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Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
Viargo, 304pp, £15.00, ISBN 9780349016221
reviewed by Grace Tomlinson
A chapter in US critic Becca Rothfeld’s astonishing debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, opens with professional minimalist Marie Kondo ripping out what she wants to keep from her books and disposing of the rest. Her newly freed pages are printed with sentences that inspire her, and are therefore allowed their paper-thin allotment in Kondo’s carefully decluttered home.
The more extreme minimalist can save yet more space, if only in one dimension, by cutting out these revered sentences from their superfluous page, but perhaps whole sheets are more easily organised than a jumble of flimsy scraps. Regardless, it is the sentences Kondo aims to keep, slotted into a dossier and amputated from their context — an impulse Rothfeld, a recent winner of prestigious Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, takes as an unwitting prophecy for the future of the novel.
Rothfeld connects the general cultural fetish for decluttering with a literary turn towards fragmentation. The modern fragment novel is no more than ‘a folder of orphaned pages, a compendium of blurb-sized missives’ — a gesture at a form rather than a form itself. Guilty parties include Jenny Offil’s novels, Dept. of Speculation (2014) and Weather (2020); Kate Zembreno’s Drifts (2020); and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021).
Rothfeld’s dissatisfaction with the fragment novel is just one expression of her central thesis: that we should be in continual pursuit of excess. Taking aim at the ‘paucities’ of contemporary culture, from ‘new puritanism’ to the invasive spread of mindfulness doctrines, she advocates for the full licensing of our desires, however flexible and capacious they may be. A hungering for ‘fictions brimming with facts [. . .] flush with form’ is just one among many, none of which should ever be met with restraint. Instead, we should ‘fight emptiness’ with ‘fullness’, aesthetic abundance, sexual ecstasy, and gluttony of thought.
The realms in which Rothfeld feels we could want more range dizzyingly wide: between essays, we jump from our bodily appetites to the tragic impossibility of living two simultaneous lives. One particularly incisive essay, ‘The Flesh, It Makes You Crazy’ excavates the mutative potential of the erotic encounter through filmmaker David Cronenberg’s oeuvre, alongside Rothfeld’s own lustful puddling upon meeting her now-husband (‘dripping’ ‘wet pearling [her] thighs’).
Rothfeld is at her best when she is laser-focused, lavish in her attentions to thinkers she means only to skewer. It might seem churlish to suggest that she could have shaved some of her sentiments down here or there — regardless, some chapters would have benefitted, especially where she lapses most indulgently into the metaphysical. Instead, Rothfeld accomplishes her most impressive feats when she commits, full-throttle, to the political and moral stakes of cultural life. An early criticism of the fragment novel’s spindly prose becomes an argument against its inevitable ethical malnourishment. The distractions of the internet, domestic labour, and the mundane jobs to which the writer must devote eight hours a day are impossible to comment on in a form that too faithfully reproduces their conditions: ‘it not a rejection; is only a reenactment’.
In an essay on the modern mindfulness movement and its emphasis on ‘non-judgemental awareness’, Rothfeld revitalises the now-familiar refrain that a diffuse malaise is perhaps a reasonable reaction to inadequate employee protections, long hours, and meaningless work. Mindfulness, touted as the cure to despondency, is anti-thought, anti-judgement – for Rothfeld, this amounts to an effort to expunge the self, in all its ‘esctasies’ and ‘absorptions’. Removed from a therapeutic context that recommends use ‘sometimes, briefly, or during spells of extreme distress’, mindfulness is applied so liberally that its practitioners are rendered passive and inert. In the face of this, our criticisms and our judgements, even our neuroses, are to be treasured – they allow us to identify injustice, so we may act. For a critic whose own recovery from depression is partly attributed to the ‘the silver flicker of the screen’, aesthetic judgment is also a moral necessity, and abundant thought is one of its prerequisites.
A stand-out in the collection, Rothfeld’s most agile and lengthiest chapter is ‘Only Mercy: Sex After Consent’, an intervention into post-consent thought. In the wake of #MeToo, consent alone has been found an inadequate standard for ethical sex. We are asked to recognise that our desires are not free-standing and home-grown, but distorted by cultural contexts, and therefore open to interrogation. So far, so good. But by hastening to remind us that ‘the social origin of a desire is not sufficient to render it inauthentic’, Rothfeld exposes post-consent’s own limitations. Neither right-wing pundits, among which ‘freelance polemicist’ Louise Perry and centre-right columnist Christine Emba are counted, nor leftist academics, such as the inimitable Amia Srinivasan or Queen Mary’s Katherine Angel, have presented viable solutions to the problem of desire. If all our wants are handed to us under the shadow of patriarchy, the prospect of them ever being ethically satisfied seems bleak. To borrow from poet and critic Kay Gabriel: ‘what is to be done given that we have the desires we do?’
For Rothfeld, both Srinivasan and Angel ‘gesture somewhat noncommittally at political solutions’ — i.e. a more comprehensive sexual revolution that redistributes power and wealth. However, in the interim before patriarchy’s inevitable dismantling, those ‘racked by impolitic cravings’ are left with nothing but tortured ‘personal scrupulousness’. The right offers little else, denying both the authenticity of any sexual desire extending beyond missionary and any possibility of fulfilling these disavowed proclivities. Through an elegant distillation of conservative thought, Rothfeld comes to argue that if we ‘refuse to reform the family or renovate the bedroom’ then we must ‘stomach self-denial without respite’; ‘personal restraint is the stopgap that takes the place of institutional reform’. Neither scruples nor self-denial will do. Might we dare to hope for ethical sex in the here and now, compatible with but not dependent on total societal overhaul?
Sex is good and we should have more of it — according, of course, to Rothfeld — because it ‘challenges us to make real [. . .] contact with other people’ rather than ‘the affirming balm of our own fantasies’. Eroticism is its own ‘ethical imperative’. Art also shares in this mandate. Just as we do not have to choose between ‘sensuality and morality’, nor do we need to separate beauty from goodness; ‘an artwork is good when and because it is beautiful’. A novel is an aesthetic success when it is ‘populated by complex characters’, and a moral one when it ‘resists the lure of caricature’. Similarly, when one or more parties fuck with an agenda, without recognition of their partner’s ‘violent individuality’, sex is not only boring, but ethically impoverished. It is only when we are rewritten by the shock of an aesthetic or erotic encounter that we can experiment with new and sometimes discomforting modes of relation, without the blinders of social expectation. In refusing to separate the good from the beautiful and the bad from the ugly, Rothfeld’s call for more is always also a call for better.
Even the essays that approach her thesis askew — on the puzzle novel and the serial killer, on the gendered arousals of waiting, a scalpel-sharp reading of Sally Rooney’s novels as anodyne wish-fulfilment — establish an ethics that stretches around the immensity of unadulterated wanting. Our excesses, aesthetic or otherwise, must justify themselves: ‘all else being equal, want is its own excuse of satisfaction’. It is up to us, and our discernment, to decide whether all else is indeed equal.
Good critical values are good ethical ones. In a 2022 issue of The Drift, she remarked, ‘if I did not think that aesthetic odiousness is an indication of moral rot [. . .] I would probably not be a critic.’ Rothfeld doesn’t only justify her excesses — she justifies her own job. If intelligent, skillful criticism is its own moral imperative, then All Things Are Too Small provides a commendable model for how it might be enacted.
The more extreme minimalist can save yet more space, if only in one dimension, by cutting out these revered sentences from their superfluous page, but perhaps whole sheets are more easily organised than a jumble of flimsy scraps. Regardless, it is the sentences Kondo aims to keep, slotted into a dossier and amputated from their context — an impulse Rothfeld, a recent winner of prestigious Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, takes as an unwitting prophecy for the future of the novel.
Rothfeld connects the general cultural fetish for decluttering with a literary turn towards fragmentation. The modern fragment novel is no more than ‘a folder of orphaned pages, a compendium of blurb-sized missives’ — a gesture at a form rather than a form itself. Guilty parties include Jenny Offil’s novels, Dept. of Speculation (2014) and Weather (2020); Kate Zembreno’s Drifts (2020); and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021).
Rothfeld’s dissatisfaction with the fragment novel is just one expression of her central thesis: that we should be in continual pursuit of excess. Taking aim at the ‘paucities’ of contemporary culture, from ‘new puritanism’ to the invasive spread of mindfulness doctrines, she advocates for the full licensing of our desires, however flexible and capacious they may be. A hungering for ‘fictions brimming with facts [. . .] flush with form’ is just one among many, none of which should ever be met with restraint. Instead, we should ‘fight emptiness’ with ‘fullness’, aesthetic abundance, sexual ecstasy, and gluttony of thought.
The realms in which Rothfeld feels we could want more range dizzyingly wide: between essays, we jump from our bodily appetites to the tragic impossibility of living two simultaneous lives. One particularly incisive essay, ‘The Flesh, It Makes You Crazy’ excavates the mutative potential of the erotic encounter through filmmaker David Cronenberg’s oeuvre, alongside Rothfeld’s own lustful puddling upon meeting her now-husband (‘dripping’ ‘wet pearling [her] thighs’).
Rothfeld is at her best when she is laser-focused, lavish in her attentions to thinkers she means only to skewer. It might seem churlish to suggest that she could have shaved some of her sentiments down here or there — regardless, some chapters would have benefitted, especially where she lapses most indulgently into the metaphysical. Instead, Rothfeld accomplishes her most impressive feats when she commits, full-throttle, to the political and moral stakes of cultural life. An early criticism of the fragment novel’s spindly prose becomes an argument against its inevitable ethical malnourishment. The distractions of the internet, domestic labour, and the mundane jobs to which the writer must devote eight hours a day are impossible to comment on in a form that too faithfully reproduces their conditions: ‘it not a rejection; is only a reenactment’.
In an essay on the modern mindfulness movement and its emphasis on ‘non-judgemental awareness’, Rothfeld revitalises the now-familiar refrain that a diffuse malaise is perhaps a reasonable reaction to inadequate employee protections, long hours, and meaningless work. Mindfulness, touted as the cure to despondency, is anti-thought, anti-judgement – for Rothfeld, this amounts to an effort to expunge the self, in all its ‘esctasies’ and ‘absorptions’. Removed from a therapeutic context that recommends use ‘sometimes, briefly, or during spells of extreme distress’, mindfulness is applied so liberally that its practitioners are rendered passive and inert. In the face of this, our criticisms and our judgements, even our neuroses, are to be treasured – they allow us to identify injustice, so we may act. For a critic whose own recovery from depression is partly attributed to the ‘the silver flicker of the screen’, aesthetic judgment is also a moral necessity, and abundant thought is one of its prerequisites.
A stand-out in the collection, Rothfeld’s most agile and lengthiest chapter is ‘Only Mercy: Sex After Consent’, an intervention into post-consent thought. In the wake of #MeToo, consent alone has been found an inadequate standard for ethical sex. We are asked to recognise that our desires are not free-standing and home-grown, but distorted by cultural contexts, and therefore open to interrogation. So far, so good. But by hastening to remind us that ‘the social origin of a desire is not sufficient to render it inauthentic’, Rothfeld exposes post-consent’s own limitations. Neither right-wing pundits, among which ‘freelance polemicist’ Louise Perry and centre-right columnist Christine Emba are counted, nor leftist academics, such as the inimitable Amia Srinivasan or Queen Mary’s Katherine Angel, have presented viable solutions to the problem of desire. If all our wants are handed to us under the shadow of patriarchy, the prospect of them ever being ethically satisfied seems bleak. To borrow from poet and critic Kay Gabriel: ‘what is to be done given that we have the desires we do?’
For Rothfeld, both Srinivasan and Angel ‘gesture somewhat noncommittally at political solutions’ — i.e. a more comprehensive sexual revolution that redistributes power and wealth. However, in the interim before patriarchy’s inevitable dismantling, those ‘racked by impolitic cravings’ are left with nothing but tortured ‘personal scrupulousness’. The right offers little else, denying both the authenticity of any sexual desire extending beyond missionary and any possibility of fulfilling these disavowed proclivities. Through an elegant distillation of conservative thought, Rothfeld comes to argue that if we ‘refuse to reform the family or renovate the bedroom’ then we must ‘stomach self-denial without respite’; ‘personal restraint is the stopgap that takes the place of institutional reform’. Neither scruples nor self-denial will do. Might we dare to hope for ethical sex in the here and now, compatible with but not dependent on total societal overhaul?
Sex is good and we should have more of it — according, of course, to Rothfeld — because it ‘challenges us to make real [. . .] contact with other people’ rather than ‘the affirming balm of our own fantasies’. Eroticism is its own ‘ethical imperative’. Art also shares in this mandate. Just as we do not have to choose between ‘sensuality and morality’, nor do we need to separate beauty from goodness; ‘an artwork is good when and because it is beautiful’. A novel is an aesthetic success when it is ‘populated by complex characters’, and a moral one when it ‘resists the lure of caricature’. Similarly, when one or more parties fuck with an agenda, without recognition of their partner’s ‘violent individuality’, sex is not only boring, but ethically impoverished. It is only when we are rewritten by the shock of an aesthetic or erotic encounter that we can experiment with new and sometimes discomforting modes of relation, without the blinders of social expectation. In refusing to separate the good from the beautiful and the bad from the ugly, Rothfeld’s call for more is always also a call for better.
Even the essays that approach her thesis askew — on the puzzle novel and the serial killer, on the gendered arousals of waiting, a scalpel-sharp reading of Sally Rooney’s novels as anodyne wish-fulfilment — establish an ethics that stretches around the immensity of unadulterated wanting. Our excesses, aesthetic or otherwise, must justify themselves: ‘all else being equal, want is its own excuse of satisfaction’. It is up to us, and our discernment, to decide whether all else is indeed equal.
Good critical values are good ethical ones. In a 2022 issue of The Drift, she remarked, ‘if I did not think that aesthetic odiousness is an indication of moral rot [. . .] I would probably not be a critic.’ Rothfeld doesn’t only justify her excesses — she justifies her own job. If intelligent, skillful criticism is its own moral imperative, then All Things Are Too Small provides a commendable model for how it might be enacted.