Anyone familiar with Ms. Roiphe’s work will be unsurprised by her desire to wrest a story of strength from an experience that others might describe with words like 'trauma' or 'victim' ... With her new book, Ms. Roiphe takes another tack in telling her own stories, and the effect is quietly revelatory. About her affair with the rabbi, for example, she is more candid about its 'not okayness.' She recognizes that her efforts to 'control and tame' this narrative by making it a tale of empowerment were not exactly lies, per se, but wishes ... This, clearly, is a different sort of book for Ms. Roiphe, who typically writes and picks fights with an unapologetic swagger. Here she shows the tender underbelly of her thoughts about sex, power and womanhood, and reveals her doubts, shifts and contradictions ... There is glamour in these stories, and plenty of wine and champagne (Ms. Roiphe runs with a fairly posh crowd), but there are also quite a few frank admissions of loneliness, neediness and fragility ... The effect is powerful, perhaps because her admitted contradictions feel more authentic, and more persuasive, than her polemics. Although Ms. Roiphe seems to be exposing her vulnerabilities here, she is actually, once again, demonstrating her unique brand of fearlessness.
Despite her reputation for controversy, Roiphe has never been that formidable a polemicist; her perspective is too blinkered, her blind spots too obvious. At the level of the sentence, though, she’s a skillful writer. Even in this book, without the ballast of a sustained argument, there’s a deliberation in her pacing that keeps everything moving ... The best parts of the book are the ones in which Roiphe reconsiders her old positions, admitting how much they left out ... Her newfound openness only goes so far. While Roiphe’s empathetic imagination extends to men and to women like Beauvoir, who were tormented by the men they loved, other women in this book aren’t afforded the same depth of understanding ... I began to wonder if this book is Roiphe’s attempt to be 'relatable' — to jump on the bandwagon of fragmented, diaristic writing by women that confesses to vulnerability and doubt. In 2020, ingratiating oneself to a shrinking cadre of male gatekeepers is no longer the shrewd strategy it once was. The Power Notebooks can be read as a power move ... But Roiphe doesn’t seem quite ready to let the old ways go.
In her searching, pensive new book, The Power Notebooks, Roiphe turns her theorizing on herself ... Roiphe’s aim is to investigate a profound contradiction within herself, between her submissive attitude toward men she desires and her fierce, feminist self-reliance ... Roiphe has a tendency to think mainly about how power affects her and women like her — white, straight, upper-middle-class, with elite educations and successful careers. Perhaps because she rose to prominence during the 1990s, the media world she describes doesn’t seem to have changed much since then. All her friends and lovers seem to be heterosexual and rich. All seem to have houses in the city and houses in the country. I half expected John F. Kennedy Jr. to saunter across the page, a copy of George rolled up under his arm ... For all her commitment to honesty, Roiphe has blind spots, including an inability to reckon with her own professional clout ... Finally, there is something troubling about the way abuse figures in these essays ... Roiphe’s larger goal here is to investigate the lived reality of her romantic dynamics, not to get on a soap box and opine. The result is a beautifully written and thoughtful book. But there is a limit to the responsibility that women can take, the ambiguity in which we can dwell; at a certain point, we have a duty to make men who behave like this acknowledge their culpability.
... a series of brief-but-potent meditations on women ... Roiphe opens up, revealing the gentler person behind the polemical writer — and the accomplished literary scholar behind both ... Roiphe's personal revelations in The Power Notebooks are part self-defense, part risky exposure to further attacks. Just don't call them apologies ... Roiphe has a knack for angering people and leaving a trail of enemies — boyfriends, fellow faculty, enraged feminists. In response, she devotes a lot of thought to the subject of likability and relatability, which she insistently links to a willingness — or worse, an imperative — to show vulnerability. It doesn't seem to occur to her that a display of compassion might just as effectively mollify one's image ... The Power Notebooks deserves positive attention. Roiphe's exploration of women's complicated relationship with power — including her own — is sharp, smart, and literate. She clearly has a penchant for the unsettled and the unorthodox, and this book helps clarify not just her fierce and often irritating stands on sexual abuse, but also her attraction to subjects like the unconventional literary marriages she parsed in Uncommon Arrangements ...and the cultural idiosyncracies she celebrated in her essay collection, In Praise of Messy Lives...In fact, The Power Notebooks is, at heart, Roiphe's audacious assessment of her own messy life.
The 70-some chapters, written in a muddled stream-of-consciousness style, deal primarily with Roiphe’s relationships with a series of toxic men ... But even after years spent poring over their letters and diaries, Roiphe seems unable to reconcile the passivity of her literary heroes in the face of cruel romantic partners — and makes little progress in determining her own place in that lineage ... The most compelling moments in The Power Notebooks come when Roiphe analyzes her own stories of abuse ... She writes...'I was not purely powerless does not mean I was not facing a man who was twisting or distorting his power.' Roiphe’s articulation of that sentiment might be read as a breakthrough, if only she applied it to anyone aside from herself. This is the most striking problem with the book ... Even outside the realm of abuse, Roiphe seems unable to draw a connection between her own experiences and those of other women. She spends an entire chapter bemoaning the decisions by feminist writers — including Roxane Gay, Joan Didion and Zadie Smith — to admit their vulnerabilities in their work ... In The Power Notebooks, Roiphe is finally making room for herself to express weakness and to feel pain. Hopefully, someday, she will do the same for the rest of us.
The book is organized into fragmentary but readable short chapters...All are crisply written and often amusing though some chapters seem to be conventional reviews and interviews, repurposed into looser Power Notebook mode. This is understandable but undermines the message that these are 'informal musings and notes.' The men in Roiphe’s life are given some minor walk-on parts ... This is a book to divide opinion. Readers who are devoted to Roiphe as 'a cultural lightening rod' may find these revelations revelatory. Non-fans may find the whole project a bit self-important, though most could probably agree that this is a nicely produced, well-written, short memoir for the bedside table to be dipped into before sleep.
In the notebooks, Roiphe finds herself 'experimenting, following possibly disturbing tangents, pursuing diverging lines of thought.' Much of what her experimentation produces lies within the realm of commonplace pop-feminism ... If the familiarity is exasperating rather than just a little dull, it’s because Roiphe seems to hold herself aloof from the audience for those insights ... Faced with circumstances that might render her ordinary, Roiphe sometimes defaults to a posture of jaded uninterest ... Yet certain of Roiphe’s autobiographical sketches succeed in capturing, with uncomfortable immediacy, the experience of confronting something larger and genuinely unresolved.
In this arrestingly intimate and cathartic work, drawn from notebooks she kept during a recent 'time of upheaval,' she reveals her struggles with doubt, confusion, pain, and anxiety, forging an audaciously articulate, prodigiously candid, and thought-provoking blend of memoir, literary biography, confession, and dissection ... Roiphe delves into the lives of women writers...praising Simone de Beauvoir as a 'brilliant elucidator,' which Roiphe is, too, to deeply clarifying and affirming effect.
At first, the fragmented notebook entries seem overly scattered, but they soon evolve into a cohesive analysis of the complex power dynamics facing women on a daily basis ... Throughout the book, the author probes the question of why women so often subjugate their power in their private lives, but she never quite finds a satisfying answer ... An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
