A memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive recounts Haig’s battle with clinical depression, which he describes with wit and verve, but also with the sort of mottoes fans get tattooed on their forearms to remind them of the book that saved their life: “Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile.” “Live in the moment. Live in the breath.” “It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but—if that is the metaphor—you are the sky.” The tone of Reasons to Stay Alive, serious but not heavy and a bit self-mocking, seems particularly suited to a young, self-conscious readership who grew up online. For indignation addicts, the book has a list of insensitive things often said to people with depression. It reassures its readers, “We are all so weird that, really, none of us are.” And it offers deft descriptions of why they might nevertheless feel alienated: “You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”

The Midnight Library seems aimed at an older demographic, those in the same early midlife when Dante found himself lost in a dark wood. You have to have years under your belt, after all, to accumulate a book full of regrets. Whatever its detractors might say, The Midnight Library is a fairly tightly constructed book. While it seems implausible that one woman could possess the gifts to become an Olympic athlete, an international pop star, a top scientist, or a noted academic, Nora is otherwise a believably depressed woman. The lives Haig imagines for her contain a credible mix of joys and sorrows. Haig can turn a phrase and deliver an insight, as when Nora, embedded in one of her alternative lives, hears a confidence from a complete stranger who believes her to be a good friend: “This must be the hardest bit about being a spy,” she thinks. “The emotion people store in you, like a bad investment.” Yes, The Midnight Library includes the sort of self-reflection that feels like the product of extensive professional counseling, counseling that Nora hasn’t had: “Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough.” But its central conceit is coherent, and its primary message—that every life is imperfect—is both solid and worth reiterating.

The Life Impossible, on the other hand, lives up to its title, though not in the way, I imagine, Haig means it. It is less modest and grounded than its predecessor and far less effective at the therapy novel’s salubrious mission. Grace, the novel’s narrator, is 72 and—like virtually every Haig character—coping with the death of loved ones. Her son died in a traffic accident at age 11, and her husband a few years before the novel begins. Marking time in (yes, again) the English Midlands, Grace diagnoses herself with anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure, a symptom Haig described in his own memoir of depression. She receives notice that she has inherited a house in Ibiza from a woman she last heard from many years ago. Mystified by this legacy and her old friend’s unexplained disappearance, Grace flies to the island to get some answers.

The first noticeable problem with The Life Impossible is that much of the novel reads like a travel brochure for Ibiza. In addition to exhaustively rhapsodizing about the island’s famous sights and celebrated nightlife, Haig has his characters insist over and over how “special” Ibiza is and how the ordinary rules don’t apply there. “This is Ibiza!” somebody is always shouting whenever Grace complains about some unlikely development.

And there are a lot of those. The story Grace steps into involves a vast stretch of magical seagrass inhabited by an advanced alien consciousness that infuses the minds of select individuals, investing them with tremendous powers. Grace, it turns out, is one of the chosen (“special,” like Ibiza itself, people keep telling her), and after her encounter with “La Presencia,” Grace can see other people’s futures and pasts, read minds, perform telekinetic feats, and access vast stores of information like a human Wikipedia. You’d think that this would more than equip her to fend off the novel’s antagonist—a sinister developer intent on building a resort hotel on Es Vedrà, a small, rocky island off Ibiza’s southwest coast—but it turns out that he too possesses extraordinary, though evil, abilities. Also, there is a portal to another planet where everything is perfect, and a jar full of glowing seawater that gives Grace prophetic dreams.

A retired, sensible math teacher, Grace initially resists the tsunami of woo-woo that drenches her as soon as she sets foot on Ibiza. But by the time she shatters the glass of a restaurant lobster tank after telepathically experiencing the misery of the crustaceans inside it, resistance has become futile. She has been brought to Ibiza to defend the island from satanic hoteliers because, as the crusty old salt who serves as her guide explains it, “La Presencia is basically an intergalactic activist. It is here to protect things. It also has organized itself. Just as we need to.” Along with lectures on how Grace needs to overcome the psychological hurdle of believing that she “wasn’t a good person who deserved happiness,” the reader is subjected to boilerplate exhortations to political and environmental protest.

Characters in The Life Impossible speak in pseudoscientific New Age–y disquisitions: “Our bodies create inner light. Biophotons. And the bioluminescent photons of La Presencia interact with the bioluminescent photons within us, because light gets through and inside everything. And, via the triggering of a stunningly complex hormonal response and a kind of biological information transfer, these new photons untap our potential.” It is only a matter of time, I told myself as I waded through this palaver, before we get to “Everything is connected,” that vapid insight favored by well-off people on spiritual quests. Sure enough, about three-quarters into the novel, Grace explains that “everyone flows into everyone else without even realizing.” Whatever that means.

People read novels for many reasons, all of them valid. The form is capacious. The Midnight Library does seem to have been useful to many people, which doesn’t make it art but is still not nothing. Yet there’s something puritanical and dispiriting about the insistence from some readers that novels dispense morals and messages. The novelists who serve this audience end up treating fiction as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself. We don’t expect other works of art—paintings or symphonies, for example—to provide us with self-help. The novels I’ve found most meaningful, from Jane Eyre to Never Let Me Go, can’t be boiled down to nuggets of advice or advocacy for mental health or conservation or any other cause, however worthy. The value of a work of art is simple in itself, like the value of a human being, apart from whatever utility it might have.

It’s hard to see what utility the dime-store cosmology of The Life Impossible might have to offer anyone. Who finds comfort reading about extraterrestrial seagrass and being irradiated with bioluminescent photons? The simplicity and ambiguity of The Midnight Library’s premise—a reader could easily believe that Nora’s time in the library is a hallucination she experiences as she lies unconscious after her suicide attempt—gave it power, the streamlined potency of a myth or parable. Nora’s story could be the reader’s. It could be anyone’s; it doesn’t require that she live on a magical island or be singled out by superintelligent aliens as humanity’s savior. I suspect that Haig began The Life Impossible with the notion of retelling The Tempest but, somewhere along the way, got lost—and that puts him in no position to help readers find themselves.

But what do I know? A novel has never saved my life. Novels are, however, one of the things that make my life worth living. Just not this one.