Becca Rothfeld is a dynamo. I had not come across her before picking up All Things Are Too Small and was unprepared for the book’s extraordinary clout and reach. She is an American journalist (a contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times and a critic on the Washington Post), a philosopher, polemicist and a wit. She challenges, in this bracing, original and intellectually poised collection of essays, many of our unquestioning modern assumptions and, most persuasively, takes aim at the promotion of minimalism as an ideal for our living spaces, novels and ourselves.
Nothing, in Rothfeld’s view, succeeds like excess and she packs so much into her opening essay about why it is OK to want more (the most extravagant of Oliver Twists) that you feel richly fed before even turning the first page. She includes the 13th-century Dutch mystic Hadewijch of Brabant (from whom her title is taken), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the critic James Wood and even makes time to sympathise with a random man sighted in a restaurant who wolfed down three dishes of pasta in a row, commenting that he wouldn’t have had to have third helpings “if any plate available were big enough”.
