Earlier this year, when Jonathan Franzen wrote about Edith Wharton and commented on her looks, so many of us were incensed. A lot of people were angry that he’d brought her looks into the equation but I barely understood what he said about her looks in the first place. It wasn’t the least bit clear why he thought Wharton wasn’t pretty. He declared this without stating his reasons, reasons undoubtedly derived from photographs, because they clearly never met. He clearly did not have the opportunity to gauge what strikes me as the actual essence of beauty but is rarely discussed: the alchemy between personality and certain “acceptable” facial features — the pert nose, full lips, wide eyes, long lashes. None of these latter have much to recommend them without an animating spirit, it seems to me. Any dead-eyed catalogue page can show you that.

Of course, we knew what he meant, anyway. What he meant was something like what my middle-school guardians meant when they declared a girl ugly — “Her hair is greasy!” “Her eyes bulge!” He meant that her body could not be poured with ease into the fashions of the day. Most of all he meant that he, personally, did not find her attractive, which somehow transmogrified, in the natural way these things do, into the world not finding her so. Men often talk this way, casually inserting appraisals.

I never know how to explain this properly to men but that, right there, is the essential weaponry of the whole beauty calculus: how quickly “I think” becomes “The world knows.”