Dombek dignifies the genre. Her essays are personal in the way of Montaigne or Virginia Woolf: bold, humane and more imaginative than navel-gazing ... while Dombek’s straight-as-a-razor tone can sometimes make it difficult to decide whether she is credulous or skeptical, her understatement allows the reader to draw her own conclusions.
Dombek writes breezily and well about the history of the idea of narcissism, leaning heavily on Elizabeth Lunbeck’s excellent 'The Americanization of Narcissism' ... She punctuates her survey of thinkers and pop culture with asides about her boyfriend, waiting for subways and living in Brooklyn. These digressions, for me, were mostly of marginal interest, not saying enough about either the writer or her concerns.
...sharply argued, knottily intelligent, darkly funny ... Ms. Dombek, despite her efforts to keep the first-person pronoun at bay, is also offering an earnest recovery narrative of sorts.
... [Dombek is] graceful on the page, and often more empathic, especially toward the suffering multitudes who’ve sustained lasting injury (they proclaim) at the hands of narcissistic bosses, bad boyfriends, selfish parents ... Because Dombek is a lot smarter and more interesting than much of the material in her archive, [certain] forays are sometimes awkward. No doubt it makes me sound like some decrepit Arnoldian—value is an outmoded category, to be sure—but there’s a lot of space handed over to cultural sludge.
