Katie Roiphe's 'In Praise of Messy Lives' is really two books: one, an 80-page collection of book reviews and literary criticisms is acute and engaging, combining just the right proportion of provocation and insight. I especially loved Roiphe's well-deserved encomium to Joan Didion, and am grateful for her essay on 'The Bratty Bystander', if only because it so perfectly echoes my own skepticism with the genre.

The other book is a bloated, somewhat blurry commentary on our society and culture, that spends far too long making far too simple a point. The point - nicely captured in the title of the collection itself - is that in confining ourselves to the conventional straitjacket of a healthy and responsible existence, we may be losing touch with something ineffable but necessary to the human experience, the creative anarchy of intense experience. That the problem with trying to control every aspect of our own, and by extension our children's, existence is not simply that it is impossible to do so successfully, but that so perfect a life, even if achieved, would prove too insulated, too sterile, to be described as learning. What we need, given where we are as a society, then, is for the pendulum to swing a little the other way: less control, more chaos; less Apollo, more Dionysus.

As arguments go, this is one I happen to largely agree with, and if Roiphe had one concise, (say) thirty page essay making this point, I would have read and re-read it, and recommended it to everyone I know. It is not, however, a point that requires, or seems able to sustain, a hundred and sixty odd pages of multiple essays that combine personal anecdote with sketchy social comment but are frequently low on insight. In her piece on Maureen Dowd, Roiphe criticizes Dowd for her superficiality, her privileging of style over substance, and while this is indubitably true, the same could be said of Roiphe herself. Do we really need a collection of critical essays to tell us that Dowd's perspectives are superficial, that people on Facebook are shrill and vain, that Internet comments are frequently unaccountably vicious and lacking perspective? Given the intelligence that Roiphe brings to her literary criticism, it's a shame that she's not more incisive when it comes to these topics, and I can't help feeling that this would have been a better book if it had been more free-ranging and less problematic. As it is, I emerge grateful for the book essays, motivated to read more Updike, and convinced that I will have forgotten everything else Roiphe had to say about our society and culture by the end of the weekend.