Which could be equally dangerous, in the circumstances. In fact, so obvious are its temptations, a part of you will perhaps be eager to sympathise with another of Ronson's new acquaintances, "Brian", a Scientologist who works in the cult's anti-psychiatry wing. Even as you reassure yourself you have no psychopathic tendencies (anyone who worries they are an unfeeling, manipulative lunatic is probably quite cuddly), you will mentally run through your friends and neighbours and find them wanting (tick, tick, tick, you will go, the behaviour of that woman who told you to get a manicure the day your mother died now satisfyingly explained). Hare's test is, even by his account, overused, and it's easy to see why: its 20-point checklist, so easy to understand, is seductive and thrilling.
Chasing this mystery, like a spaniel after its tail, he stumbles on Bob Hare, the Canadian psychologist who has formulated a supposedly definitive questionnaire for the diagnosing of psychopaths. Ronson is asked by the friend of a friend to investigate the appearance of an elaborate handmade book, Being or Nothingness, that has begun appearing in the pigeonholes of academics and other wonks across the world. The book starts, for want of any better launch pad, with a shaggy dog story. Finishing up, you gaze at his bibliography and wonder, with a sigh, where to begin. His subject is huge and tragic and terrifying but there is something tinny and unfinished about his investigation. He skates when you want him to dig he does that amazed, disingenuous thing, when a little old-fashioned anger and indignation would serve him far better he makes peculiar connections between things that are not really connected at all. But it also reveals, sometimes painfully, the limitations of his journalistic technique. Ronson's new book is provocative and interesting, and you will, I guarantee, zip merrily through it. And, in the case of The Psychopath Test, perhaps more than occasionally. T he difficulty with reviewing Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test is that, if I am to be honest, I risk sounding like a person with no sense of humour – and who wants to be one of those? Certainly not Ronson, whose joke rate is as indiscriminate as it is high, by which I mean that though the belly laughs come thick and fast – my God, he is funny – they are occasionally accompanied by a certain kind of queasiness.
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