A few weeks ago, the headline of an obituary in the Times caught my eye: “Barbara Holland, Defender of Small Vices, Dies at 77.” A “defender of small vices”—what a fine title by which to be remembered, the kind of informal, appointed job that you didn’t know exists but then seems essential once you do. The obituary pointed me to Holland’s 1995 collection of short essays, “Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences.” In the preface, Holland explains the crisis she and her like-minded cohort—she often writes in an embracing first-person plural—faced during the last decade of the twentieth century:

To make sure we aren’t having any casual, private fun, the contemporary wisdom has withdrawn a lot of our older pleasures—chicken gravy, long summer vacations, cigarettes, martinis, sleeping late—and replaced them with fitness and gloom.

Fitness and gloom, a pithy summary of that decade—add recession, and you’ve got a good working definition of the first decade of this century, as well. Though the collection predates smart phones, social networking, and 9/11, it still feels spot on as cultural observation, and, in terms of charm, it’s timeless.

Holland’s sharp eye narrows at the absurdities of contemporary middle-class life. The modern workout, done for the glutes or abs but not the soul, gets especially rough treatment. “Exercise, to qualify at all,” Holland writes, “must be lonely, painful, humorless, and boring.” With sublime wit, she conjures her brother’s NordicTrack (remember those?) as “a sort of steel giraffe,” and adds,

He was never seen to operate the thing, but it was useful for hanging up one’s jacket or drying one’s underwear, and effective in breaking the toes of guests trying to find the light switch in the dark.

It’s fun to read Holland’s stylish rants, and fun also to imagine her holding forth at a cocktail party or commenting on the current lifestyle of hipsters or investment bankers. But her best mode is when she combines exuberance with well-honed nostalgia. This collection is more about joy than it is about despair.

On waking up: “Obviously the best possible time to wake up is in the June of our tenth year, on the first day of summer vacation.”

On baths: “The eyes closed automatically with luxury, and sometimes the bather fell asleep, slid under, and drowned, happy to the last.”

On smoking: “The passing of cigarettes leaves all phases of romance impoverished.”

On meeting an old flame for lunch: “Lunch with lovers, past, present, or possible, enjoys an anarchy, a severing of our connections to life’s duties, rather like the sea voyages of former days, when self-limiting flirtations flourished and responsibility dropped from one’s shoulders.”

Holland is no snob, but she clearly is of a people—the slightly dispossessed, those incredulous about the drift of society, the fun-loving—that exist at some imaginary point where the upwardly mobile professional and the downwardly mobile aristocrat meet. Some of her pleasures take real guts to defend, such as “Driving Beltless,” or the entry for “Disasters,” in which she argues for the perverse thrill we feel at witnessing the action and aftermath of tornadoes, floods, or explosions. But Holland is consistently self-aware, as the playful scold has to be. Though she laments the end of the housewife, the eradication of public smoking, or the emergence of physical fitness, she does so with the full acknowledgment that such developments represent progress, at least for general health. She is lighthearted but stern, and mostly amused—by the joys that she celebrates, and that so many of her neighbors seem inclined to deny themselves.

Her best advice, perhaps, comes when she sings in praise of the happy hour, the darkened bar, and the winding down of the day:

Then, knees touching, neck muscles relaxing, brow drying in the cold dry air, we should drink. Certain things were put upon this earth for our enjoyment, and it’s wasteful and wicked to condemn them.

Amen. Order a copy of this book for your worry-laden, type-A friend or lover. They’ll thank you. Or they may just miss the point.