Some Fine Messes: Katie Roiphe's "In Praise Of Messy Lives"

My previous readings of Katie Roiphe's essays and criticisms are fairly limited in number, but the pieces affected me enough to clearly remember her over two years after I first cited her. In analyzing (and daring to critique) the literary styles of certain male novelists, Roiphe and Meghan O'Rourke came under intense critiques themselves in 2009 and 2010, stemming from O'Rourke's questioning the popularity of Jonathan Franzen, in which she cited Roiphe's "The Naked and the Conflicted." Having recently completed In Praise Of Messy Lives, a recently published collection of Roiphe's essays, I learned that she is no stranger to a lot of other jabs, arguments, and controversies. Agree or disagree with her stands, it's admirable to find that she counters her critics not with name-calling, but confidence and further writings. Also, as much as I devour essay compilations, I've found that category to be rife with male writers, and reading Roiphe's essays was a great way to shake this up, at least in regard to my own reading habits. She doesn't view herself as a divisive figure in the literary world, but acknowledges that her opinions tend to have extremely intense backlashes. In her introduction, she cites a response letter written after the publication of "The Naked and the Conflicted:"

'To the Editor:
Not only are you contributing to the total annihilation of the literary culture, but also to the destruction of our civilization. Think about it.'

Roiphe writes beautifully in her personal essays, with the opening selection detailing how people treated her in the wake of her divorce. Her friends and associates seemed to be carefully dancing around the issue, or treating her much too delicately. However, her occasional asides into personal reflection and assumptions can give the reader pause (I say this in reference to myself, since I try to elevate discourse above the "angry commenter" she explores later in the book):

"I once wrote an entire book about how one shouldn't reach for easy feminist interpretations of the world. And yet, even I can sense the residual sexism at work: while a woman outside of marriage is still considered a vulnerable and troubling figure, a man is granted a higher measure of autonomy. My husband, for instance, hasn't been receiving quite this level of solicitude. I don't think we are nearly as quick to assume that divorced men are falling into a life of despondency. I don't think that we are as concerned about what will happen to them, that we are filled with the same exquisite worry over their situation. We assume they will marry again, and until they do, we assume they're fine (Roiphe 6-7)."

Based on my own experience of men in the process of divorce, I can say, without giving away too many personal details, that divorce can be just as strenuous, the reactions can be just as similar, and many people are filled with the same exquisite worry. Roiphe is much too keen a writer to make flippant generalizations about the outside world, so I know this is based on her experiences, whereas my own experiences are opposite what she describes. Again, her writing is beautiful, but this specific passage jumped out at me as something I disagreed with; but one can admire the style without fully agreeing with the substance.

Her "voice" has a way of changing depending on the subject, but not in a distracting way. Later in the collection, she shares a college memory of sleeping with the romantic interest of one of her close friends. The essay feels like a short story, but one never gets the feeling that she's embellishing or softening any of the tense details. She's honest about her emotions at the time, and her exploration of the set-up and the aftermath is philosophical in its own way. She doesn't present any explicit, physical details of the encounters with the boy, but her full honesty in other passages creates an intensity beyond a lurid sexual adventure. The essay is not about sex, but about friendship and the workings of the teenage mind, minds intellectually but not emotionally advanced (or, to use a better word, experienced).

"As it turned out, my efforts to explain myself bothered Stella to no end. I think, in retrospect, that all she wanted me to do was accept responsibility. I think the whole conversation about what happened exhausted her. Who cared why or how from her point of view? Who cared what particular frailties of character led me to be vulnerable to this sort of thing? What matters in the end is the irrevocable act. Even if I was able, through sheer force of will, to create a little ambiguity in a wholly unambiguous situation, there was something insulting, finally, about doing it. My impulse, it seemed, was to take the whole thing apart like a car motor, to take out the pieces and look at them together; of course, if I could engage her in this process, if I could get her to look at each one of these oily mechanisms with me, then I would be part of the way to regaining our friendship. It is the two of us doing something together, however awful. Stella, in her own way, sensed this and refused (Roiphe 57)."

More than a couple of the essays in In Praise Of Messy Lives are witty dressing downs of modern urban parenting. As the mother of two children in New York, Roiphe constantly encounters worrisome parents, an onslaught of conflicting parenting books and advice, and an emphasis on safety and structure that goes beyond logic. Roiphe never criticizes parents for wanting the best for their children, but she addresses the sometimes insane extremes. Today, it sometimes feels like kids aren't allowed to be kids, and while I don't have any of my own, my work in bookselling has exposed me to the sheer number of books, as well as the parenting styles of upper-class Lincoln Park people. Roiphe's explorations are comical and sometimes incredible, but even through her opinions, she lets the examples speak for themselves.

"As their children get a little bit older, and slightly beyond the range of constant obsessive monitoring, homework offers parents another fertile opportunity to be involved, i.e., immersed. I can recall my own mother vaguely calling upstairs 'Have you done your homework?' but I cannot recall her rolling up her sleeves to work side by side with me cutting out pictures of rice paddies for a project about Vietnam, or monitoring how many pages of Wuthering Heights I had read. One mother told me about how her seven-year-old, at one of New York's top private schools, received an essay assignment asking how his 'life experience' reflected Robert Frost's line in 'The Road Not Taken': 'I took the one less traveled by.' And of course, that would be a question calling out for the parent writing it herself, since the seven-year-old's 'life experience has not as of yet thrown up all that many roads (Roiphe 194-195)."

The sections of the book that I enjoyed the most were Roiphe's literary criticisms and textual analyses. Her explorations of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag are both textual and personal, with references to specific passages as well as their meaning in the bigger pictures. I'm more familiar with Didion's writing than I am with Sontag, but, as I mentioned via Twitter the other day, Roiphe succeeds admirably with what I feel is a basic requirement of contemporary literary criticism: she manages to illuminate and educate with the texts I haven't read, instead of assuming that the reader is familiar with them. I've encountered essays on Susan Sontag many times, but I still haven't read her works. Thanks to Roiphe's pieces, I know much more about her life and writing style than I did before. Roiphe digs deeply into her literary explorations and manages to expose some very intriguing arguments. What started as a review of a biography of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter, becomes a look at the biography market in general, especially biographies of women associated with famous male artists.

"Of course, the biographies of great men's women lend themselves to all kinds of romanticizing. It is, in these hefty, attractive books, with their dramatic, sepia covers, enormously glamorous to be mad. Had Lucia Joyce simply married, and stayed in Paris and taught dance to eager young protegees, and pursued her art in a modest way, and grown fat and happy and had a couple of children in a little apartment with a view of the river, there would be no Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Roiphe 83-84)."

In Praise Of Messy Lives follows a sort of formula that seems to be prevalent in all essay collections by established authors: there are a seemingly equal number of pages devoted to personal essays, literary criticisms, and intelligent investigations of pop culture. I'm not saying that I didn't enjoy Roiphe's takes on Mad Men, Facebook, and Twitter, but these sometimes feel like they're supposed to be pleasant diversions from more complex material. From Roiphe to Jonathan Lethem to Zadie Smith, one can almost feel the paths turning throughout the course of a book, an almost subliminal "okay, enough with that heavy stuff, let's have some fun." But, these authors can find areas not often discussed online or on blogs. I'm not critiquing the authors, but rather the way essay collections are constrained in presenting diverse material. Nonetheless, Roiphe's take on Facebook, for example, is spot on and hilarious:

"Many, especially slightly older, teenagers seem to like to parody the Facebook norms even as they embrace them. The idea is that you are pretending to speak in the common language of Facebook, and are in fact speaking in that common language, but are aware of how unoriginal you are being; so when you write 'omg' you are ironically commenting on the use of 'omg,' but when other people write 'omg' they are seriously saying 'oh my God.' This very delicate balancing act is artful, in its way. Your character is now employing the cliches of the genre, but with satire, or maybe that would be satirrrrrrrrrre (Roiphe 230)."

To disregard (or ignore) my previous assessment, the "essay collection formula" does work well with Katie Roiphe, especially given her public image. Her essays acknowledge controversy without inviting it. She's honest and seems welcoming of constructive criticism that almost never comes, replaced by assumptions and nasty assessments made by online commenters. So seeing her balance between pieces that have received intense reactions and seeing her use biting comedy to illuminate her points is a formula unto itself. She never apologizes for her opinions, but also knows that some topics are universal. In Praise of Messy Lives is a invitation to educational writings with the understanding that you'll either agree or disagree with the author's assessments. Who knows? Maybe I'll go to some of her back list works and find writings that I completely disagree with. But, just going by this latest collection, I find that I agree with her more than I disagree, and this is a rare example of knowing a bit more about the author's personal life helping to put the essays in context. I've read some of the sneering, embarrassing insults directed her way, and I admire her way of defending herself with a quick wit, rather than giving into the easy temptation of stooping down to the level of personal attacks. There are many topics and passages I've left untouched, but I've explored enough to give potential readers a taste of what to expect. These pieces won't change the mind of anyone who dislikes her writing, but there's just the right amount of challenging material to foster discussions and further studies. And really, no matter what your opinions of her opinions, isn't that the ultimate goal?

Work Cited:
Roiphe, Katie. In Praise Of Messy Lives. Copyright 2012 by Katie Roiphe.

Between the Sheets

(NOTE: The cited passages are Not Safe For Work).

This new decade is not even a month old, yet the intangible notion that we're in a new era is undeniable. Even during the waning months of 2009, retrospectives were being written and discussed, whether in the media or in private conversations. This is only natural, this almost instinctual desire to analyze and to quantify, whether it be a list of the best films or albums of a given era, or to remember the beginning of said era before iTunes, Facebook, and the like. Some people have christened (most of) the past decade as the "post-9/11 era." For the purposes of this piece, it also seems to be the "post-metrosexual era." Thankfully, this tired phrase seems to have been put to rest. The novelty of it was downright embarrassing, to think that men who weren't ashamed of emotions or intelligence had to be defined by a borderline homophobic term, instead of being called "men" or "human beings."

Back in October, I made the claim that Michael Chabon's Manhood For Amateurs, a collection of essays directly or indirectly related to masculinity, was one of the best books of 2009. I still stand by that, and was thrilled at the time to find that Chabon was equally adept at writing non-fiction as well as fiction. My admiration for the book also went beyond formats and styles; as I originally wrote, "Chabon's writings prove that personal essays can discuss masculinity, sexuality, and drug use in an intelligent manner, retaining all aspects of quote/unquote manliness and not making the writer come out looking like a pig." There was no way to know this at the time, but the release of that book might have kicked off a renewed interest in masculinity studies, especially in the realm of literature. This month has seen the publication of two essays that have sparked discussions on the modern notions of male sex and gender expectations. Katie Roiphe's "The Naked and the Conflicted" (The New York Times, January 3rd) compares male writers' depictions of sexuality between two different generations. To a lesser extent, but still providing some intriguing passages, Molly Lambert's "Men In Revolt" (This Recording, January 11th) analyzes masculinity (or lack thereof) on a much broader cultural canvas.

(Photo:Katie Roiphe)

Roiphe's essay argues that, despite feminist critiques against postwar male sex scenes in literature, writers like John Updike and Norman Mailer were injecting undeniable emotions into their works. On the flip side, today's generation of male writers is beset by a lack of sexual focus in the written word, leaving much more to be desired, but with the same sexism tucked away in less blatant passages. "In the early novels of [Philip] Roth and his cohort there was in their dirty passages a sense of novelty, of news, of breaking out. Throughout the 1960s, with books like An American Dream, Herzog, Rabbit, Run, Portnoy's Complaint, and Couples, there was a feeling that their authors were reporting from a new frontier of sexual behavior: adultery, anal sex, oral sex, threesomes--all of it had the thrill of the new, or at least of the newly discussed (Roiphe)."

She doesn't condone any of the sexism or misogyny that was apparent in these works. However, she offers an anecdote about a friend who threw away a copy of Philip Roth's The Humbling, because "the [sex] scene was disgusting, dated, redundant." Personally, I'm more up-to-date on the writers whom she dubs "our new batch of young or youngish male novelists." In lieu of fantastically described sex scenes, the opinion is that no sex (or heavy innocence) is the prevailing style. Molly Lambert is blunt in her assessment: "Maybe this is the worst kind of criticism to give these practitioners of the new earnest manhood, but god is it boring." I feel that Roiphe's only true error in her piece is her assumption that today's male novelists are "too cool for sex," and the brevity of Lambert's essays fills in where Roiphe leaves off. It's also where the two women split into different, but equally relevant arguments: Roiphe is tired of the hidden sexism that prevails today, whereas Lambert has little patience for male writers who, despite a wealthy of literary talents, falter in their abilities to create vibrant, realistic female protagonists. This view is personal to me, because I'm about to start writing a short story with a main character who is female. Years ago, I made feeble attempts to write characters with makeups and backgrounds that were foreign to me, with the hope that I could write different viewpoints in strong fashions. Granted, my writings at the time were horrible, but even now, as I've matured as a fiction writer, it's disheartening to realize that even the professionals struggle with basic writings on the opposite sex. For all of the focus on the more positive aspects of masculinity (i.e. Chabon), there are still problems like these. Lambert's advice to male writers is "write a male character, then give them a female name." This is either completely sound or completely saddening.

But let's get back to sex. The unmentioned area is quote/unquote transgressive fiction, itself a sometimes shady definition. If the postwar novelists were trumpeting a new sexual landscape, then it was only for the mainstream. Some writers had been doing it all along, away from (at the time) popular consciousness. He likely doesn't have any fans in the feminist ranks, but Charles Bukowski's writings revealed sexual lives that were just as revealing, if not as "journalistic" as Roiphe would claim for the likes of Roth and Updike. The primary difference is that Bukowski didn't write with any true enthusiasm, only stark reality, a reality that was probably too much for some readers in the 1960s, even with the new stories about oral sex and threesomes.

"here was this old horny-looking freak, glass of schnapps in his hand, double-lensed glasses. just like the old-time movies. he appeared to be having a visitor, a young thing, almost too young, looking flimsy and strong at the same time.
she crossed her legs, flashing all the bit: nylon knees, nylon thighs, and just that tiny part there where the long stockings ended and just that touch of flesh began, she was all ass and breast, nylon legs, cleanblue laughing eyes...(Bukowski 39)."

Here is a sex scene from Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City. He's one of the best "youngish male novelists," and while he doesn't avoid sex, it's not the main focus of his works:

"The insatiable Hawkman debased herself elegantly to him night after night, in positions and attitudes the involuntary recollection of which he found overriding his senses throughout the days between. For instance, now, here, at the gala. At two that same morning he'd had Georgina swinging in a rope chair she'd had installed at his whimsical suggestion, hung from a bolted hook on her ceiling, her legs spilling over the sides of the mesh seat in which her splendid bottom lay helpless to his savage ministrations. The situation was wildly odd and erotic, Georgina's hands bound behind her as she rotated in the squeaking device, head turned courteously to one side, ever and absolutely the aristocrat no matter how fiercely he worked to defile her. He'd heard her murmuring as she climaxed, 'The best, the best, the best...(Lethem 129)."

Bad? No. Lacking? Possibly. Sadly, I don't have the passage available for immediate citation, but this scene reminds me of a quote by Jonathan Franzen. His opinion was that he generally disliked sex scenes in novels, and I'm sure a passage like Lethem's might fall into that category. While Roiphe makes an excellent assertion that literary sex can't be defined as pornography, since the sole aim of pornography is to arouse, has today's sexualized culture made sex in novels...well, less sexy? The short answer is no. Objectifications aside, Roiphe's main argument is that as the veteran writers have gotten older, the sex scenes have airs of being written casually, as space fillers, not with the daring that was commonplace in the mid 20th century. To me, a poorly written sex scene is just as bad as a poorly written argument, or a poorly written conversation on culture. Sexuality is just one part of the human condition, and if one is going to write it, it needs the same devotion and craft as any other action.

"Anyway, if Katie Roiphe is underwhelmed and unoffended by the sexually neutered males of Brooklyn fiction, she should check out this vast cultural wasteland called the internet. The best writing about sex is currently being done by people who are smart/stupid enough to date and write about it (Lambert)."

Lambert admires Chabon's essays, but criticizes him for writing some passages too tidily. My above respect for Chabon's views on masculinity should be taken with the understanding that it's non-fiction, albeit creative non-fiction. If the best writing about sex is being done by serial daters, then there needs to be an understanding that it's a modern form of journalism, not literature. There's still potential for young writers to explore sexuality in the written word with honesty, respect for women, and the power to incite emotions and maybe just a hint of arousal. Roiphe's opening paragraph provides a quote that makes for an excellent conclusion to my piece:

"For a literary culture that fears it is on the brink of total annihilation, we are awfully cavalier about the Great Male Novelists of the last century."

Forgive me if this is too obvious, but the fact that any written accounts of sexuality can cause stirs and essays, it's a sign that literature is not even close the brink of annihilation. Books may be on the fast track to more digital formats, due to technology and environmentalism, but the core values--entertainment, provokings thoughts and discussions--are not waning. Even if today's novelists are too chaste for someone's liking, there's still the untapped potential for new views on sexuality. As part of the human condition that novels have been grappling with since the beginning, it still makes for new discussions.

Works Cited:

Bukowski, Charles. The Most Beautiful Woman In Town. Copyright 1983 by Charles Bukowski.

Lethem, Jonathan. Chronic City. Copyright 2009 by Jonathan Lethem.