In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays
In her latest essay collection, controversy-magnet Roiphe (Uncommon Arrangements, 2007) addresses a felicitous assortment of subjects, from travels in Asia to Jane Austen. The book’s enticing title stems from her analysis of the “enormous popularity” of the television series Mad Men and its cigarette-smoke-laced, alcohol-fueled interpretation of “the glamour of spectacularly messy, self-destructive behavior.” What’s most interesting is how Roiphe turns the camera, so to speak, on the socially correct, health-obsessed habits of today’s new puritanism, and on her feminist writer mother, Anne Roiphe, whose memoir, Art and Madness (2011) records her experiences during the Mad Men era. Roiphe is equally bracing—and hilarious—in her dissection of the Fifty Shades of Grey craze. Roiphe writes with an archer’s aim and a bullfighter’s bravado. While it’s true that the world she dissects is an elite one, it is also highly influential. And her cultural soundings do run deep, whether she’s critiquing incest in literature; sex scenes in Roth, Mailer, and Updike versus Franzen, Chabon, and Wallace; or, from a more personal stance, entrenched attitudes toward divorce and single mothers. --Donna Seaman