Reviews

From The Atlantic Monthly

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Underscoring one’s own wide-ranging observations with sly references to self-aware aphorists—Thoreau, Pierre Bourdieu, Andy Warhol—may seem a recherché gambit hardly worth the hazard. Yet by foreword’s end, the reader knows that all is well. Why? That underscoring observer is Richard Todd, a longtime cultural critic with Montaigne-like tendencies toward gently acerbic discursion. Owing certain stylistic, spiritual, and topical allegiances to Joseph Epstein’s bravura Snobbery, Todd takes ruminative stock of his life and the paradoxes inherent in various external matters: celebrity, antiquity, politics, travel, brand names, spare parts, modern art. Along the way, our apprehension-obsessed Virgil offers object lessons aplenty—how poignancy emerges most clearly when it’s least forced, say, or why a well-Windexed personal prism is still our best refractor of the universal. As important, he pillories only those who truly deserve it (which, given the candor, often means a reflexive sacking). All of this reinforces the reliability of the narrator, an insightful humanist who concludes, “We need to be better materialists.” If that means more books like this one, then indeed we do.

—The Atlantic Monthly