by Kelly Pickerill
Unless they’ve written a book I’m familiar with, I don’t recognize the names of the essayists in The New York Times Book Review. But when Katie Roiphe’s new book came out this fall, a book of essays called In Praise of Messy Lives, I recognized her name from an essay in the Book Review. Weird, I know, but it’s because her essay, on the front page, which is unusual in itself, was so fascinating. In “The Naked and the Conflicted,” Roiphe contrasts the treatment of sex by novelists of two generations, that of Updike, Mailer, Roth, and Bellow, with that of younger writers such as Jonathan Franzen, Benjamin Kunkel, Dave Eggers, and Michael Chabon. She asserts that the former group’s virility has been transmuted by the latter into a kind of “passivity . . . a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite,” where “the cuddle [is] preferable to sex.”
The essay caused a bit of controversy, with some folks reacting quite intensely: “Not only are you contributing to the total annihilation of the literary culture, but also to the destruction of our civilization.” She’s been described as “an uncomfortablist,” a term which, if a criticism, is perhaps less harsh, and one she herself admits is apt. In most of her essays, though, it works, as she critiques what in our culture seems like a trend of bourgeois conventionalism, for example, that our obsession with all types of “healthiness” elevates shopping at Whole Foods to an act of heroism.
If Roiphe’s personal essays can be a bit overbearing, it’s that her method of praising the messy over the conventional in her own case reads a bit like, “if your life is put together you are simply boring, ha ha I win because I have two children from two different men.” But when applied to our culture as a whole, this method elicits some fascinating stuff: could we love Mad Men because our conservative sensibilities crave the spectacle of stylish people who smoke too much, drink too much, and sleep around, or is our obsession with being the perfect parent doing more harm to our children than we realize?
Roiphe’s essays on literature though are by far the best part of the book; like “The Naked and the Conflicted,” they are unconventional yet close readings of works that remind us of why we like to read, and why we like to read about what we read. So I don’t mind that Roiphe makes me a little uncomfortable.
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