Book review: ‘The Ugly History of Beautiful Things’ by Katy Kelleher

“The Ugly History of Beautiful Things” outlines a practice of investigating beauty through essays on different objects from pearls made alongside the gloopy bodies of oysters, to mirrors made by mercury-inhaling glassmakers, to perfume made from rotting animal parts, to white porcelain and edible flowers. The book is based on Kelleher’s column by the same name for Longreads. There, as in this book, Kelleher approaches her subjects through a combination of cultural history, science writing, memoir and philosophy.

For example, Kelleher’s essay on mirrors braids together Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, murderously jealous French glassmakers, and the pleasures of private self-knowledge, as well as the toxic effects of mercury and dangerous working conditions — but don’t be put off! “I don’t want to ruin your beloved objects or steal your happiness,” Kelleher writes. “Ideally, I want to help you see the world more clearly, and more generously.” In fact, if any of your pleasures overlap with Kelleher’s (as her fascination with marble does with mine), her work might reveal them to be more complicated and ultimately even more desirable. Kelleher interprets our ability to find beauty as a desire to connect to the physical world and a chance for revelation.

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And yet Kelleher also writes about beauty with suspicion, knowing that the inevitable challenge of our moment is to love what we love but to love it responsibly. On subjects of the clean scent of 1990s perfumes, a marble countertop, or a matte green piece of turquoise, she continually asks the question: Is this too good to be true? Or rather: Is this too beautiful to be good? The answer: always. Beautiful things, almost all of them, are uncannily good at hiding the environmental degradation, pernicious cultural associations and human toil that went into their acquisition and creation. And Kelleher cannot see a beautiful silk curtain without sprinting over to pull it back and ask every question about how the curtain was made, too.

In the process of interrogating these objects, Kelleher also investigates our tastes, sometimes literally. Her chapter on flowers begins with her early love of collecting edible violets in her childhood backyard in Massachusetts. This book is sympathetic to our desire to consume; Kelleher, after all, loves flowers so much, she must devour them. But from there, she backflips and turns a harsh gaze to America’s most iconic floral symbolism of heteronormative, orchestrated romance: the roses on “The Bachelor.” Those blooms, she notes, are always the American Spirit varietal, and sometimes the production team must “fly in emergency roses on charter planes” to the set, a dramatic example of the environmental costs of cut flowers.

Despite the cost of cut flowers (in terms of toll on climate and human labor), Kelleher adores them. She loves dying tulips, droopy and dramatic, in particular. And it’s the particularity of desire that Kelleher upholds in “The Ugly History of Beautiful Things.” It’s choosiness as conscientiousness. If there’s no consumption without cost (there isn’t), she suggests that we must pick carefully — and savor. “Identifying the mundane qualities of sensory pleasure has enabled me to find so much more of it,” she writes.

“The Ugly History of Beautiful Things” at once offers and exemplifies a sophisticated framework for what we do with our guilt in a world where there’s no ethical consumption. Guilt can be tedious; worse it can prevent the guilty from doing anything about it. Kelleher has produced a work racked with guilt, that manages not to wallow, but, instead, to spin around and try again to do better.

This isn’t a self-help book — where’s the beauty in those? Instead, it is sumptuous text, full of delicious facts and sharp meditations. But it aims to shift how you see and appreciate. To oversimplify the book’s arguments: Kelleher wants you to expand your definition of beauty, to divorce the impulse for ownership from the impulse of desire, to consume less but more deeply, scrutinizing and obsessing while we do so. She sees the beauty in our greed, our desire to see something from every glittering angle. “I do believe the experience of contemplating something and judging it to be beautiful does provide a little moment of mental elation, a petit mort for your brain,” she writes. If consumption should be limited, admiration should be endless.

Maggie Lange writes about books for many publications. She also runs the weekly newsletter Purse Book, which publishes quick reviews of slim volumes.

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things

Essays on Desire and Consumption

Simon & Schuster. 262 pp. $27.99