In her first extended outing since The Argonauts, a book that brought her many new readers when it was published in 2015, the American poet, critic and all-round deep thinker Maggie Nelson makes a concerted land grab on the much “depleted” notion of freedom, aiming to steal it away not only from the populist right, but also from the puritan left (puritan, I should say, is my word, not hers). Nelson has, it seems, long been suspicious of emancipatory rhetoric, language that may condition us to think of liberation as a “future achievement rather than an unending present practice”, and she has duly made this her new book’s guiding principle. Freedom is, she writes, often “knotted up with so-called unfreedom, producing marbled experiences of compulsion, discipline, possibility, and surrender”. Her text, then, will “bear down” on its “felt complexities” in four distinct realms.
What are these realms? The book comprises “four songs of care and constraint”: in effect, four essays (I struggle to think of them as songs, not least because their musicality seems to me to be gravely in doubt). In the first, Art Song, Nelson pokes at such issues as cultural misappropriation and the denunciations that now inevitably trail supposed “transgressions” by artists and writers. In the second, The Ballad of Sexual Optimism, her attention shifts to #MeToo and female desire, and the tension that may exist between them. After this, however, things get more diffuse. Drug Fugue is not much more than a tour d’horizon of addiction literature – included are Iris Owens’s novel After Claude and Avital Ronell’s Crack Wars – while the final piece, Riding the Blinds, is a kind of intellectual anxiety attack provoked by global heating, the solving of which must inevitably involve the loss of certain freedoms. To drive or not to drive? Nelson lives in Los Angeles, so this is a hard one for her.
Only the first two essays come close to working, if by this we mean that they make some kind of vaguely perception-shifting argument. If Nelson is willing to point out, as she does in Art Song, the dangers of self-censorship – the logic of paranoia is, she thinks, inevitably “homogenising” – she also mistrusts instinctively a lot of the outrage that is out there. Take, for instance, her discussion of Open Casket, Dana Schutz’s quasi-abstract portrait of Emmett Till, lynched in Mississippi in 1955, whose inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial provoked so much anger (Schutz is white). She cannot help but recall, almost guiltily, the response of Zadie Smith to the painting (“I didn’t feel very much,” wrote Smith in a piece for Harper’s, having visited the gallery). Art is, as we all know far too well by now, a highly dependable pawn in any culture war. But how often, if we’re honest, does it really stir us up? When was the last time you cried in the theatre?
While I can’t go along with her assertion, in The Ballad of Sexual Optimism, that sex cannot be central to “any politics”, at least in part because “most people don’t like it” (what?), it’s hard to disagree, however uncomfortable this may feel, with her insistence that many #MeToo stories are scrubbed entirely clean of women’s desire. Her analysis of Monica Lewinsky’s reappraisal of her own story, and of the 2019 account by the woman known as “Grace” of her alleged assault by the comedian Aziz Ansari, are searching and valiant, if not exactly audacious. Nelson is brave enough – or perhaps I mean compassionate enough – to suggest that talking about trauma is one of the few socially acceptable ways in which women may discuss sexual discomfort (“In Judeo-Christian morality, it is much better to be taken by force than considered a bitch in heat,” as the French writer and film-maker Virginie Despentes puts it in her feminist manifesto, King Kong Theory).
Do these seem like slim pickings, ideas-wise? If so, then all I can tell you is that I felt the same disappointment myself on finally making it to the end of On Freedom, a book that is close to unreadable at moments. (Try this for size if you don’t believe me: “If and when we attribute all coarse language, all perseveration on individual body parts, all desires to consume, top, penetrate, or fetishise to cis men, we stay deaf to, or stand in judgment on, real aspects of female, lesbian, and queer expressions of desire, which do not always find expression in a gender-abolished, power-free, tentacular stew.”) Like The Argonauts, Nelson’s account of her life with the artist Harry Dodge, it is clotted with jargon and arcane references to Foucault et al. Unlike that book, however, it comes with no element of memoir, and thus with no narrative urgency. Its pace and tone never change. Rarely have so many words been used in a supposedly non-academic book to so little effect, Nelson’s endless sub-clauses, justifications and equivocations growing all over every page – all over everyparagraph – like barnacles on a rock.
Is this stifling, boring, impenetrable thicket the result of the fact that it was written in the blissful liberation afforded by the MacArthur ”genius grant” its author was awarded in 2016? What an irony, if so. Nelson was, in my eyes, a far better and infinitely more lucid writer – she was, in fact, a writer who seemed altogether more free – when she was still imprisoned by the need to worry about her rent. The book of hers that I like best is The Red Parts, which came out in 2007, and is about the trial of the man who murdered her aunt, Jane Mixer. Not much fatter than a powder compact, it can be read and understood in an afternoon. Unlike On Freedom, it will stick to your mind for ever, like glue.
• On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
