Sharp by Michelle Dean review – what do Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag have in common?

It’s always fun to read about the dozen exceptional women this book collects together but does each writer’s distinctive wit and thought get lost?

At times Michelle Dean’s Sharp feels like a zany game of Twister. How to connect the dots between such disparate figures as Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Nora Ephron and Janet Malcolm – and, more importantly, why? There’s no denying that Dean has great taste in women: those she has chosen are fabulous company, always worth revisiting. Yet her argument might appear to be right there in the subtitle – The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion – it remains frustratingly vague.

Sharpness, Dean seems to suggest more than once, is something of a lost virtue in the current era, and she undertakes a vindication of fierceness, of the willingness to forgo “niceness” in favour of intellectual rigour. She particularly admires women who, far from trying to ingratiate themselves, responded to a hostile or indifferent environment by growing ever more acerbic – and she evidently believes this is a mode that deserves to be revived and championed. Yet that notion is undermined by her inclusion of so many familiar 20th-century figures, which gives the book a rather clubby atmosphere. Dean sometimes falls prey to the sort of self-defeating pop-feminism that bigs up women whose stature has long been undisputed while also accidentally undermining that stature by slinging them together, privileging what they have in common – whether that’s social class, the tendency to be opinionated, or, often, little beyond womanhood itself – over what is distinctive in their ideas. One of the ironies here is that Dean has produced just the kind of soft‑centred work that most of her subjects would have delighted in eviscerating.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Kq5jEN