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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rebecca West in the 1920s. Photograph: Alamy

By including so many writers about whom so much is already widely known, Dean has set herself an impossible task – there’s just not enough room to say much that’s new in the breathless sweep from one woman to another, and what links them is often tenuous, except in the case of those who were friends (such as Arendt and Mary McCarthy, whose relationship is given a separate chapter). In moving from Parker to Rebecca West, for instance, Dean observes that the latter “knew something of despair over men, and how to write about it”, and also that she resembled Parker in being “a woman writer who was greatly celebrated in her own time”. When the links between the individual figures are so tenuous, it becomes harder to ignore the question of why these women were included and others left out.

Given how little space each writer gets, the gossipy biographical details, while entertaining, can also seem a bit trivialising: Dean notes in her chapter on Arendt that the love letters she exchanged with Heidegger, unlike those between West and HG Wells, contained “little baby talk … no pet names”. Meanwhile her analysis of the work itself is patchy and her choice of examples can be mystifying: after all that’s been written about Joan Didion as a stylist, it’s both odd and anticlimactic to read that “No person as depressed and lost as Didion purports to be could possibly draft prose this precise.” And while it’s understandable to admire Didion’s wit and “intelligent scepticism”, the fact that she apparently once “fired a simple ‘Oh, wow’ at an intemperate letter writer” doesn’t strike me as the best evidence for it.

Her cast of characters ensures that the book can be thoroughly enjoyed for the quotations alone. Yet her readings of those quotations don’t always convince. Most striking for me is her interpretation of Arendt’s reaction to the death of her friend Walter Benjamin while he was attempting to flee Europe in 1940. Dean quotes Arendt:

The form of the book tends to imply once more that women writers must occupy the same category

One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble; one day later the people in Marseilles would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible.

Dean reads this as “an intellectualised lament of Benjamin’s fate, a laying of ideas on to the tragedy, an attitude that might suggest a certain emotional distance”, going on to reassure the reader that Arendt did in fact care for her friend, and made efforts to find his grave. It’s strange that someone who would take the time to retrace the lives, work and relationships of so many serious and prolific writers would nonetheless take such a dim view of intellectuals. Dean seems here to be placing ideas in opposition to feeling, and presenting them as a cold and potentially harmful distraction from questions of life and death, rather than as urgent explorations of exactly those questions.

There is nothing especially abstract, high-flown or unemotional about these words of Arendt’s: she is writing of how, in the context of great loss, it becomes especially difficult to accept life’s essential randomness, the sense of how close any given thing that happens came to not happening, and how unbearable it is that the loss is nevertheless irrevocable. Far from some supposedly empty intellectualism, the passage strikes me instead as a direct statement of a feeling that may well be instantly recognisable to anyone grieving.

In the end, even though Dean has chosen her women precisely for their exceptional qualities, the form of the book tends to imply once more that female writers must occupy the same category. It’s always fun to read about these women as social and professional creatures – where they published, whom they seduced, how they treated one another – but perhaps inevitably, given how little many of their intellectual projects had in common, Dean doesn’t always pay enough attention to what each one was saying, and how she said it.

Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean (Little Brown, £20). To order a copy for £17, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.





