The Review

Becca Rothfeld, who since April has been the nonfiction books critic at The Washington Post, brings to her new role not only long experience writing for such venues as The Point, Liberties, and The Chronicle Review, but also her training as an academic. Though we’d planned to talk in person, we were confined to Zoom by the smoke blanketing the East Coast last week (appropriately enough, forest fires are the subject of Rothfeld’s most recent column). Besides the smoke, we discussed criticism, the academy, sanctimony, and Twitter. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You wrote a very widely read review of Senator Josh Hawley’s book about manhood. That, along with some of your other recent reviews — the one on Sontag, the one on books about maternity — have clustered around shared themes: gender, sex, sexism. Do you think across reviews in terms of thematic clusters or through-lines? Or is every review its own thing?

I think it sort of happens naturally, in virtue of my preoccupations. The kind of books about which I think I would have something interesting to say tend to be about certain clusters of topics. So, in the coming months I’ll write a number of reviews about liberalism and whether it can be resuscitated — just because I’m interested in that topic. Maybe there’s a logic in the things that end up happening unbeknownst to me too, the cunning of history at work. Because I do find that my reviews end up creating a body of work with themes and preoccupations that overlap in interesting ways. Things crystallize of their own accord, in a way that feels really comprehensive and satisfying. Maybe that’s the doing of my subconscious.

You’re a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Harvard. How did you get into the general-audience criticism business?

At first, it was completely haphazard. It wasn’t that I was conscious or deliberate about wanting to have a career in this kind of writing, but rather that I had a pathological need to write for a public audience. I found it almost therapeutic to try to produce beautiful writing alongside the drier and more-academic writing that I had to be producing in my Ph.D. program. I thought of public writing almost as a guilty indulgence.

It didn’t occur to me that writing for public audience could be my full-time career. But then it became clear that I was spending most of my time in my Ph.D. just looking for excuses to do it.

Do you still feel like you have a foot in the academy? What do you work on in philosophy?

Aesthetics is my primary area, and then I have secondary interests in the history of philosophy, particularly in twentieth-century German philosophy and increasingly in nineteenth-century German philosophy — the link between Romanticism and idealism. And separately I’ve been increasingly interested in political philosophy, in Rawls and in the entire cottage industry of discussions around Rawls. I was very omnivorous, which was one of the reasons that the academic life didn’t suit me. I always had too many interests. I was too much of a temperamental generalist.

I’m in a Kant reading group right now, which will force me to read the secondary literature about Kant — something I struggle to do on my own, because it’s so unpleasant.

One thing that I enjoy about having defected is that now I can read academic papers on whatever I’m interested in at the moment.

Do you experience a translation of your academic self into your reviewer self, or is it sort of all of a piece?

When I decided that I did not want to be doing academic philosophy, I continued to think that certain things about it were really important, and I made a conscious effort to integrate the two modes of thinking — and now their integration just comes naturally. But when called upon to reflect more explicitly on it, I can say that my philosophical background informs the ways I approach reviewing. One thing it informs is the sort of books I review. In the coming months, I’ll be reviewing more philosophical and academic titles than a standard nonfiction book critic would likely be choosing to review. And of course there are moments when some writer is explicitly drawing on philosophy — Josh Hawley talks about Epicurus and his relationship to liberalism, which are things that I know enough about to know that he’s completely wrong.

More generally, my background in philosophy has pervaded my method so totally that I am a stickler for argumentative precision. I’m always looking for people to define terms, or to write about something in a way that is free of contradictions. I’ll never be able to free myself of that. It’s an indelible professional deformation.

Before your current gig, one essay of yours that found a pretty broad public was in Liberties, “Sanctimony Literature,” about fiction, and about the criticism of fiction. You criticize what you see as bad general trends in cultural criticism this way: “The question is ... whether political value is the supreme value, the only sort of value — and, by extension, whether every analysis of every artwork must always advert to political factors, on pain of moral and evaluative failure.” How do those concerns relate to your work now?

In some ways I have repressed the memory of writing that piece, because I wrote it during the pandemic, in what was probably the worst period of my adult life. I try not to think about it that much. I’m not sure that I would write the same piece now, maybe because I feel that the cultural moment has changed. I feel that there’s a much-broader acceptance of the kind of argument that I was making then. At the time when the piece came out, there was both a positive reception — ultimately it didn’t hamper my career — and a lot of negative backlash, a number of people accusing me of being reactionary and so on. A piece that makes basically the same argument but about the visual arts came out recently (by Jason Farago in The New York Times). The glowing reception of Farago’s piece — which it absolutely deserved — demonstrated to me that the moment has shifted. I think if someone were to publish “Sanctimony Literature” now, no one would get that mad.

I think you helped prepare the ground. And even before the Farago essay, there was an essay in The Yale Review by the novelist Garth Greenwell about Philip Roth which was similarly critical of certain kinds of sanctimonious myopia. Taken all together, these essays might announce a change in the atmosphere. You had the courage to strike out there first.

I wrote that piece the way that I did because, when I was writing it, Liberties was not online yet. And they didn’t tell me that the first piece they would put online, without a paywall, would be this piece. If I hadn’t thought that the piece wouldn’t be widely accessible, I probably would have been too afraid to write it. I’m glad I was under a false sense of security when I wrote it. I try, usually futilely, to replicate that false sense of security when I write now.

That anecdote gets at what most writers I know will admit if pressed, which is that the kind of exposure that the internet, and especially Twitter, enables makes us all keenly vulnerable to a kind of self-censorship, because we don’t want to get dragged on Twitter.

I had three pieces set to come out in various leftist magazines, and I wrote to all of the editors: “If you want me to pull the piece now because I’ve been tarred and feathered on Twitter and am now associated with reactionaries, I completely understand.” At the time that felt to me like a reasonable response. Of course all of them said no, it’s fine.

In some ways it was quite instructive, the backlash. It felt like the end of the world, but it wasn’t at all. It emboldened me. And I deleted Twitter.

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Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin