Madeleine

Andre Gide must be held at least partially responsible for our age's magnification of ordinary life into overheated prose. Although he wrote books about Montaigne and the Congo, much of his work is extravagantly self-obsessed. A line can be drawn between Gide and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. In this volume, he recounts his marriage to his cousin, a decent enough woman who mostly withstood his pederasty and tawdriness in stoical silence. An exception was when she told Gide, "I loathe indescretion," to which he self-importantly replied that he hated falsehood more. She also quoted at him a line from the poet Paul Claudel: "Better hypocrisy than cynicism." As is so often the case in relationships like these, Madeleine, the simpler person, was the better one.