On the whole, All Things Are Too Small, a collection of essays by Becca Rothfeld is a joy to read, full of intelligence and humour. It does contain a couple of essays that are of no interest unless you have encountered either the works of Eric Rohmer or the novel Mating by Norman Rush. Additionally, there is one deeply unpersuasive and entirely unamusing essay, Only Mercy, which begins with that most unpromising of phrases "Studies show" and, among other things, goes on to label Louise Perry as a Puritan, (a disparagement in the context), instead of countering Perry's arguments. I suspect this particular essay may have been written at an agent's behest, (can we have some sex please?), or in order to gain street cred among the author's own generation, (this might also be the motivation behind the uncritical references to Marx that pop up from time to time).
But let's set these pieces aside and declare the book mainly a pleasure. The essay on Marie Kondo, after all, is such a delight. In it, Rothfeld nails the madness at the heart of the decluttering doctrine:
"The ultimate goal is to inhabit even permanent dwellings not only as if we were about to leave but also as if we have just arrived" she says, adding,
"We can yank ourselves out of the mess and mayhem of the past and install ourselves in eternal immediacy only if we are willing to live in rooms without any contents."
The essay entitled Ladies in Waiting is also excellent. In it Rothfeld demonstrates that in certain respects, despite the supposed march of feminism and women's rights, little has really changed when it comes to men and women and dating. She describes the pain of waiting that most women must endure if they are to successfully gain a mate - and thus go on to have children (in an age of instant gratification is a lack of training in patience behind the decline in the birth rate?)
"The messages that I answer immediately" Rothfeld explains, "without inserting a buffer of delay calculated to give the (always erroneous) impression that I'm busy or unavailable, come from my female friends, and they often constitute an agonised refrain: How soon should I reply? Can I say something yet? Should I call? I know I shouldn't text him, but ... My advice ingrained in me by years of comparable counsel from comparably responsive female friends, is always: wait. Waiting is the rule, the convention, tacitly enforced by men who retreat from female aggression and actively perpetuated by some who self-police. This is the agreement we opt into when we receive the first day-after texts with such awed gratitude, as if we didn't deserve them."
She goes on to produce some nice aphorisms about the state of waiting:
"Waiting is the transformation of time into misery", she declares; and
"Waiting is sustained by the possibility of fulfilment that is yet to be decisively precluded."
In her essay on meditation - Wherever You Go, You Could leave - and the whole big business of mindfulness, Rothfeld is as acerbic and funny as she is on Kondo:
'"No matter how hard I tried" she tells the reader, "I never understood the injunction to 'practice mindfulness', as if it were piano or a dance routine. I knew, of course, what I was supposed to do, at least at the most literal level: I was supposed to sit, close my eyes, and attend to my breathing. I was not supposed to do anything else. I wasn't supposed to feel my emotions, but I wasn't supposed to think about them either. If any mental matter assailed me, I was supposed to acknowledge it and discard it. Under no circumstances was I supposed to evaluate thought or feeling as good or bad, smart or stupid, intriguing or boring. Perhaps at a more advanced stage, I would be able to circumvent the indignity of thinking and assessing altogether, but, in the interim, I was supposed to exercise something called 'non-judgmental awareness', which I would one day learn to achieve in any and all situations but which for now I could cultivate in its purest form by way of 'meditation'."
Her description of the process of trying to be mindful is hilarious:
"The voice is instructing me to 'become aware' of my breath. I was already aware of my breath, in a general way, and now I am aware in a specific way, which seems to make little difference. Up my chest rises, down it falls. Up, down, up, down, a testament to the dull cunning of the body. What am I supposed to do now that I am aware that I am breathing? I think - oops, I don't think - I am simply supposed to go on being aware of it, languishing in virtuous boredom...If the mindful person finds herself thinking, how idiotic, she should tag this interjection as an instance of Thinking and direct the beam of her attention back toward her respiration ... Cogitation is an unmitigated evil, an annoyance ... What is supposed to be so enjoyable about the breath, which is always the same slog in through the nose and out through the mouth...Only someone who longs to be no one could savour the deprivations of a decluttered mind."
In the end she gives up on the whole enterprise and decides on a different solution to anxiety - moviegoing. That would be very sensible if they were still making good movies, one could say, but of course it is still possible to see old films if you find the right cinema.
In Other People's Loves, Rothfeld portrays brilliantly and hilariously the temptations of internet stalking:
"I first navigated to Rachel's profile knowing that she was the person for whom Adam had left me. I clicked through beaches she'd visited and lumpy cakes she'd baked, passages she'd underlined and toddlers she'd tickled. Her bookshelf jutted into the background of a few photographs, and when I zoomed in and squinted, I could make out a row of mint-coloured Penguin Classics. An earlier, non-Adam boyfriend still liked some of her photographs, which I knew because I clicked not only through her pictures, but also through the profiles of all the people who had liked them, then through their photographs, then through the profiles of the people who had liked those, and so on, until at last I found myself hunched over my telephone at five in the morning, staring at pictures of Rachel's ex-boyfriend's third-grade teacher's tomato garden."
The essay comes with some added stuff about various arthouse movies. I don't think these add anything and I suspect they are included as proof that Rothfeld is not just funny but an intellectual heavyweight. Being funny is such a rare and sublime gift, that it seems to me Rothfeld should stop fretting about demonstrating so called intellectuality. If you can make someone laugh, why would your audience beg for parallels with Bergman and Almodovar? Tommy Cooper managed perfectly well without giving us a quick side disquisition on Dostoevsky. Sadly though, the youth of today have a solemn bent.
To sum up, this is overall a highly engaging book, the product of a brilliant young mind. Sadly, that mind has been trained in the slightly batty contemporary world of ideas where to be truly clever there seems to be a requirement - probably a result of French influence - to be unnecessarily (tediously?) complex. Ms Rothfeld obeys the strictures of her era by heaping on top of her wittiness extra helpings of theory and demonstrations of wide-reading. Luckily, she is so genuinely gifted that she does not completely bury her humour. Despite her very best efforts, she cannot prevent herself from being most of the time very entertaining, perceptive and making her readers laugh.
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