Publishers Weekly
★ 02/26/2024
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. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Named one of the most anticipated books of 2024 by Lit Hub
"Bracing and brilliant . . . The iconoclastic US author’s intellectually poised critique of minimalism boasts scintillating writing of breadth and power. . . . Rothfeld writes where devils fear to tread—about sex, beauty and desire and about consumption and consummation. . . . Becca Rothfeld is a dynamo."
—The Guardian
"All Things Are Too Small . . . is splendidly immodest in its neo-Romantic agenda—to tear down minimalism and puritanism in its many current varieties . . . Rothfeld makes her strongest case in her essays’ very form, a carnival of high-low allusion and analysis . . . [an] exhilarating ride."
—The New York Times
"All Things Are Too Small is an exuberant, moving, and ultimately persuasive argument for giving desire, whether in love or in art, its due. That is, for taking the risk that desire might, indeed, un-do us, and that this undoing might be worth the price."
—The Millions
"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."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"The writing is crisp, reflecting a curious mind and a yearning body."
—Kirkus
"Shrewd . . . The arguments here are delivered with gusto and delight, and eagerly invite heat of disagreement."
—The Wall Street Journal
"This is a radical and important book. Along with the brilliance of the prose and the range of consideration, there is the steady coherence of Becca Rothfeld's argument: in these essays, she stages passionate duels between egalitarianism and distinction, abstinence and appetite, control and disproportion, and wins the battle, beautifully and eloquently, for the side of expansiveness and mess and desire. It's a thrilling struggle, thrillingly prosecuted."
—James Wood, author of Serious Noticing: Selected Essays
"In this brilliant debut, Becca Rothfeld dismantles our assumptions about politics and culture, urging us to embrace restorative excess in place of a meagre (and mistaken, in her view) puritanical asceticism. All Things Are Too Small is a riveting book from one of our subtlest critics."
—Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom
"Becca Rothfeld, one of our finest critics, writes with the boldly sensuous lyricism of DH Lawrence and the pugnacious brilliance of Irving Howe. In All Things Are Too Small ideas sing, jostle, sweat and brawl. In no other writer is the life of the mind such a raucous, exhilarating joy."
—Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment and Uncertain Ground
"It seemed at one time that the legendary New York intellectuals and the luminaries of Partisan Review were definitively matchless and could have no successors or replicas. Becca Rothfeld alone is refutation: she not only equals their prowess, she ventures beyond their boundaries into queries never before dared or dreamed. There is no aspect of contemporary civilization or literary engagement that eludes her eye and her voice—nor could Lionel Trilling have predicted so elastic a body of insights."
—Cynthia Ozick, NBCC- and PEN-award winning author of (most recently) Antiquities
"These essays spring from a philosopher's voracious, brilliantly synthesizing mind, and from a poet's love for language that leans always toward rapture."
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
"Becca Rothfeld has an unsparing wit, a crystalline style, and a berserk appetite; she is not only one of America's most invariably interesting young cultural critics, but among our most generous and profound perverts. All Things Are Too Small is both a tribute to surplus and a seigneurial example of it—each essay here overspills its banks into the next, and the book sums to a rich, dazzling, and nonetheless precise entertainment."
—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction
Kirkus Reviews
2023-10-05
Essays on the desirability of excess in life and in art.
Rothfeld, a philosopher, essayist, and nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, reflects on how film, novels, and other art forms, as well as moral endeavors such as sexual consent, decluttering, and mindfulness (“the decluttered mind”), constrain desire. Of particular concern is the singular quest for economic and political equality. Justice is only the start of a journey “into the more exciting territory of want, glut, and extravagance.” As the author writes, “Where justice seeks proportion…the erotic seeks abundance.” Rothfeld argues that the “fragment novel” (one example is Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation), “which is divested of all extravagance, is therefore an artwork from which the art has been removed, a body drained of all its blood and carnality.” A similar argument is made with the risk-free novels of Sally Rooney, which simulate normalcy and wallow in “claustrophobic romantic entanglements.” In her strongest essay, Rothfeld questions the viability of sexual consent and the resilience of patriarchal norms of femininity, while lamenting its blindness to the erotic and the shock of sensuality. Comedies of re-marriage—e.g., the “1940 masterwork of romantic comedy,” His Girl Friday—lead the author to the possibility of endless talk. Love requires “faith in the inexhaustibility of another person.” Among other themes that Rothfeld investigates are the excess in filmmaker Éric Rohmer’s cycle Six Moral Tales; the way women wait for men (to love is to live “in a state of painful expectation”), as Penelope did in the Odyssey; and eating as a metaphor for fully absorbing the sensual world. Rothfeld’s essays are themselves excessive, with layers of fertile ideas and sharp observations at times obscuring her central thread. The writing is crisp, reflecting a curious mind and a yearning body.
Intellectual fare to complement the healthy pursuit of erotic transcendence.
