Book Report March 2024
All that hideous hunger
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, Becca Rothfeld, 2024
In the final sequence of Claire Denis’ film Beau Travail, the main character, a disgraced French Legionnaire, makes his bed with military precision. He lies down atop the sheets, shirtless, holding a handgun that we assume will be used shortly. As he lies there, tense but still, the camera pans over to his bicep, where a vein throbs. Then—a cut. Galoup is back in the club in Djibouti, in front of the sparkly, mirrored wall, dressed to kill. “The Rhythm of the Night” comes in loud. Galoup (Denis Lavant) smokes his cigarette and begins to move, feeling out his body and the rhythm. His dance starts tentative then explodes. He’s spinning, swinging his arms, doing crazy footwork. He reins himself in then lets loose again, even more, diving, windmilling, eventually rolling on the floor, completely beside himself. This is his soul, his exuberant beating heart fighting to find outward expression in a man who has been squeezed into absolute control by military discipline. In these final frames the film shows us the incommensurable dimensions of the hugeness of our feelings and the meager means we have of expressing them.
In the twelve essays in this forthcoming release (out next week), Washington Post nonfiction book critic
explores precisely this dilemma, making the case that, as the title of the second chapter says, “More is More.” Across a broad spectrum of topics, she pushes back against the numerous forces in our society dedicated to convincing people to accept smaller, diminished lives. In the first piece, which functions as an introduction and thesis, she argues that the fundamental human experience is a yearning for things that outstrip possibility—ecstatic experiences, encounters with pure beauty, expressions of love beyond physical limitations—and that the feeling of this acute, irremediable lack is intentionally squashed by a society in the thrall of economically efficient moralizing minimalism. As she puts it:Plates, cups, books, bodies, and all the rest are too small, not contingently, but constitutionally. There is no way around the sense, lodged hard in the throat, that the greatest human longings exceed any possible fulfillment. To want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough of it. Is it this longing, phenomenologically keen enough to strike some of us as fact, that has led religious thinkers to posit the existence of eternity, the logic being that we seem to need it? Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else, but until eternity arrives, we will have to find somewhere to fit our appetites. One way to proceed is to shrink them—first by making concessions to smallness, then by framing contraction as wisdom or virtue. This is the minimalist tack, and these days, it is on the rise. At every turn, we are inundated with exhortations to smallness: short sentences stitched into short books, professional declutterers who tell us to trash our possessions, meditation “practices” that promise to clear the mind of thought and other detritus, and nostalgic campaigns for sexual restraint. These adventures in parsimony each make their own particular mistakes, but they also share a central failing. There is nothing admirable in laboring to love a world as unlike heaven as possible. All things are too small, but some things are less small than others. Even if paucity is inevitable, we can still fight emptiness with fullness.
Part of the solution, she notes, rests in the political realm. We could live in a world with more art made by more people, we could embark on richer love lives, we could have more time, if we improved the material conditions of most people’s lives. Poverty is a moral scandal of the highest order that could be solved tomorrow if only our leaders had the will.
But more than policy prescriptions Rothfeld is interested in refuting the logic of the minimizers, putting forward a vision of more, and exploring the outer edges of experience.
It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, the place to look for possibilities beyond the mundane is art rather than reality. In chapter four, “The Flesh, It Makes You Crazy,” Rothfeld uses David Cronenberg’s films Shivers, Rabid, and The Fly to consider the possibilities of transformation and its erotic dimension, weaving in additional threads about the overwhelming attraction she felt to her eventual husband and a discussion of how a sufficiently transformative experience defeats the logic of classical decision theory. Another essay discusses serial killer fiction and the dynamic of seduction between the profiler trying to get in the killer’s head and the killer’s pornographic impulse to continue reenacting the same event over and over again, following Sontag’s formulation that porn is defined by its plotlessness (the relationship between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter in the show Hannibal being the archetypical example). Others include the urge toward degradation as depicted in Secretary, identification with the inaccessible other in Bergman’s Persona, and Eric Rohmer’s exquisite films of unrequited passion.
As it should be clear, a large part of this book is devoted to our experiences of sexual attraction, desire, and our bodies. Reading Rothfeld’s admirably revealing discussions of her own physical cravings and satisfactions, it dawned on me just how little I’ve read that takes this part of life seriously and engages with it in a critical and revealing manner. I imagine it’s very hard to write in this mode on this topic—it requires a supreme lack of embarrassment and a deft conceptual hand to keep these squishy ideas from wriggling away at every turn. She succeeds on both counts, the personal material always relevant and raw and the analysis rigorous and robust.
I loved the dual-track essay that pairs a takedown of Marie Kondo-style decluttering books with the current crop of wispy “fragment novels” whose plots and characters have been decluttered to the point of emptiness. Describing how these books rely on formulations that tell you about habitual parts of the characters’ lives rather than showing them, she writes:
Why go to the trouble of actually enacting repetitions—repeatedly describing someone lying next to someone else at night, repeatedly taking note of the trash on the sidewalk—when it is faster and cleaner to summarize? Why finish sentences when you can wave at their conclusions? [...] After all, why think when you can mimic thinking? And why write a novel when you can meditate on the difficulty of writing a novel?
The showstopper piece is chapter nine, “Only Mercy.” In it Rothfeld considers an ethic for good sex that goes beyond the consent principle to something more comprehensive. She does so by working through several recent books on the topic written from a conservative perspective. Somehow these books argue that because the consent standard is too paltry, instead of developing new standards, we must roll back the sexual revolution and retvrn to a world where sex before marriage is unthinkable. This is the longest chapter in the book but it never drags because Rothfeld is so funny as she picks apart these books’ failings, making it clear in the process just how identical they are. When you asks, “What does sex represent to these people, does it have a dimension beyond the friction of two bodies?”, she quotes a bizarre definition from Wendell Berry, who claims that “sexual love is the force that connects us [...] to the fertility of the world, to farming and the care of animals.” Every time after this she has to characterize these neo-puritans’ beliefs she works in a new joke about the involvement of livestock that never failed to make me laugh.
I could go on. I loved every one of the twelve essays on offer here but I can’t talk about all of them. Even the one that dragged for me the most—on mindfulness—is still a great read. I can’t emphasize enough how much Rothfeld’s writing is both very very smart and very very readable. Highly recommended.
Tehanu, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1990
In the fourth Earthsea book, Le Guin goes back to Tenar’s perspective to explore grief, domestic life, and the passage of time. We last saw Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan as the young high priestess of the dark powers of the earth who escaped with Ged. It’s now twenty-five years later. She first lived with Ged’s teacher Ogion on Gont but abandoned her study of magic to marry a farmer, have children, and live a conventional life. Now her children are grown and her husband dead. She takes charge of Therru, a seven year old, abused daughter of vagrants who was thrown into a campfire; she was badly burned, losing an eye and damaging one of her arms.
When the action begins, Tenar receives word that Ogion is dying and goes to him. These early chapters made me a weepy mess. It was so affecting to be back with these characters and to see their care for one another. It’s really amazing—Ogion appears for just a couple chapters in the first Earthsea but Le Guin renders his gruff countenance and inner warmth so vividly that I still love him years later.
Soon after Ogion dies, Ged returns. This is directly after the climactic events of The Farthest Shore—Ged was pushed to the brink of death, having expended all his magic to avert catastrophe. He is no longer a mage. He left Roke as Archmage; now, he knows, no one from the Isle of the Wise will even come looking for him. He mourns his lost powers and his lost identity. Tenar craves his companionship but he’s hard to be around.
This is a very different Earthsea book. The action never leaves Gont and scarcely any magic is performed. Taking the place of grand voyages and acts of heroism is a consideration of everyday life with its attendant joys and tediums. Tenar is reflecting on the choices she made—her deliberate choice for a normal life over one of power—and what she chose to accept in the process. Her husband wasn’t a bad man but he was a typical chauvinist, expecting her to put dinner on the table and clean up afterward night after night. Living with Ged, she notices how he does housework without a second thought—as someone who never married he doesn’t think of these chores in gendered terms, they’re simply tasks that need doing.
There was a seventeen year gap between the release of The Farthest Shore and Tehanu. According to Le Guin’s afterword, work on the fourth book began soon after the third but it was a long struggle to bring it to fruition. The strain shows. What I admire so much about Le Guin’s writing is how marvelously subtle she is with her themes and yet how cohesive her ideas are. This book falls short of her typical standards on both counts. Much of the dialogue is disappointingly blunt, as when Tenar wonders about the differences between the sexes and why we’ve ordered society the way we have. But at the same time, her ideas remain separate strands that don’t knit together into something more. It all feels like Some Things Le Guin Is Thinking About but they haven’t yet been synthesized and elevated.
Where this book succeeds is in its ruminations on the passing of time and the passing of our lives and its depiction of the changes wrought by reaching middle age. Once Ged can put aside his rage at losing his magic, he and Tenar slip into a comfortable rapport in which there’s nothing to prove. When they move their relationship from roommates to lovers, it’s done with the matter-of-fact unspectacularlity of a love beyond big outbursts of passion. When Tenar first invites Ged to her bed, he warns she’ll have to be patient with him. “I have been patient with you for twenty-five years,” she replies. “Come—come on, my dear—Better late than never! I’m only an old woman… nothing is wasted, nothing is ever wasted. You taught me that.”
