Toward a Sordid Utopia?

On Becca Rothfeld's 'All Things Are Too Small'

Giorgio De Chirico, Landscape with Divinity, Oil on canvas

The writer Lore Segal — known in particular for Other People’s Houses, her novelized account of fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria as a ten-year-old — once asked Vivian Gornick to explain feminism. “What is it that you want? I don’t think I’ve ever understood,” Segal said. Startled to be asked such a question in the early 2000s, Gornick began to explain. Segal listened to Gornick’s perspective and then summarized, “with something like wonderment, ‘You have a passion for equality.’” Gornick was astonished that Segal didn’t. “I have a passion for many other things,” Segal said, “for love, and friendship, for good conversation, for living inside another’s imagination — but not for equality. There are many things I cannot live without before I cannot live without equality.”

This tension between equality and other human priorities drives Becca Rothfeld’s pugilistic and eclectic 2024 essay collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. A philosopher by training, Rothfeld is the staff nonfiction critic for the Washington Post, an editor at The Point, and a prolific freelance essayist. She has won the Robert B. Silvers Prize for literary criticism and the National Book Critics Circle citation for excellence in reviewing. Rothfeld opens her collection by proclaiming herself an egalitarian, someone who favors greater material and economic equality. She accepts that egalitarianism can involve reducing human beings to depersonalized, fungible bundles of entitlements and obligations. But her book, she explains, “is an argument in favor of a careful interrogation of the proper limits of the egalitarian project — limits that keep attitudes proper to the political sphere from crossing over into the aesthetic and emotional realms.” Drawing from John Rawls, Rothfeld writes that egalitarianism (or, I infer, any political vision) must maintain room for “excess” and “extravagance,” which she says remain “our human due” in the private sphere even while we strive for spare and dutiful equality in the public.

There is something tricky in her locution. What Rothfeld means when she says that extravagance is “our human due” is that it is, well, not an extravagance at all. By “extravagance,” I take her to mean individuality and all the things we do to discover who we, and other people, really are beneath our polite (or alien) exteriors. Rothfeld’s book, then, is an attempt to square the circle: to reclaim some space for Segal’s side — for the irreducible complexity of individuals; for love, eroticism, and art — without giving up on social equality and economic redistribution. What is most interesting in the collection is Rothfeld’s keen but less-than-explicit awareness — as she ranges from the declutterer Marie Kondo to the filmmaker Éric Rohmer — that the lines between the public and the personal are messy, and that sometimes we really do have to choose what to live without.

---

Rothfeld is a cultural diagnostician, aiming to identify and cure what ails us. Her wide critical scope includes literary novels, medieval poetry, philosophy, criticism, movies, television, self-help books, and religious mysticism. She also draws from her own life, though these are not personal essays in the usual sense. Instead of dwelling on her own experiences, Rothfeld treats her life as one more text to be mined in support of her arguments. Nonetheless, two personal experiences crouch inside nearly every essay. The first experience is that literature and movies helped save Rothfeld’s life, literally, by reengaging her with the world after a college suicide attempt. The second is her more recent elopement, after two months, with a man who is, by Rothfeld’s account, super fun in bed. She thus explores the philosophical dilemmas of egalitarianism primarily through the experiences of art, eroticism, and love.

In the collection’s first major essay, Rothfeld cleverly ties the “decluttering” urge — the desire to reduce our possessions to the bare essentials — to both an old ideal of American pioneer simplicity and to a recent trend of “fragment novels,” from which she says all novelistic conventions have been excised except the “thin, warbling voice of a placeless, hungerless narrator.” Rothfeld is against all of it. She sees in this minimalism an attempt to become so simple that the specificity of personhood ceases. She rejects the spiritual doctrines behind popular tidying manuals (she somehow digests about twenty) and their “obligatory injunctions to relish ‘fresh starts,’ ‘blank slates,’ and all the other cliches of inauguration.” She is similarly impatient with the muted protagonists of fragment novels — usually lonely and artistic women — whose predominant “aspiration is to streamline, to simplify, to braid their diverging worries and preoccupations into a tight rope of focus.” Rothfeld’s objections come down to her belief that “what is required in the aesthetic mode” (and for a fully realized self) “is not the sort of control we exercise in a decluttered room but capitulation, a willingness to crash into something that is not in its proper place.” Art (and life) “require that we renounce ready-made morals — that we submit wholesale to [its] demands and dangers.”

The essay displays Rothfeld’s extraordinary precision and variety of cultural references — as well as her tendency to attack the least charitable, rather than the most reasonable, version of an opposing argument. If this is not exactly straw-manning, it is also not quite cricket. Many “fragment novels,” I think, seek to escape the mental austerity they convey. (In this essay’s margins I scrawled: “Wittgenstein’s Mistress???”) I also wondered why Rothfeld read the decluttering gurus so literally and thereby played dumb about the inherent hyperbole of salesmanship — the fact that no one sells advice by claiming it will produce only marginal and temporary improvements in the customer’s life. It was hard for me to imagine the actual human who would so mercilessly adopt decluttering mantras that they create an environment, as Rothfeld fears, of “absolute predictability,” like “solipsism spatialized.” Then again, it was also hard for me to believe the way Marie Kondo purportedly decluttered her library, which was, no kidding, to copy down “sentences that inspired me” and then discard all the books themselves.

Rothfeld presses the maximalist point in an essay challenging “mindfulness” and the ambition to achieve perpetual “moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness.” This essay opens with her freshman-year suicide attempt and her subsequent experience with cognitive behavioral therapy. The therapist’s practical advice helped: Rothfeld started running and went to the movies, where “sitting in the dark with strangers” flooded her “with a sharp sense of human presence.” She learned to escape into art. But the therapist’s cognitive advice — which Rothfeld insists, not quite plausibly, was to somehow cease all thought and judgment — proved indecipherable. From there, the essay characterizes “mindfulness” as a religion in which “cognition is an unmitigated evil, an annoyance, and an occasional agony,” and then goes to work with reasoning of a type often deployed against other varieties of religious thinking. Rothfeld favors energetic cognition and judgment over their quietist opposites.

She is a marvelous guide through the historical and cultural forces that produced mindfulness as we now have it, and the essay persuasively links mindfulness to the fin de siècle “mind-cure” craze (which pushed mental habits as a total cure for both physical ailments and poor social conditions, particularly for women). But Rothfeld’s ultimate dismissal of present-day mindfulness as self-abnegation does not quite click. In this essay I longed for data, just a dash of social science, because the pragmatic and medical argument in mindfulness’s favor is that, for a lot of people, it in fact helps. Rothfeld instead fights a caricature or in any case an extreme, metaphysical breed of mindfulness while quietly conceding to William James — who accepted religious practices on the basis of their worldly, psychological effects — that she has no beef with mindfulness the way I suspect nearly everyone uses it, as “one technique among many for keeping the wolves at bay.” Her long and furious argument ends where it began, with the personal, and with one of her best lines: “As I discovered when I decided to live,” Rothfeld writes, “perturbation is a small price to pay for the privilege of a point of view.” This closing called to mind the final lines of Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, when the perturbed and furious Mickey Sabbath similarly decides against suicide: “How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.”

---

Several essays in the collection address erotic desire and experience, which Rothfeld values as a species of the aesthetic. In a fifty-nine page manifesto called “Only Mercy,” Rothfeld argues that good sex, like good art, is one of the essential ways that people discover and express their truths, particularly when their truths flout social norms. She argues that the erotic’s moral value lies in its carnival-like imaginative play and in the way that subjecting ourselves to someone else can produce profound, surprising transformations that politesse precludes. (“The only way to fail, to fuck badly, is to know what you want and extract it from another person,” Rothfeld writes, quoting Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service.) Rothfeld illustrates the point in another essay about David Cronenberg’s body horror films. In these movies, ordinary people morph into disgusting, crazed parasites and bugs — an experience that reminds Rothfeld of meeting her husband. That is, she felt similarly transformed. Yet “shopkeepers addressed me as if I were not obscene. It was incredible, I thought, that a lust like mine could go so wholly undetected. . . . Couldn’t passersby tell that I was infected, feral and filthy, dripping beneath my dress?” Rothfeld claims a “magnificently perverted” relationship like hers is not mere fun; it is an ethical experience that reveals messy personal truths and that might, if replicated at scale, lead us toward a sordid utopia.

Now, if you like art and sex for their power to disrupt a too-tidy consciousness — if you think it’s good to confront uncertainty and the irreducible complexities of others — boy will you love marriage. In “Our True Entertainment Was Arguing,” the final and finest essay in the collection, Rothfeld reflects on the way that love smudges the boundaries of the self (in ways she endorses) even as it refuses the ideals of justice and equality (in ways that are hard for an egalitarian to accommodate).

Justice, as Plato held, is to give every person their due. Meanwhile “love,” as the J. Geils Band held, “stinks.” Love is arbitrary and idiosyncratic. Love matters enormously to our material prospects in life, and still, Rothfeld writes, we would never invoke “justice” to demand romantic love any more than we would compel Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet to accept the socially appropriate yet personally distasteful marriage proposal of the guy before Darcy. Love, moreover, tends to render us “stonily impervious to the suffering of humanity” and “myopically fixated on one person at the expense of all the rest.” Nor is there automatic justice within love itself: to fall in love and share life only commences the struggle between two people to fully and persistently apprehend one another, to regard each other as true equals, with wants and needs on the same footing.

This is my favorite essay in the collection because Rothfeld explores these ancient problems without purporting to solve them, and because it reflects a high form of literary appreciation: a searching and vulnerable effort to understand her own recent marriage through the canon of art and philosophy to which she feels most connected. (There are appearances from Aristotle, Kant, Stanley Cavell, Christine Korsgaard, Amartya Sen, Pride and Prejudice, Norman Rush’s Mating, and classic movies including The Lady Eve and His Girl Friday.) Drawing from His Girl Friday, Rothfeld explores a lovely notion of “marriage as a long conversation.” Drawing from Mating — a novel about a tender and at times “exquisitely equal” romance on an experimental egalitarian commune, a novel in which Rothfeld says “nothing less than the possibility of equal love” is at stake — she highlights the way that the unity of two people can be a synecdoche for the problems of civilization in general. Beneath both Mating and Rothfeld’s essay lies a suggestion that chafes, she recognizes, against the egalitarianism to which she has committed from the collection’s first pages: that if we cannot achieve enduring equality between even two people with love on their side, there might be no chance for billions of people who have to get along without it. Rothfeld, nodding to her own newlywed hope, is an optimist about the compatibility of love and equality. But if she had to choose, I think I know what she’d go without.

---

Given its overarching argument for untidy love, art, and individuality, the collection has a conspicuous omission. In 2021, Rothfeld published an essay in Liberties called “Sanctimony Literature,” in which she lamented that the contemporary tendency to fixate on “the politics of everything” had induced some prominent novelists to ignore the possibility that their political commitments, if not wrong, were at least incomplete answers to life’s complexities. The incorrect suggestion of such self-satisfied novels, Rothfeld wrote, was that good politics were not merely necessary but sufficient to live a moral life. Her criticism of these books drew from the “anti-reductionism” of Irving Howe and James Baldwin — who stood against literature that could be reduced to advocacy — and most importantly from Lionel Trilling, whose philosophy of “moral realism” Rothfeld embraced.

“Moral realism” was, Trilling himself acknowledged, “an elaborate, even fancy, phrase” for an anti-righteous tendency to acknowledge both our own doubts and the equal humanity of even people we consider incomprehensible or evil. Trilling’s overall politics were what might today be called “patient left-liberal,” views nicely summarized by the essayist George Scialabba as:

Yes to greater equality, inclusiveness, cooperation, tolerance, social experimentation, individual freedom . . . but only after listening to everything that can be said against one’s cherished projects, assuming equal intelligence and good faith on the part of one’s opponents, and tempering one’s zeal with the recognition that every new policy has unintended consequences, sometimes very bad ones. But after all that . . . yes.

In “Sanctimony Literature,” Rothfeld proclaimed herself a Trilling partisan: an egalitarian nonetheless “on guard against complacency, self-assurance, and the pre-reflective acceptance of a self-aggrandizing ideology that takes the place of a modest and discomfiting idea.” She also endorsed Trilling’s understanding of literature as a moral enterprise especially aimed at teaching us personal virtues — “discrimination, receptiveness, patience, magnanimity,” as Scialabba puts it — rather than more obviously public-minded virtues like justice or equality.

Trilling’s liberal tendencies often led him to criticize the impatient and self-righteous elements of the left. This segment of the left reciprocally reviled Trilling as a reactionary. Rothfeld’s “Sanctimony Literature” essay blamed his excommunication on the “mental poverty” of his critics. But I could not help wondering whether Trilling’s conflict with the progressives of his era (and perhaps some online anger that Rothfeld herself received after publishing “Sanctimony Literature”) had something to do with the essay’s omission from this collection. The book is somewhat eager to advertise Rothfeld’s egalitarian allegiances — frequently reiterating her commitment to “economic equality” — while making her pitch against a reductive, overbearing “politics of everything” with uncharacteristic coyness. Trilling is mentioned only in passing. Howe and Baldwin not at all. By reframing “moral realism” as a pitch for private “excess,” Rothfeld seems to be playing for acceptance by the progressive circles that, she acknowledges, “I am lucky enough to run (and fuck) in.”

In any case, the omission bugged me. “Sanctimony Literature” not only would have belonged; it would have been the collection’s ideological centerpiece, clarifying the intellectual lineage of her argument against “ready-made morals”: that is, her belief that the last thing we should want, for reasons both aesthetic and ethical, is to stifle — through decluttered minimalism, self-denying mindfulness, or timid sexual mores — the art, literature, love, and personal experimentation from which a truer understanding of ourselves, and an enduringly fairer world, might gradually be gained.

---

Then again, perhaps Rothfeld doesn’t stand by “Sanctimony Literature”? Cynthia Ozick, another disciple (and student) of Lionel Trilling’s — as well as a blurber of Rothfeld’s — opened each of her first three essay collections with a disclaimer. The disclaimer, as she put it in Quarrel & Quandary, was that “nearly every essay is an experiment, not a credo.” Essays of the kind she cared to write were exploratory, “a short story told in the form of an argument” — “if there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run.” By this slightly anxious caveat (itself made with keen awareness of Trilling’s fate), Ozick freed herself to publish not only her most patiently measured judgments but also brawling polemics that she knew she might not stand by tomorrow.

Rothfeld brawls without disclaimers, but I often wondered whether she would stand by these essays’ most categorical assertions. I also found my wondering to be mostly beside the point. What is most engaging about this collection is the agile prose and the fine critical intelligence behind it. Rothfeld takes enormous and infectious joy in assembling her ambitious, articulate, digressive, searching, and often intemperate arguments. These are arguments worth arguing with, as well as invigorating expressions of a voracious, rigorous, and flesh-bound mind, portraits of a writer who abhors a vacuum and adores a din. Something would be wrong, in fact, if Rothfeld were always right, issuing only meticulous opinions we’d all be happy to see the Supreme Court hand down. Her mission after all is excess, to color outside the lines. Some extravagant overstatement seems a fair price to pay for the privilege of her point of view.

Julius Taranto is an Associated Editor at The Metropolitan Review and the author of How I Won a Nobel Prize.