All Things Are Too Small

November 15, 2023
Essays on the desirability of excess in life and in art. Rothfeld, a philosopher, essayist, and nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, reflects on how film, novels, and other art forms, as well as moral endeavors such as sexual consent, decluttering, and mindfulness ("the decluttered mind"), constrain desire. Of particular concern is the singular quest for economic and political equality. Justice is only the start of a journey "into the more exciting territory of want, glut, and extravagance." As the author writes, "Where justice seeks proportion...the erotic seeks abundance." Rothfeld argues that the "fragment novel" (one example is Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation), "which is divested of all extravagance, is therefore an artwork from which the art has been removed, a body drained of all its blood and carnality." A similar argument is made with the risk-free novels of Sally Rooney, which simulate normalcy and wallow in "claustrophobic romantic entanglements." In her strongest essay, Rothfeld questions the viability of sexual consent and the resilience of patriarchal norms of femininity, while lamenting its blindness to the erotic and the shock of sensuality. Comedies of re-marriage--e.g., the "1940 masterwork of romantic comedy," His Girl Friday--lead the author to the possibility of endless talk. Love requires "faith in the inexhaustibility of another person." Among other themes that Rothfeld investigates are the excess in filmmaker �ric Rohmer's cycle Six Moral Tales; the way women wait for men (to love is to live "in a state of painful expectation"), as Penelope did in the Odyssey; and eating as a metaphor for fully absorbing the sensual world. Rothfeld's essays are themselves excessive, with layers of fertile ideas and sharp observations at times obscuring her central thread. The writing is crisp, reflecting a curious mind and a yearning body. Intellectual fare to complement the healthy pursuit of erotic transcendence.

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Starred review from February 26, 2024
Washington Post book critic Rothfeld’s erudite debut collection muses on the merits of indulgence. In “More Is More,” Rothfeld likens the spare storytelling in “fragment novels” by such authors as Kate Zambreno and Jenny Offill to the decluttering ethos espoused by Marie Kondo, critiquing both for prioritizing utility over sentimentality. Individuality, she suggests, is achieved through the accumulation of things (friends, fears, and phobias, for instance) one doesn’t need. “Wherever You Go, You Could Leave” derides the recent mindfulness vogue and contends that though some people might find the mental exercises soothing, the movement’s emphasis on tranquility and acceptance serves to divert attention from the material inequalities and unjust labor conditions that stress people out in the first place. Elsewhere, the author pushes back against a recent spate of books decrying the “rough, casual, and extramarital sex that the sexual revolution legitimated” and posits that the ostensibly restrained films of French director Éric Rohmer “trade in unfamiliar forms of exaltation,” brimming with tenderness rather than overt sexuality. Rothfeld has a knack for aphorism (“There is nothing more foreign to justice than love”), and it’s an absolute pleasure to watch her idiosyncratic arguments unfold. This is a triumph.