Towards the end of All Things Are Too Small, Becca’s Rothfeld’s defence of maximalism, she reproduces a quotation that she has “so thoroughly digested and metabolised” that it is now an essential fixture of her “mental repertoire”.
“I love a demystified thing inordinately.”
Yes, I thought, that’s it. That’s the problem with this book: Rothfeld’s tendency towards such relentless demystification of her subjects that they’re pallid and lifeless by the time she’s through.
This is not true of all the essays in the collection. It opens promisingly and with astounding energy and vigour. Initially, one forgives Rothfeld’s immediately evident habit of making grand, inaccurate statements, such as: “Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else.” If anything, her verbosity and inexactitude seem charming – she’s wrong because she’s passionate. Reading, I felt myself at a dinner table surrounded by voices stridently debating all manner of interesting things: literature, meaning, mindfulness, feminism, sex, sex and more sex (to give an idea of the topics of these essays).
Vatican Spies by Yvonnick Denoel: This could have provided John le Carré with enough material for a second career
Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik: It’s almost unfair for a biography to be such fun
Rinsed: From Cartels to Crypto: How the Tech Industry Washes Money for the World’s Deadliest Crooks by Geoff White - An engrossing and mind-blowing guide
Nosferatu director Robert Eggers: ‘We needed to find a way to make the vampire scary again’
My God, though, did I want that dinner to end, so I could return somewhere peaceful and reflective, to cease the ringing in my ears of all this terribly intelligent demystifying. The humour, too, wears thin. Yes, it’s hilarious to mock the bourgeois aesthetic of Marie Kondo (I laughed aloud at “the declutterer dreams of a house without f**king or sh**ting”), but by the end of the collection, these knowing asides and the unremitting sarcasm made me feel like I was trying to converse with a surly, unimpressed teenager.
Also, Rothfeld’s attempts at love-writing made me physically cringe. At one point, she tells us that her husband loves reading so much, he does so in the shower. The impossible logistics of this image will never, I fear, cease to irritate me.
Yet, there are moments of clear insight, and of great beauty. Rothfeld’s capacious vocabulary left me stunned, and exquisite phrases such as “the gleaming purity of a history” almost made up for her agonising attempts at poeticism.
“The night was cool as mint. Behind him, the light from the streetlamp became butter melting. His voice was flat and nasal, mouthy as saltwater toffee.”
Ultimately, this collection’s great weakness is that these pieces have been gathered into a collection at all. I can see that, taken one at a time, Rothfeld’s tone would be pithy and gratifying, and these qualities would make up for her prolix, excessive demystification and broad, questionable statements. Alas, reading her thoughts over and over, all in a row, I grew frustrated, tired and harried. By the end, I wanted to leave the dinner party, to run out into the street, to regain the relief of a little mystery.
