Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis
by Laura Kipnis (Pantheon, $26)
“Laura Kipnis launches provocations with the frequency of a tennis ball machine,” said Molly Young in The New York Times. In her new book, the critic, professor, and polemicist who has previously taken potshots at monogamy and the policing of sexual harassment brings her usual juice and style to examining the state of sexual relations during our pandemic era. For Kipnis, the 2020 lockdown offered more proof that people, including herself, are not built for long-term coupling. She was annoying; her boyfriend was annoying. Being stuck inside together made their flaws hard to overlook. From there, she launches into a wider consideration of what ails modern relationships, and for much of the book, “scooting around Kipnis’ mind feels like eating the world’s finest trail mix: no dud raisins to shift aside, only M&Ms and the fancier nuts.” She’s that fun to read.
To Kipnis, our failed Covid relationships are symptoms of a deeper crisis, said Kat Rosenfield in the Washington Examiner. Long before the pandemic, social media had taught us to approach intimate relations with mistrust, disgust, and fear. “Fear most of all,” Kipnis might say, because online culture has encouraged the spread of accusations of emotional cruelty and boundary crossing, and the fear has in turn been reinforced by a second contagion: of people exploiting the power in positioning themselves as traumatized victims. While some of these insights aren’t original to Kipnis, she “makes them fresh” by finding unseen angles on stories we’ve all read about before and implicating herself in the trends she decries. “One gets the sense of following a brilliant, slightly eccentric anthropologist around a small apartment while she talks aloud to herself.”
She’s only truly on her game in one of the book’s four essays, said Jessica Ferri in the Los Angeles Times. All her fire disappears when she focuses on the love life of a Black, queer former student and how that life is complicated by intersecting online dialogues. Despite the title, Kipnis’ book also has nothing to say about the romantic lives of the people most dramatically affected by the pandemic: young parents, other caregivers, and those who are mourning lost loved ones. In the end, “it’s Kipnis’ questions about monogamy, and in particular heterosexuality, that seem worth asking.” Men, she asserts, are in a difficult spot. Their awkward bids for sexual connection, which Kipnis says she can’t live without, are increasingly viewed as encroaching. Can heterosexual monogamy survive such pressures?