The judgments we use to elevate our lives can also hem them in. Joshua Rothman on the mysteries of taste, from Susan Sontag to A.I. and “research taste.”
Most of us aren’t as glamorous as Burden, who is a descendant of the Vanderbilts and a granddaughter of the fashion icon Babe Paley. Still, we get it when she recounts falling for him: “As I saw him confidently descend the wide, steep stairs at the back of the apartment, tucking in his striped oxford shirt as he held the heavy door for me, I thought, I am going to marry him.
” Even if we’ve only read F. Scott Fitzgerald, instead of living in the rarefied world he describes, his particular vision—poised, elegant, just a little debauched—can make us swoon. Or maybe we prefer some other vision: the James Dean good-girl aesthetic in Taylor Swift’s “Style,” or the Beth and Rip thing from “Yellowstone.” Although style can be superficial, in the best case it reflects something more fundamental—knowledge, judgment, intention, discernment. Taste, in short. “Taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response,” Susan Sontag wrote in “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” from 1964. “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste in morality,” even “taste in ideas.” In her essay, Sontag explored the notion of camp, the appreciation of which requires having “good taste in bad taste.” Today, meanwhile, artificial-intelligence researchers talk about “research taste”: they hope to create algorithms that have intuitions, as the best humans do, about which problems are interesting and which will hit dead ends. We use our taste to perceive, to decide, to think. All this makes it sound like having taste is something we do—like a tool that we can wield. Often, though, the reverse is the case. “Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you,” Nicole Diver muses, in Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.” The world is always telling you what to like; as a result, taste is suspect. When are you expressing your true self, and when are you allowing others to reshape you? Visit one beautifully appointed Brooklyn apartment, and you’ll admire the owners’ taste. Visit ten identical apartments, and you’ll wonder if having perfect taste actually means having none at all. The worry that taste is deceptive or distracting haunts seemingly every narrative in which it figures. In “Strangers,” Burden wonders how she failed to notice her husband’s unhappiness, and asks how he might have failed to notice it for himself. “I thought I was happy but I’m not,” he tells her. “I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t.” It’s a brutal way to leave a marriage. And yet later a friend tells Burden that the divorce has liberated her real personality, revealing someone who is “lighter, easier, more relaxed. . . . You seem to be letting go of a bigger set of cultural standards, of some sort of externally imposed idea of who you should be.” Living tastefully requires making many small, good decisions, and doing this successfully can give you the sensation of heading in the right direction. But the risk of crafting a picture-perfect life is that you’ll lose sight of the big picture. The couple’s good taste flows from their screens into the physical world, and then back into their screens. On social media, they see an endless grid of airy apartments filled with “stunning plants in bay windows, on plywood shelves, against herringbone parquet.” Soon, their apartment is a greenhouse, too—“Plants appeared out of nowhere, a fully developed skill,” Latronico writes—and this enriches the photographs that they post, when they list their apartment online, so that tourists can rent it. Similarly, after years of making the same sandwiches and spaghetti sauce, they become serious cooks, along with everyone else. Dinners at friends’ houses suddenly involve “elaborate salads sprinkled with seeds and fruit,” and each course is “accompanied by a chorus of compliments and technical remarks.” Latronico notes that “their interest hadn’t been planted by sly marketers, but appeared as if by osmosis, as they observed the little differences all around them.” As members of a tasteful generation, “they were all learning together.” Collecting vinyl, clubbing at Berghain, contemplating polyamory—this is cool. But Anna and Tom don’t feel free. They’re trapped in the taste matrix that they’ve helped construct. It was their own good taste, after all, that originally compelled them to flee their provincial home town for Berlin; when newer incoming cool-hunters push up the cost of living in the city, it’s taste that nudges them toward Lisbon , where they hope to repeat the cycle. The problem is that data moves faster than they do. When dinner-party pictures can instantaneously travel “to the other end of the planet, bouncing along in low Earth orbit or speeding across ocean ridges,” meaningful distinctions can’t last. In Lisbon, “it was all different, which was what they had wanted; and yet it was also somehow all the same.” There’s something science-fictional about “Perfection,” and yet it’s an accurate account of how modern taste makes itself felt. Taste is a global force, driving migrations, shifting investments, and dividing us into groups and tribes. Because it’s been so heavily technologized, it now feels unitary, omnipresent—like a wave that sweeps us up but never breaks. Philosophers describe the “problem of expensive tastes”; today’s luxuries become tomorrow’s necessities. For Anna and Tom, that dynamic leads to exile. Driven out of the place they’re from, they’re priced out of most places they might want to go, and can’t be content in the ones they can afford. By the closing act of the novel, although their taste is everywhere, they’re citizens of nowhere. Something happens in Marguerite’s life—it would be mauvais ton to reveal it—and she is forced not just to leave her world of mannered privilege behind but to revise her understanding of who she is. She winds up in New York, where she sells a memoir in a lucrative book deal. But her editor, Bethany, isn’t happy with the draft. “Hi Marguerite,” Bethany writes. “This seems like a lot of backstory, making the reader wait for the main event.” The memoir should be a lurid tell-all, Bethany thinks; she suggests talking to a ghostwriter, who might “knock the text into shape.” Alternatively, she wonders, “Would it help if the two of us met and talked and I just recorded you on my cell to get it all down so there’s something to work with?” In the end, it’s Marguerite’s good taste that prevents her from succumbing to the pressure to write a tawdry account of her life. This is one quite plausible theory of why taste is valuable: it’s certainly nice to make the most of the little things, but the performance of taste is actually a rehearsal for more important performances to come. If you cultivate taste today, then, later, when the spotlight finds you, you’ll have standards. Maybe you’ll draw on your experiences of discernment, propriety, and virtue as you rise to the occasion. It’s commonplace for our tastes to be better than we are. When we’re young, we can become very tasteful very quickly; we might know what to read but not how to act, or we might be easily fooled by cool. In Jane Austen’s novels, intelligent young women with good taste often fall for apparently similar young men, only to discover that their suitors’ taste is only skin deep; they realize, to their further mortification, that they, too, are more tasteful than they are wise. But Austen’s heroines rally after this disappointment. Having previously concluded that pretty much everything is mauvais ton—“The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it,” Elizabeth Bennet says, in “Pride and Prejudice”—they commit to further developing their own faculties, becoming equal to the taste they’ve cultivated. This is another argument in favor of taste: it is one of our main mechanisms for self-improvement. And yet it’s not quite right to see taste mainly as a means to an end. In DeWitt’s novella, Marguerite takes taste seriously in itself. She would never be so gauche as to chase self-improvement. Instead, she actually cares when jazz is performed with the right sort of swing. “The English understand wool,” DeWitt writes. “The French understand wine, cheese, bread. . . . The Germans understand precision, machines. . . . The Swiss understand discretion.” This understanding is focussed not on the self but on the thing. That’s the paradox of taste. Your taste can say a lot about you, and yet it’s not actually about you. Having good taste might orient you toward what’s good. It’s when you think you’re good, however, that you fall into its trap. ♦
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