REVIEW: Frivolity: A Defense by Jehanne Dubrow

Reviewed by Renee K. Nicholson

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jehanne Dubrow finds herself on a quest. While some of us traded sourdough starters, she dedicated herself to the art of frivolous observation. Hence, Frivolity: A Defense (Columbia University Press; August 2026).

She begins with “The Year of Perfect Skin,” where Dubrow writes, “In the time of our global pandemic, I began to watch myself.” After seeing her face reflected back to her on countless zoom calls, Dubrow began purchasing the delicate vials and elegant glass jars that would bring her that promise of a skin-perfect visage. And while I could laugh or even scoff at such superficiality, my own lockdown obsession became champagne tasting, after watching a BBC interview with Judi Dench in which she attributed her well-being to daily walks in the woods followed by a glass of the bubbly. So, to say I recognized a bit of myself in Dubrow’s eccentricity, may not be the epitome of elegant thinking, but makes up for it in honesty.

Though most of us are eager to distance ourselves from lockdown, perhaps, as a collective, we’ve started to metabolize the lessons of our experience. As such, the literature emerging from the pandemic is only in its adolescence, and when we look at its creative nonfiction offerings, it’s easy to separate this body of work into two general categories: those that are about the immediate experience of COVID, and those that aren’t about pandemic life itself but are manifested because of it. Dubrow’s Frivolity: A Defense is an example of the latter, her interest in the frivolous a consequence of the lockdown, an inquiry that branches in many directions.

And yet, Frivolity defies easy classification. As an author, Dubrow reminds me a bit of the musical artist, Prince, who, in any one showing—album, concert, any other event—might seamlessly integrate musical styles, looks, and performances. Dubrow’s book is a similar shapeshifter. It can be read as lyric essay, personal essay, cultural criticism, listicle, manifesto, book-length essay, academic treatise, and so on. If to be hybrid is to combine forms, then Frivolity is hybridity in extremis, and what ultimately emerges is a book whose form is as flexible and rule breaking as its premise, this notion that frivolity itself needs defending.

In fact, Frivolity makes an elegant case for its subject, if also a highly associative one. Organized in numbered sections of varying lengths, Dubrow negotiates with her reader the drive to be frivolous and the need for our frivolities. Frivolity never feels frivolous itself, however. In her prose, Dubrow tethers the frivolous to the serious, first acknowledging frivolity’s core weakness, our society’s central premise that “Frivolity is always intended as an insult.” She unpacks the nature of the insult, identifying the gendered nature of frivolity—how, culturally, we paint it as female—noting, too, that the frivolous is often also tied to queerness and skin color. The frivolous, Dubrow postulates, is othered.

Dubrow seats her insights within the writings and theory of other artists, writers, academics, and thinkers. In talking about the gendered nature of frivolity, she references art critic and writer John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, noting his observations of the unkind ways that women are viewed while, she notes, “Men’s passions are taken seriously.” Untangling our cultural and societal norms around the frivolous, Dubrow’s verbal webbing is taut, which helps the reader to follow her associations and forge their own connections.

There are critiques of frivolities, and in one she cites both the late-Renaissance French essayist Michel de Montaigne’s “On Vanity,” and literary scholar Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories. In “On Vanity,” Dubrow notes that Montaigne’s writing in general has often been considered its own frivolity, and notes in this specific essay that his version of vanity is “false or empty. Vanity is the fruitless.” Then, Dubrow pushes Montaigne toward Ngai’s more modern ideas to lament the frivolous as “the debris of late-stage capitalism . . . our worst impulse to possess.” Having carefully constructed her argument, Dubrow then pivots to a critique of such a narrow view, dismantling the assertions she so painstakingly put together: “Pure frivolity is like a palate cleanser—a small bowl of raspberry sorbet—that we consume before returning to the next somber course of a meal.” Dubrow often resists tidy resolutions, this being one of many examples.

Dubrow’s prose collects as much as it elucidates, and the sheer volume of people she quotes, George Eliot, Susan Sontag, Jericho Brown, Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, Roy Lichtenstein, fashion critic Vanessa Friedman, queer film critic Juan Barquin, and many others, can feel staggering at times. Yet, if the volume feels exhaustive, the individual insights are precise and poised, even as the larger structure becomes an associative romp. I found myself wondering if Dubrow might shrug at a reviewer’s attempt to classify her writing, the point of which seems to be to entice us into chasing her down rabbit holes so that we can see how the book is a subtle assault on the limitations of classification—perhaps, how it, too, can be frivolous.

As we follow her through numbered sections, Dubrow nearly tumbles into insight. “Merriment,” she writes, “is a shield we use, so no one will notice our suffering and call out with sudden concern.” And I cannot help but remember that this work came out of the COVID-19 pandemic, where many of us, unyoked from our regular routines, often searched for ways to divert ourselves from the chaos around us, with activities such as baking, gaming, binge-watching, and crafting, to name a few.

“Frivolity,” Dubrow reminds us, “is a disguise.” This disguise can have its usefulness. To make her point, Dubrow calls upon Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, a character who embraces the gendered notions of frivolity that Dubrow critiques in the earliest pages of the book. “For Emma, shopping is a release,” Dubrow maintains. “It’s an activity that approximates freedom and agency.” Yet, frivolity can also be subversive, a point Dubrow nearly insists on in her observation of Jane Austen’s heroines. “In Austen’s world, beauty is useful,” Dubrow asserts, and it is this usefulness that has kept Austen relevant for hundreds of years. Dubrow artfully catalogues Austen’s leading women to make this point, that their marriage prospects or lack thereof, which is to say their life prospects, hinge on the useful tool that beauty provides or withholds. That is the essential pleasure in reading Jane Austen, Dubrow argues.

For us, one of the pleasures of reading Dubrow is in witnessing Frivolity’s accruing momentum, its intellectual and aesthetic velocity. I found myself lured into rereading passages, even as the current of her prose pulled me along with the volition of a page-turning novel. For instance, Dubrow’s agile pivot from Austen to fashion is equally cerebral and personal. Dubrow announces that, emerging from lockdown, she has no idea what to wear. She writes, “Clothing has always been a way for me to announce myself,” and while there may be something frivolous about that statement, it also speaks to our shared struggle to reintegrate into society that felt both familiar and foreign after months of isolation.

In examining how clothing and appearance function, Dubrow centers her personal experience and insights among critical and aesthetic sensibilities. From subversive agency to useful beauty, to personal testimony, the lines blur, and we come to understand, as she has, the arbitrary nature of boundaries and definitions. Dubrow traces her frivolous fascination with clothing to her beloved Oma. Her grandmother’s skill as a seamstress should have led to a brilliant career, but her dreams were stunted by antisemitism, and though clothes bring Dubrow delight, her depiction of Oma’s plight is a stark reminder that frivolity itself is often hitched to the weighty and consequential. For all the twists and diversions, Dubrow’s conclusions are sharply observed: “…the clothing put on our bodies tells others what we defy and what we believe. Clothing reveals our aspirations.”

Succinctly stating a takeaway feels like a fool’s errand with this book, but the reading of it is not. In Frivolity, there are insights, large and small, and that is part of the delight. However, if one aspect of the book lingered with me long after reading, it’s Dubrow’s observation that, “Identifying frivolity is not as easy as dividing the world into the silly and the serious.” Perhaps this was the lesson of my own lockdown, which prompted me to discover the pleasure of champagne, consumed not as a nepenthe to forget the perils of the pandemic but as a way to engage new aesthetics.

Since pouring my first glass, I’ve learned about grapes, a two-part fermentation process, artisan makers, and how each sip should reveal something of the earth where its grapes grew. It has spawned ideas about the nature of creativity, as well as the idea for a novel. What is more frivolous than bubbles cascading up, its pétillant? Jehanne Dubrow might answer both nothing and everything, for the frivolous “asks us to examine what we find worthy and what we dismiss.” That is, our own frivolity is the tool we use, whether we recognize it or not, to define ourselves.