The literary-critical marketplace now suffers social media as a necessary side street at the very least, if not a central forum. As a result, it has adopted some of the latter’s methods of preference and promotion, and a clear and quick route to notoriety has been established: The aspiring critic writes a long and negative review-essay, framed around a popular and fashionable writer. The essay should make the writer in question representative of broader cultural themes, gesturing in argument toward an ambitious social diagnosis. At the same time, it should be peppered with slashing close-reading, wounding invective, and acute personal jabs. If these ingredients are appropriately balanced, the essay might then go viral (meaning in this field that it achieves tens of thousands of readers, as opposed to several hundred).
Reputations can be forged through this process. The recent defenestration of the erstwhile queen-regent of the form, Lauren Oyler, by a snappy new challenger demonstrates that the model is still alive and working. But paradoxically, it also reveals its fleeting, meteoric nature. As Becca Rothfeld writes in her excellent debut collection All Things Are Too Small, negative criticism of errant work is essential to the regulation of aesthetic standards — indifference simply “leaves open the possibility that the things in question are terrible.” But in a vicious ouroboric cycle, Oyler’s reputation is now assailed by a practitioner of her breakout form. It is Rothfeld — whose name is also probably best-known for a sharp, personally targeted, and viral essay of her own — who has graduated beyond this dog-eat-dog ecosystem and to an altogether mightier position on the food chain.
It was Rothfeld’s analysis of Sally Rooney and her work — “Normal Novels,” first published in the Point and republished in this collection — which indicated she might be set for a similarly insurgent trajectory. Coming in 2020, the same year as the TV adaptation of Normal People and probably the peak of Rooney-mania, it seemed that Rothfeld had popped up to puncture an overblown reputation. The essay has its smattering of put-downs: “Rooney’s … fiction is about as politically radical as it is formally adventurous — which is to say, not very”; “commercial romances that specialize in a certain sort of fantasy fulfilment”; “Rooney and her readers hope to bask in the self-congratulatory glow of their supposed egalitarianism without ceding any of their accolades.” And Rooney probably hadn’t suffered the insult of having her work critiqued alongside Fifty Shades or Twilight before. But, read back between hard covers, and with a ceasefire maintained in the Rooney wars for now, it is not the aggression of the essay that strikes but its effortless lucidity and searching intelligence.
These are the traits that define this entire collection. Because this is no simple selection of occasional journalism (which, as Martin Amis said of one of his own grab bags, could only be “offered with all generic humility”). This is a book with a shape, and a critic with a purpose and a message. The opening essay, which supplies the title of the collection, is Rothfeld’s manifesto. “The minimalist tack … is on the rise,” she writes, referring to general contraction in gluttony, excess, and mess in cultural life. By Rothfeld’s lights, this is an error of judgment edging into perversity. Our inclination toward an ecstatic and refulgent aesthetic is what makes us human, she writes. And, for this reason, litigating good aesthetics from bad is of social importance. Political egalitarianism is all very well, but in culture the stakes are too great for a “democratizing” force to lay down the law. The critic’s purpose is therefore not simply advisory or consultative, but practically existential in nature.
With such claims behind her, it is fortunate that Rothfeld spends the rest of the book demonstrating her own capacity for the role. Though they are all perfectly balanced blends of criticism, memoir, and argumentation, the essays in this collection divide into two broad types. There are several long, sophisticated, and more deliberately political interrogations of broad social trends — minimalism, mindfulness, and feminism. Alongside these, shorter and in greater number, are free-flowing pieces upon a particular genre of art or artist, with some unifying theme shared between the subject and Rothfeld herself binding together her meditation.
Of the latter genre, “The Flesh, It Makes You Crazy” is probably the most successful in a crowded field. It opens with a description of the David Cronenberg film Shivers, in which the residents of a luxury apartment complex are infected with a parasite that turns them into creatures of pure appetite. The film culminates with the residents reduced to something like a mindless orgy, with the scientist responsible for the parasite the final victim. But, Rothfeld goes on to ask, is “reduced” right? The essay then segues into an account of Rothfeld’s early relationship with her now-husband, before looping back to more on Cronenberg’s body-horror anti-parables. The implicit and actually complimentary comparison, soon to be explicitly posed, is between the Ovidian metamorphoses Cronenberg inflicts on his canvases, and the transformation the thing we call love inflicts on the human soul.
The same spirit and some of the same questions animate what is the most seriously argued and permanently valuable part of the book. In the essay “Only Mercy: Sex After Consent,” Rothfeld tackles feminism in the post-#MeToo landscape, which she argues has forked along two paths in its attempt to circumnavigate the same obstacle: the limits of consent. The first, associated with the political Right, is the “new puritanism,” which sees consent as an utterly inadequate standard of protection for women against sexual violence and abuse, and argues for a more comprehensive set of social and legal mores to reduce the sexualization of life and culture. The latter, associated with the Left, views consent as a minimum standard, but holds sex to political critique, demanding that we analyze our sexual desires as products of the inequalities of society around us.
Rothfeld picks out a subtle but trenchant third position, based upon her neo-Romantic vision of the world. The sex puritans can make no positive case for sex, she writes, regarding it not as a joy, but a threat. But in many ways the post-consent feminists fall into the same trap, demanding that we self-abnegate all those desires which, though perhaps wrong and impolitic, we are nonetheless effectively born with. Feminism must reclaim a concept of “Eros,” and regard the sexual space as “a world apart” or “a second life” akin to the free-play bacchanalia or “carnival” described by Mikhail Bakhtin, where usual social rules are temporarily suspended. This is typical of Rothfeld’s method: with Art and Life as her tools, she makes a determined case for the unpredicted, the undetermined, and the human, even when she winds up testing several modish moral assumptions.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
It is all the more fortunate that, in making such a maximalist case, Rothfeld is capable of doing so in such a greedy and exuberant style. These essays are full of original comic turns — overzealous advocates of straightforward writing become “Occam’s barbers,” while the ambient awareness of one’s breath during a tedious “mindfulness” session is wryly registered as “a testament to the dull cunning of the body.” More difficult still, she can make her writing sufficiently alive to match the case she is making for the vitality of Life. In the essay on Cronenberg and love, we are hit with a rush of aqueous metaphors so vivid they almost make for uncomfortable reading: “bouts of lust” require “sliming, swelling, and secreting”; “an erotic craving” is “inextricable from the ferment that foams up when one self is sluiced into another”; and, just as Rothfeld is falling utterly in love with her husband, we see her “dripping beneath [her] dress … with wet still pearling [her] thighs.”
This is erotic writing, from someone whose provocations are never simply journalistic snipes, but considered interventions on parts of the world she finds wanting. We are fortunate to have someone writing and thinking her way with such intelligence into the corners of experience and contestation too frequently neglected out of embarrassment or fear.
Nicholas Harris is a commissioning editor at UnHerd and a freelance critic.
