Before reading it, I had already decided to dislike this book. I had assumed, incorrectly, that it must be another clever panegyric on something traditionally thought of as a vice. I’ve grown weary of volumes purporting to reveal the hidden virtues of (to recall a few works from the last decade or so) hypocrisy, bitchiness, gossip, divorce, and melancholy. At their best, these kinds of books can make us reexamine pejorative words and concepts—Adam Bellow’s In Defense of Nepotism did that for me—but by and large they are little more than clever perversity.
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