All Things Are Too Small
Essays in Praise of Excess
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as mindfulness, decluttering, David Cronenberg, and consent.
In her debut essay collection, “brilliant and stylish” (The Washington Post) critic Becca Rothfeld takes on one of the most sacred cows of our time: the demand that we apply the virtues of equality and democracy to culture and aesthetics. The result is a culture that is flattened and sanitized, purged of ugliness, excess, and provocation.
Our embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished. We see it in our homes, where we bring in Marie Kondo to rid them of their idiosyncrasies and darknesses. We take up mindfulness to do the same thing to our heads, emptying them of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are. In the bedroom, a new wave of puritanism has drained sex of its unpredictability and therefore true eroticism. In our fictions, the quest for balance has given us protagonists who aspire only to excise their appetites. We have flipped our values, Rothfeld argues: while the gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, we strive to compensate with egalitarianism in art, erotics, and taste, where it does not belong and where it quashes wild experiments and exuberance.
Lush, provocative, and bitingly funny, All Things Are Too Small is a subversive soul cry to restore imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment to all domains of our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
