Three literary critics assail the cult of minimalism
ACCORDING TO Architectural Digest, maximalism is “a design style rooted in a more-is-more philosophy”. It’s a contemporary vogue for busy, visually eclectic interiors that sits in direct opposition to greige Japandi minimalism and the decluttering movement.
The writers under review here are maximalists to a woman. Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic of the Washington Post and an editor at the Point. Approximately half of the pieces in her collection All Things Are Too Small: Essays in praise of excess are published here for the first time. The introductory essay argues for “the enchantments of maximalism”, such as “encyclopaedic novels of exorbitant length”. The enemy is “the minimalist tack”, which is “on the rise”. The journalist and culture critic Nathalie Olah agrees: Bad Taste: Or the politics of ugliness sets out to expose the grubby motivations behind contemporary preferences for a simple, homespun, natural aesthetic. Lauren Oyler’s first book of nonfiction, No Judgement: On being critical, is maximalist in a looser sense, with respect to the sheer luxury of space given over to the author’s opinions on gossip, Goodreads, autofiction and vulnerability. It consists of seven previously unpublished essays – not the scorchingly negative reviews with which Oyler has made her name as a literary critic, but more general ruminations on “our present moment”.
Echoes and parallels between the three books abound. Reading them back to back has been a maximalist sort of pleasure, like one of those branching, headlong conversations in which you keep thinking of more stuff you want to say, but too late, because the discussion has moved compulsively on. This review, I know, will come to an end with a long list of observations unmade and arguments unhad. All three writers stalk the zeitgeist. They position themselves as bullshit detectors, calling out hypocrisies of thought and language. Each chapter of Olah’s book surveys a different arena in which taste is exercised: homes, fashion, beauty, food, leisure. In the chapter on food she recalls working for a drinks company peddling pre-packaged juice “cleanses”. This was a diet in disguise, she explains; what struck her about the experience was “the new language that had emerged with respect to food … Words such as ‘joy’, ‘clarity’, but also ‘achievement’, ‘gratification’ and ‘fulfilment’ were thrown around casually”. Oyler, too, in her essay on the contemporary preoccupat
