“Allegory of Sight“ (1659) | Jan van Kessel / CC0 1.0
Like William Blake, Becca Rothfeld believes that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
A widely praised young critic (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Prize for Criticism and the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism), Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post, an editor at the Point, and a contributing editor at Boston Review. She is also a PhD candidate in the philosophy department at Harvard, on “indefinite hiatus,” in her own words.
Rothfeld’s bio exemplifies excellence through excess, reflecting the central theme of her first book, All Things Are Too Small (Metropolitan Books, 2024), which is subtitled Essays in Praise of Excess. The cover offers a glimpse of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Garden of Earthly Delights, just to make clear that the excesses at issue, for Rothfeld as for Blake, include conduct considered sinful and vicious by those who uphold the traditional moral virtues of Western civilization.
A certain logic runs through each essay in All Things Are Too Small. Although achieving justice in society requires moderation and a sense of proportion, Rothfeld argues that we all ought to be maximalists in our cultural and private lives, to be as extravagant as possible in what we find beautiful—be it through enjoying art, exploring our sexuality and erotic desires, or wholly contending with our thoughts and emotions.
The book contains 12 essays. One drags under the microscope tidying guru Marie Kondo, named one of the world’s most influential people by TIME in 2015. Rothfeld prefers clutter: our homes are where we can express our interests, a place to be among precious belongings—books, paintings, clothing, knickknacks—that unlock memories and relax us, or are simply pleasant to gaze at because we find them aesthetically pleasing. If we only hang on to items essential for daily life, we’re at risk of stripping away our very essence, leaving us with bare rooms that say nothing about who we are, mirroring the emptiness we feel as a result.
Subsequently, Rothfeld sets her sights on fragment novels (which she terms “impoverished non-novels”) by popular contemporary writers like Jenny Offill, Patricia Lockwood, and Kate Zambreno. She condemns their collective style for having unvaried plots and being “made up of sentences so short that they are often left to complete themselves … an artwork from which the art has been removed, a body drained of all its blood and carnality.” In pointed contrast, Rothfeld herself deploys maximalist prose that overspills with fabulous artistic indulgence: “I dream of a house stuffed floor to ceiling; rooms so overfull they prevent entry; too many books for the shelves; fictions brimming with facts but, more importantly, flush with form; long tomes in too many volumes; sentences that swerve on for pages; clauses like jewels strung onto necklaces; a kitchen crammed with cream, melting butter, sweating cheese. Clothes on the floor, shoes on the bed, blood rusted on the sheets, mud loaming all the carpets, and a table set for a banquet bigger than I could ever host. I want all this precisely because I do not need it. But then, why can’t we insist that we need as much as we want?”
Is Rothfeld right in saying that excessive art is the most beautiful? Many of us who appreciate excess can also find exquisite wonder in keeping things simple. And still others prefer pared-back art to maximalist creations—a point that Rothfeld doesn’t entirely acknowledge in her writing. (Take the Pitchfork reviewer who criticized the excesses of Taylor Swift’s hugely successful but very long 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, as “unruly, unedited, and even a little tortured.”) Plenty of readers experience significant pleasure while devouring an abridged literary style. Rothfeld may argue that a reader’s preference for concise books over lengthier creations is influenced by mainstream culture and that it’s a tame, restricted brand of gratification. Yet for those who spend an entire weekend curled up with a Jenny Offill or Patricia Lockwood novel, barely coming up for air from start to finish, this is an ecstatic pleasure.
That’s the beautiful gift art can offer us—whether minimalist in style, as many contemporary novels are, or maximalist, as Rothfeld prefers, books offer us the freedom to indulge our unique hunger.
Rothfeld views cognition similarly: limiting a person’s thought is akin to choosing austere décor or concise literature. In one essay, she outlines her rejection of meditation practices, deciding that “perturbation is a small price to pay for the privilege of a point of view.” She considers how mainstream culture encourages us to empty our thoughts of anguish (to achieve a “decluttered mind”) and focus on the good in our lives. But Rothfeld argues the danger in doing this is we then ignore the unjust conditions that are making us unhappy, such as in our jobs, by falsely assuming “our dissatisfaction is always attributable to mental mismanagement, never to circumstances of genuine injustice.” If, instead, we rejected mindfulness and paid attention to our thoughts, even the excessive ruminations, we’d better distinguish where to make changes in our lives and gain power over our wellbeing.
Agree with her logic or not, readers will find Rothfeld’s essays are full of astute observations, demonstrating her wide-ranging interest in philosophy, criticism, and popular culture. Other essays explore a critique of novelist Sally Rooney for describing her characters as normal when, Rothfeld asserts, they’re extraordinary; the birth of mystery novels in Charles Dickens’s era, when his work was released periodically; the definition of sexual consent among partners experimenting with erotic play; and admiration for Éric Rohmer and David Cronenberg’s films. A few of these pieces lack an obvious connection to the book’s primary concern: the necessity of cultural maximalism. Still, one of the reasons Rothfeld postponed her dissertation at Harvard was due to a frustration with only discussing ideas central to living, and never truly trying to apply them. She wanted to bring these ideas to an audience broader than her grad school classmates, and in that ambition, her first book is undoubtedly successful.
Am I persuaded by Rothfeld’s arguments? It depends on the definition of excess. I agree that what we deem beautiful in life provides invaluable insight—a “palace of wisdom”—and should, therefore, be indulged in as much as possible. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all; it varies from one person to another, not always in line with the fashions of mainstream culture, as Rothfeld suggests, but often due to genuine in-built preferences that evolve over time. I personally enjoy the contemporary “non-novels” that Rothfeld dislikes and have found mindfulness to be a life-affirming exercise in specific situations. At the same time, I admire Rothfeld’s exuberant writing style and agree that clutter in my home is a must. Regardless, as Rothfeld remarked in a recent interview on the matter of how she feels when sharing her preferences, likes or dislikes, with potential naysayers: “That’s what criticism is, baby.”
