A call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as mindfulness, decluttering, David Cronenberg, and consent.
Rothfeld makes an impassioned case for cacophony ... Rothfeld’s language is often extravagant, luxuriating in alliteration and internal rhyme ... This is Rothfeld at her very best, dancing across media, experience and scholarship to deliver a surprising conclusion ... Having just recovered from a dazzling insight, we might be provoked to argue with her (one can imagine she likes it that way), and we are never bored.
Splendidly immodest in its neo-Romantic agenda — to tear down minimalism and puritanism in its many current varieties — but, like Smith, she makes her strongest case in her essays’ very form, a carnival of high-low allusion and analysis.
Bracing, original and intellectually poised ... It is part of her scintillating achievement, in this book of appetite, to make one vow never again to use the phrase 'less is more' under any circumstances.
