Review by New York Times Review
IF THERE IS a cipher to "The Fame Lunches," Daphne Merkin's first essay collection in over 15 years, it is embedded in her profile of the poet Anne Carson, who writes: A wound gives off its own light surgeons say. If all the lamps in the house were turned out you could dress this wound by what shines from it. Merkin's 46 essays share a similar curiosity about the glittering byproducts of personal pain. The conspicuous suffering that runs through the book belongs to actresses, to novelists, to musicians and to the author herself. Like Joan Didion, whose most famous essays are impossible to imagine appearing in any contemporary publication, Merkin often deals in inscrutable genres. She has a particularly keen ability to abridge other people's lives, and some of her best writing appears in what are ostensibly book reviews of biographies. Merkin writes from that chic state of mind she calls "cultural egalitarianism." Her celebrity subjects range from the "wholesome and aboveboard" Marilyn Monroe to the novelist Jean Rhys, whom she describes as forever "doomed to be overwhelmed by first impressions." Though Merkin is susceptible to "the florid jargon of shrinks" and has an oddly archaic desire to spin coherent narratives from psychoanalytic conjecture, her investigations into the inner lives of icons are conducted with genuine and earnest attention. It can sometimes seem as if the global supply of candor has run dry, all the world's dirty laundry already aired. But in a book brimming with insight ("Children are inherently conservative") and impeccably precise description (Susan Sontag's writing has a "crisp and haughty 'are you with me, you morons' manner"), Merkin's most striking trait is her fearlessness with regard to her own denial and rationalization, especially on the subjects of weight and finances. If there is anything truly shameful left in this world it is self-deception, and Merkin deserves laurels for the willingness she shows in interrogating her own. "Bad Feminist," Roxane Gay's second book this year, makes the claim that we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to identity politics. "When feminism falls short of our expectations," she writes, "we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement." Gay's thesis - which is reasonable, if overly reliant on an unreasonable straw man - is that women shouldn't reject feminism just because their natural inclinations, like reading Vogue or listening to sexist rap music, make it hard to live in perfect accord with contemporary feminist principles. The book that follows ranges in subject from Gay's obsessions with childish fiction ("Sweet Valley High," "The Hunger Games") to the way race is mishandled in contemporary film ("The Help," "Django Unchained," "Twelve Years a Slave") to the patriarchal prejudices involved in deeming a novel "women's fiction." Throughout these personable essays, many of which first appeared online, we learn of Gay's Haitian-American upbringing, the harrowing sexual assault she suffered in adolescence and her conflicted feelings about the civic responsibilities of being a black academic. But Gay squanders much of this intimacy on points more vague than topic sentences in SAT sample essays. She is "fascinated by strength in women," and notes that "girls have been written and represented in popular culture in many different ways." She informs us, in the book's first sentence, that "the world changes faster than we can fathom in ways that are complicated." Gay very much likes the word "interesting" and deploys it to describe everything from niche dating sites to Patrick Bateman to Hanna Rosin's "The End of Men." This casual imprecision would be more forgivable if the book weren't built around a fundamentally unconvincing perspective: that of the "bad feminist" that Gay wants readers to believe she is. Yes, she shaves her legs and enjoys the melodies of misogynist pop songs. But her opinions and preoccupations, and every bit of hand-wringing she engages in, suggest a woman very much in tune with modern feminism. The eager pride she takes in being different - "I am an acquired taste" - can read more like personal branding than political conviction. "In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie," Gay writes, as though "being bad," which she is so invested in, were not just as much of a performance as being good. ALICE GREGORY is a contributing editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine and has written for publications including Harper's, New York, GQ, The New Yorker and n+1.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 5, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This trenchant collection assembles previously published essays and new work by cultural critic and novelist Gay (An Untamed State). Even though she loves pink, feels nostalgic about the Sweet Valley High series, and lets degrading rap lyrics blast from her car stereo, Gay is passionately committed to feminist issues, such as equal opportunity and pay and reproductive freedom. Writing about race, politics, gender, feminism, privilege, and popular media, she highlights how deeply misogyny is embedded in our culture, the careless language used to discuss sexual violence (seen in news reports of sexual assault), Hollywood's tokenistic treatment of race, the trivialization of literature written by women, and the many ways American society fails women and African-Americans. Gay bemoans that fact that role models like Bill Cosby and Don Lemon urge African-Americans to act like ideal citizens while glossing over institutional problems in the education, social welfare, and justice system that exacerbate racism and poverty. Although Gay is aware of her privilege as a middle-class Haitian-American, she doesn't refrain from advising inner-city students to have higher expectations. Whatever her topic, Gay's provocative essays stand out for their bravery, wit, and emotional honesty. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Popular and prolific essayist and novelist Gay (An Untamed State) reflects on feminism, politics, and popular culture. (LJ 9/1/14) (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Essayist, novelist and pop-culture guru Gay (An Untamed State, 2014, etc.) sounds off on the frustrating complexities of gender and race in pop culture and society as a whole.In this diverse collection of short essays, the author launches her critical salvos at seemingly countless waves of pop-cultural cannon fodder. Although the title can be somewhat misleadingshes more of an inconsistent or conflicted feministthe author does her best to make up for any feminist flaws by addressing, for instance, the disturbing language bandied about carelessly in what she calls rape culture in societyand by Gays measure, this is a culture in which even the statelyNew York Timesis complicit. However, she makes weak attempts at coming to terms with her ambivalence toward the sort of violent female empowerment depicted in such movies asThe Hunger Games. Gay explores the reasons for her uneasiness with the term womens fiction and delivers some not-very-convincing attempts to sort out what drives her to both respect and loathe a femalecentric TV show like Lena DunhamsGirls. Although generally well-written, some of these gender-studies essays come off as preachy and dull as a public service announcementespecially the piece about her endless self-questioning of her love-hate relationship with the tacky female-submission fantasies inFifty Shades of Grey. Yet when it comes to race-related matters (in the section "Race and Entertainment"), Gays writing is much more impassioned and persuasive. Whether critiquing problematic pandering tropes in Tyler Perrys movies or the heavy-handed and often irresponsible way race is dealt with in movies likeThe Help,12 Years a SlaveorDjango Unchained, Gay relentlessly picks apart mainstream depictions of the black experience on-screen and rightfully laments that all too often critical acclaim for black films is built upon the altar of black suffering or subjugation.An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
