All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
by Becca Rothfeld (Metropolitan, $28)
“Becca Rothfeld writes where devils fear to tread,” said Kate Kellaway in The Guardian. In her “bracing, original, and intellectually poised” debut essay collection, the widely published philosopher and critic, who currently leads The Washington Post’s nonfiction review coverage, rejects today’s vogues for minimalism, instead extolling intemperance in life and literature. “Nothing, in Rothfeld’s view, succeeds like excess,” and “she packs so much into her opening essay about why it is OK to want more that you feel richly fed before even turning the first page.” Her allies, all name-checked: Herman Melville, Marcel Proust, and filmmaker David Cronenberg. Her nemeses: decluttering guru Marie Kondo, meditation advocates, and today’s sexual-consent police. Her persuasiveness proves powerful enough to “make one vow never again to use the phrase ‘less is more’ under any circumstances.” “Rothfeld is both a seriously precise writer and a very funny one,” said Tim SmithLaing in The Telegraph (U.K.). Most importantly, she writes with purpose. Like Theodor Adorno three generations before her, “Rothfeld thinks about criticism as a means of imagining a better world.” In All Things Are Too Small, she’s “working out how our longing for excess in food, film, sex, and literature might be used to pierce the limits we experience as individuals in society.” That mission gives “heft” to her “entertainingly barbed essays” that blast Kondo and such current literary darlings as Ottessa Moshfegh for emptying our homes and novels of connections to the world beyond self.
Rothfeld “makes her strongest case in her essays’ very form,” said David Gates in The New York Times. Each one is “a carnival of high-low allusion and analysis,” and her “maximalist prose” delights in alliteration and the juxtaposition of antiquated phrases and “F-worded celebrations of sexuality.” Though you may ultimately disagree with Rothfeld’s judgments, “what counts in these essays is the exhilarating ride,” not whether they win you over. “William Blake wrote that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; Rothfeld might say that they’re one and the same. No argument there.”