MixedThe New YorkerGilbert’s assessment of the era is damning, and likely to resonate with readers of her generation ... But Gilbert is oddly silent on this pitiful bouquet of pick-me behaviors in Girl on Girl. Though the book is laced with suggestive personal asides and hypothetical questions that gesture at the ill effects of pop culture on young women, it doesn’t include an account of how women actually responded to the material it so assiduously documents ... The removal of the protagonist from this story—the viewer who perceives and acts in response—gives the book an elusive, lopsided quality. On the one hand, it is an exhaustive account, a formidably thorough excavation of pop-cultural artifacts whose disdain toward women is often stunningly blunt ... On the other hand, it is a strangely untethered document, evidence marshalled for an unknown case: a long list of causes in search of a presumed effect ... Reading Girl on Girl as a member of its target audience is a conflicting experience, alternately tedious and engrossing, unpleasant and therapeutic ... The collected material makes a persuasive case for self-forgiveness. If you contorted or disfigured yourself to fit into this moment, the book seems to say—if you \'participated in your own oppression\' by getting the memo and acting on it—don’t blame yourself. This was the water; you were just a fish ...
Less persuasive are the conclusions Gilbert draws about porn. There’s a whiff of something old school in them, a half-buried paranoia about pornography’s role in women’s diminished power in the United States that recalls the feminist anti-porn line of the nineteen-eighties ... Possessing neither the ambition of the Dworkin-MacKinnonites nor the materialism of their socialist and Third Worldist contemporaries who traced the source of women’s oppression elsewhere—to racism, colonialism, and economic inequality—Gilbert’s argument finds itself at a dead end ... Gilbert alludes to collective power, but remains hazy on what it is to be used for, and ends her book looking out onto a familiar cramped horizon. Representation matters, she tells us, and, if we can rewrite our limiting storytelling models, we can remake the world. Yes, representation matters, but culture alone can’t do the work of politics, and neither can cultural critique.
Elena Ferrante
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWhat a relief it is when an author who has written a masterpiece returns to prove the gift intact ... translated once again by the nimble and attentive Goldstein ... Adolescence remains rich territory for Ferrante. Here as in her past work, she captures the interior states of young people with an unflinching psychological honesty that is striking in its vividness and depth. We share in Giovanna’s embarrassments, the tortured logic of her self-soothing, her temptations and decisions that accrete into something like experience...Ferrante’s genius is to stay with the discomfort. With the same propulsive, episodic style she perfected in the Neapolitan quartet, she traces how it is that the consciousness of a girl at 12 becomes that of a young woman at 16 ... The change in period makes all the difference. Setting Giovanna’s coming-of-age in the early 1990s, Ferrante slyly asks how decades of feminism and reaction have changed the world since the Neapolitan novels’ Lila and Lenù were teenagers ... There is also more humor to be found, at least in Giovanna’s perfect Gen X deadpan ... [a] perhaps too-abrupt end.
Lindy West
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...a director’s commentary of sorts on her most memorable stories, several of which are reprinted here. The later essays, about her father’s death, are the most ambitious as writing, but the hits hold ... [she writes] with patience, humor and a wildly generous attitude toward her audience ... West’s humor, I admit, is not always my style. At times it feels juvenile, irritating ... But no matter, there is good work here that represents a decade of public service for which she deserves years of back pay.
Jessica Valenti
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe writing that feels truest to life describes Valenti feeling sapped of it....[P]erhaps there’s no better illustration of the way everyday sexism grinds one down than the fatigue that drags on this book. But Valenti short-sells her peers when she suggests humor is a pandering concession or a rictus grin women must wear to mask their pain. Humor needn’t be a diluting agent; it can be a Trojan horse. As the saying goes, if you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, or they’ll try to kill you.
