I did two podcasts, one on Lolita and one on Marie Kondo and negative reviews

Hi, I'm Becca. I am (very soon to be) the non-fiction book critic at the Washington Post. In the meantime, I'm an essayist and literary critic, a contributing editor at The Point and The Boston Review, and a PhD candidate (albeit one on hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard. I'm currently putting the finishing touches on an essay collection about maximalism, tentatively titled All Things Are Too Small, to be published by Metropolitan Books in the US and Virago in the UK. To keep up with my writing/rantings, subscribe to my substack here.

I hold a first-class MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a B.A., summa cum laude with high honors, from Dartmouth College, where I studied philosophy & German (and cultivated an enduring distaste for fraternities). These days I live in Cambridge, MA, with this person, whom I love.

As a writer:
I contribute essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, and more. I am the winner of the first annual Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism (see more here).
I'm also a two-time finalist for The National Book Critics Circle's book reviewing prize (2016 and 2018), and in 2017, I was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category (my nominated essay, "Ladies in Waiting," was subsequently collected in the 2017 Best American Magazine Writing anthology, available here). In 2018, my essay "Rhapsody in Blue" was included on the Notable Essays and Literary Non-Fiction list published in the 2019 Best American Essays anthology. When I write criticism, I write mostly about "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent, but I also review contemporary fiction sometimes. A few authors I especially love are Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, Henry James, Henry Green, Heinrich von Kleist, Marie de France, Simone Weil, Antal Szerb, and Norman Rush. You can read my interview with the National Book Critics Circle here and my interview with Lit Hub for their Secrets of the Book Critics series here. My wonderful agent is Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary. (You can stalk her and her agency here.)

As a philosopher:
I am primarily interested in aesthetics (especially aesthetic value and its relationship to other types of value), the philosophy of love and sex, and the history of German philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger, although I have increasingly consuming secondary interests in political philosophy. In my second-year paper, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," forthcoming in the British Journal of Aesthetics, I defend aestheticism, the view that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. (A draft is available upon request.) If I ever get around to writing it, my dissertation will be about some combination of the following: what it is to be a beautiful person, why evolutionary psychologists are wrong about human beauty, the ethics of exclusionary romantic/sexual/aesthetic preferences, and what role the state should play in ameliorating inequitable distributions of intimate "goods."

I receive many emails asking for advice about graduate school applications. I have answered some frequently asked questions on this page. As I note there, I do not consider myself an expert in how to write a successful graduate school application, and I urge all prospective grad students to consult resources online, as well as supervisors who have served on admissions committees, rather than me!

Before the pandemic, I followed Hegel in regarding nature as geistlos, but now, like any good Heideggerian, I am a big fan of hiking. Here I am in the Berkshires, which I love

I did two podcasts, one on Lolita and one on Marie Kondo and negative reviews

2/15/2020

3 Comments

Although speaking is not my preferred medium, and although I cannot promise I don't sound like an idiot because I am too appalled by the sound of my own voice to listen to these, I had a lot of fun recording them! They're with two very smart women, both of whom I like a lot and both of whom are merit further internet-stalking (in an admiring but non-creepy way, of course):

On Lolita with Jennifer Frey on her podcast, Sacred and Profane Love: https://thevirtueblog.com/2020/01/17/episode-19-love-and-lust-in-lolita/

On Marie Kondo and negative book reviewing with B.D. McClay on the inaugural episode of her podcast, Stet:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stet/id1498659735#episodeGuid=9d382c82-e486-4947-941c-bf2f260504e8

3 Comments

Edward

2/28/2020 05:41:50 am

Good stuff! A podcast addict, I listened the sound of the “Lolita” one at work and am looking forward to catching up on all of “Sacred and Profane Love” and the “Stet” episode.

When I recall the dream-world of “Lolita,” it has the thick-aired deliriousness of an all-too-coincidental, frustrating, but gorgeous and darkly comedic, nightmare. So I’m only irritated and bored by any adult who actually reads it and thinks that Nabokov himself wanted in some way to defend or beautify pedophilia. As you say, the book is suffused with suffering—which, in major part, is obviously due to Humbert bursting the “bubble of hot poison in [his] loins.” Even he himself repeatedly tells us that his actions toward Lolita are poisoning her: “Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime.” Survive! How, then, could Nabokov, who loathed cruelty and believed that one of the best things is kindness, be rationally condemned as a pardoner of pedophilia? In my opinion, Martin Amis made one of the most important points on the topic: “[N]o human being in the history of the world has done more [than Nabokov] to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of” . . . “the sexual despoliation of very young girls.”

Nabokov had the unsentimental courage, however, to brook the very real possibility of beauty and humor and bliss even in aspects of something as disastrous as pedophilia: The ecstasy of Humbert’s surreptitious orgasm against Lolita’s thigh after they fight over an apple, to invoke for example your favorite scene. And the pleasure is not strictly only Humbert’s, as it would be in a didactic screed: “[I]t was a very languid Lolita,” Humbert later writes, “that moaned and coughed and shivered in my embrace”—“moaned” having the supremely apposite definition here of “a long, low sound made by a person expressing physical or mental suffering or sexual pleasure” (New Oxford American Dictionary). Or, to invoke a different novelist with a similar courage: “Later [in Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate”], a six-year-old at the threshold of the gas chambers releases the chrysalis he has been carrying on his journey to the camp, thinking, ‘Let it live!’ ”

Years ago, in an ancient CD version of the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” there was this surprising admission (I paraphrase): “Some children who are the victims of sexual assault report enjoying the experience.” This is honesty, brutal honesty; and behind the brutal and elegant honesty of “Lolita,” if not of Humbert the man, is something else—an artist who has “a sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate.” You said you “have no good explanation” why you love Nabokov. For myself, I love him because he was a master of fair contrapuntal creation, in which the individual (animate or inanimate, fictional or non-fictional) is sovereign: Humbert, “a babboon, but a babboon of genius, perhaps”; the academically hopeless but “very pure” Lenski of “Speak, Memory” with his “downy ears” and detestation of “footmen and French”; and, from the same unsurpassed pearl of English autobiographies, a relaxed happy-family atmosphere suddenly become tensely closed: “On the night of March 28, 1922, around ten o’clock, in the living room where as usual my mother was reclining on the red-plush corner couch, I happened to be reading to her Blok’s verse on Italy—had just got to the end of the little poem about Florence, which Blok compares to the delicate, smoky bloom of an iris, and she was saying over her knitting, ‘Yes, yes, Florence does look like a ‘dïmnïy iris,’ how true! I remember—’ when the telephone rang.” In my opinion, Nabokov had—had to a more profound degree—Orwell’s famed “power of facing unpleasant facts,” because he could not only face those facts but also flick his pencil in front of them like a conductor and make those facts play magic mural-like music:

“From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then

Ed-(sorry for so many comments)-ward

2/28/2020 06:48:12 am

there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.”

Brute fact and mellifluous fiction blend, making beauty. “[E]mbers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control,” Van writes in “Ada.” But Nabokov seldom lost control. At least he never did with the moral complexity of “Lolita.” “Great writers . . . never get carried away,” Amis writes in his introduction to the novel. “Even pretty average writers don’t get carried away. People who write one novel and then go back to journalism or accountancy (‘Louder, bitch!’)—they get carried away.” Without this ability to brook and blend, Nabokov would not have been able to make some of the sex writing in “Lolita” good erotica; he would not have even been able to write “Lolita.” Fear and conformity would have stopped him—as they stop so many even from reading the book or admitting to themselves that it excites them. But not everyone: “As a survivor of abuse,” a woman named Daisy writes in an iBooks review, giving “Lolita” five stars, “I find this book to be a beautiful, feral, disgusting, validating pile of hell. Read it. Nabokov = genius.” This woman, and the woman who anonymously wrote “The Incest Diary,” are, like Nabokov, brave scientists of being. They state paradoxically unique truths. “My body was pure sex,” Anonymous writes. “My father had made himself a sexual object for me, too. I objectified him as I objectified myself for him. I had an orgasm bigger than any single one I had in my subsequent twelve-year marriage. We didn’t say anything. Not one word. Then he got out of my bed, went out of the room and down the hall and back into his bed. Not one word ever about that night.”

In everyday life, I aspire, but usually fail, to live up to Nabokov’s radical genius for individualization: “[Lolita’s] body glimmers in all its inimitable specificity on close to every page.” And one reason modern American politics is so alienating, I think, is that it’s obsessed with doing the very opposite: with scrict, prosaic reducing. Which is dehumanizing. As you quote in your lovely essay on Grossman (words that could have come from Nabokov’s diary), “[a]mong a million Russian huts you will never find even two that are exactly the same. Everything that lives is unique. It is unimaginable that two people, or two briar-roses, should be identical.” Yes! By caging then killing Lolita off, Nabokov—one of the strongest humanizers—lets her live: lets her “continue to guard the miracle of [her] unique universe.”

“Brian Boyd . . . reports that among all the characters . . . whom Nabokov admired as human beings, Lolita stood second only to Pnin,” Rorty wrote in his introduction to “Pale Fire.” “But readers of ‘Lolita’ often have trouble getting Lolita in focus. All they seem to remember is Humbert’s creature, his invention—the nymphet, rather than the little girl. So Nabokov’s suggestion that she is a splendid human being is hard to take in. Still, readers of Lolita vaguely recall, Lolita did have guts: somehow she got away from Quilty and managed to find herself a good man who would give her a child.”

Nevertheless, I also hate Nabokov, because he was human. As a teenager without a father, I looked up to him as if he were my father, or more precisely Father. He was for me a kind of disembodied pure style that, like an equation, could be applied to life to decode it. Oh, how I wanted to be him whenever I saw his mock-dignified and mischievous balding profile on the hardcover of “Pale Fire” (Everyman’s Library, 1992). He seemed a bon vivant of the life of the mind. His dapper morals and extreme artistic decrees I put on despite their being many sizes too big. (I was a teenager—of course I was absurd; and I likewise misread “Lolita” as a simple love story. “So why do you like that book so much?” a friend asked me during a jaunty summer car ride. “You mention it a lot.” I had no idea why. “Boo! . . . Come on.”) Disenchantment came when I discovered Nabokov’s all-to-human betrayals of Vera. A man excusing himself after a burp at a dinner is a grotesque philistine, I was to believe, bu

Ed-(sorry for so many comments)-ward

2/28/2020 06:49:57 am

ut what is a man who, in old age, tries to cheat on his adoring wife of forty-plus years with a student? For a while after my discovery, Nabokov’s prose nauseated me. His once-powerful dictums now seemed like dick moves. Yet I was being foolish: I was asking for way too much and being self-righteous. After all, it was Nabokov’s ability to individualize that had in the first place made me feel respected as a reader, as a human. Eventually I came to love him again, love his flawed self more, and more honestly, because I accepted that, as Rorty once said in an interview on consolation, “We’re all dirty, we always will be dirty.” “In the wake of Darwin,” the unhealthy obsession of “the ascetic priest” with praying for the calm waters of purity is “dangerous.”

In the preposterous but fun movie “The Leaves of Grass,” Rabbi Zimmerman (played by Maggie Siff) is asked by the crestfallen protagonist after his brother is shot to death why people do such things. She responds solemnly: “We are animals, Professor Kinkaid, with brains that trick us into thinking we aren’t.” That doesn’t excuse the wicked, of course. But it often helps me to understand; and in the grand scheme of things, it makes ranking bad behavior—and thereby forgiving—a lot easier.

Or, at least, I kinda think so? . . . This unruly throng of thoughts, some of which by me are likely confused or glib or worse, are not, I hope, too irritatingly put: I’m just thinking out loud while reflecting on what you and Frey discussed and on what you’d written. So please don’t take the many obvious points I make as me trying to explain anything to you. For relative to your gracefully flying thoughts in “The Real Lolita,” mine are like a dippy bird—not even a waxwing slain. Your essay clarified many of my inchoate feelings, reassured me. Reading you, like reading Nabokov, is often a joy. And a far-fetched dream of mine is for you to one day do a long review of “Speak, Memory.” Till then, I’ll settle, happily, for anything you write.

Best wishes,
E.

I did two podcasts, one on Lolita and one on Marie Kondo and negative reviews

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