All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess

by Becca Rothfeld

You find yourself on the edge of a vast and murky bog. Your quest requires traversal of the sloppy expanse, but you’re not sure how to even begin. Is that a path, or are you seeing a future gravesite of mud and water?

But lo, there’s a hut; out front, a person calmly loping through this landscape with a comfortable ease. As you approach, you can hear some light grousing, so perhaps not complete ease. But steady. Confident. Soon, you realize it is famed curmudgeon Andy Rooney, and he’s ready to take you where you need to go–for a price. Mr. Andy Rooney will fill the fetid air with his particular blend of insight, complaint, and general charisma as you pick your way through the fens. Will you accompany him?

Such is the vibe in All Things Are Too Small. It’s intricate, but the marshlands are vast and full of despair; be prepared to rely on your guide for quite some time. And while the landscape won’t change much, you still need to pay attention to each step–this is a dangerous bog, after all. The prose is intricate, but the structure repeats: small personal experience as synecdoche for larger societal woe, poked and prodded in elaborate (and arch) examination. There is a reason we only got three minutes a week with Andy Rooney, and so I suggest taking All Things Are Too Small at a measured pace.

But I do suggest taking it. Even (especially?) when clarifying someone else, the language in All Things is beautiful: “In Barthes’s view, love is centrally defined by the transfiguration of neutral lack into conspicuous vacancy, of emptiness into absence.” I found myself tabbing more pages and marking more lines the further I read. The author is good. Great, even. At least, the writing is my style, where both the substance and structure are interesting. Bogs and fens and whatever other near-synonym for wet and treacherous landscapes I can pull out of my fantasy-adventure-laden memory are appropriate metaphors–traversing the prose requires careful attention, because the path is complex and it is easy to get lost in the winding words if attention flags.

But you have a good, solid guide who makes clear solid points. Poking a finger at the ephemeral modern-urban-girl-narrator genre, of which I am a strong enjoyer, was interesting rather than snide, even if it had some bite: “But in fact all their anti-narratives are soothingly tractable, made up of sentences so short that they are often left to complete themselves.”

After around nine essays, the structure seems to double back on expectations: I either got comfortable enough with the author’s style to follow the arguments with fewer pauses to catch my breath, or the essays simply improved. Saving the best for last can be a challenge in an essay compilation—who makes it all the way through?—but it did make the journey end on a relative high note, so my post-book memories are that might brighter.

All Things are Too Small has way of traveling through the world where it is both above and within the muck: “The best sex, probably, was the sex people had when they really believed they would got to hell for it–but craved it so badly that they had it anyway.” Its gentle gripes and alluringly pointed suggestions on how to survive in the muddled swamp of modern existence make for time well spent—you might find your own way through on your own, but this way you get a local’s expertise.