MichelinaNeri's Reviews > The Argonauts

Your enjoyment of this book will be 100% tied to your tolerance for theory. If your idea of a good time is seemingly endless quotes from Roland Barthes and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, references to Butler and Zizek, the use of terms like the "sodomitical mother" and enough analyses of the symbology of the anus to impress Freud, you will like this book.

At one point, Nelson describes an awkward scene she witnesses at a panel discussion - one theorist has recently become a mother and has moved her thinking from the abstract to the personal, relating the history of art to her own feelings and experiences. The other panel member eviscerates her, accusing her of letting her own self-involvement cloud her mommy brain with half-baked theories and bad nude self-portraits. Nelson admits the first panel member's talk had been muddled, but sides with her in a fury of feminist indignation. This conflict basically foreshadowed my opinion of the whole book - which consists of tiresome descriptions in minute detail of mundane personal moments in Nelson's life used as the jumping off point for relentless dives into theory. At one point she tries to take her baby to a burlesque show and is turned away at the door - it is bar with an age restriction. This is the world's most unremarkable story, but somehow Nelson plumbs its depths for a whole chapter until she hits Freud. By the time she was discussing the ontology of contractions in childbirth, I was so done with this book.

There were a few good bits, a few interesting anecdotes, a few interesting thoughts. I liked reading a book about family that upsets the traditional, conservative view of family, about a family that fucks with gender. But it is strange to address the whole book to your partner, Harry, and then spend less time fleshing out who Harry is as a person than you spend recounting an entirely pedestrian argument you once had with him about the assimilationist politics in X-Men: First Class. Who cares? This books is like being trapped at a bad cocktail party with a bunch of blowhard, self-involved professors trying to one-up each other with Foucault quotes. No thank you.