Public intellectual

on No Judgment

it must be exhausting always rooting for the antihero

The press cycle attending No Judgment is as boring as it was predictable. As a literary critic, Lauren Oyler made a name flaming her elders; now that she’s published a book of unremarkable essays, her salaried peers have cover to fire back. As of this writing Becca Rothfeld (PhD student, flogging her own book of sociological hand-waving) and Ann Manov (federal judiciary clerk, accepts commissions from Peter Thiel) have the juice. You die a hero or live long enough to become the villain, and 33-year-olds can’t afford children of their own.

Rothfeld’s takedown of No Judgment is packed with zingers, and fails to apprehend its subject. Her supposition of the book’s giant-slaying ambition — anything less would not merit 2,000 words in The Washington Post — is undone by its categorical lack thereof. No Judgment is a volume of tossed-off essays for and about the internet; it will sell reasonably well, owing to the viral book reviews Oyler published five years ago for $200 apiece. (Oyler is, above all else, a working writer.) Backlash is more bankable than indifference, and Rothfeld can be dismissed for taking it too seriously. The real loser is the book-buying public, for expecting any better in this publishing environment. There are infinite angles from which to critique No Judgment, but let’s presume Oyler knows what she’s doing.

Oyler’s notoriety owes to her vitriolic pan of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, and No Judgment furthers the rebuttal. Where Trick Mirror’s essays siphoned cultural phenomena through a conflicted psyche, No Judgment inverts the funnel, amplifying quirks of Oyler’s life — gossip, discernment, expatriation — into broad social commentary. She plumbs her wayward twenties for insights into global migration, and contemplates Goodreads as a lens into consumerism. Oyler meets the moment, if only stylistically: navel-gazing is cheugy, and decadent, and people are dying. Looking outward rather than inward, she makes the personal essay impersonal.

Was Trick Mirror really that bad? I didn’t think so, although Tolentino is the patron saint of writers who, per Oyler, “find simple things complicated and complicated things simple.” I think that’s one of Tolentino’s best qualities — she has a way of interrogating assumptions until you begin to question your own. It’s a facility uniquely suited for the first-person essay, and the market responded enthusiastically. Tolentino had commodified herself, half-wittingly, for the internet’s gaze; on the precipice of marriage and motherhood, she would not occupy her station much longer. Personally and professionally, she had to get Trick Mirror out of her system.

Tolentino’s collection was inspired if not urgent; it was a hot-girl book, or whatever people with spurious ADHD diagnoses were saying in 2019. I’m not sure if No Judgment’s glancing affect is an attempt at modesty, or a concession that white Yale alumnae aren’t afforded first-person indulgence. Mostly, Oyler summarizes the news. She revisits Shitty Media Men and the Bad Art Friend; she recounts Gawker’s bankruptcy and the American Dirt foofaraw. No Judgment’s lucid moments gesture at an outsider’s inferiority complex, the Appalachian chip-on-her-shoulder that — now I’m hand-waving — animates Oyler’s anti-institutional fervor. She doesn’t owe us that book, but it’d be more honest than whatever this is.

A treatise on “generalized anxiety” (scare quotes hers) nods at the confessional, but it’s sweeping and unspecific, surveying mental health disciplines and dismissing them in so many words. Her agent must’ve sold a good book proposal: Oyler is compelling for the way she’s leveraged hallowed institutions (Yale, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books) to criticize hallowed institutions (Tolentino, Roxane Gay, Zadie Smith), flambéing the literary elite while solidly among them. Where her novel Fake Accounts was intriguingly slippery, the longform essay is a vehicle for indulgence, a means of bolstering criticism with autobiography. No Judgment is short on both, sacrificing the anger and precision of her magazine work, retreating into Lebowitzian flippancy at the expense of self-reflection.

I can only justify the news roundups as flailing attempts to broaden the book’s audience; they’re aging like milk. There’s a genre of Substack essaying I find underwhelming, framed with allusion to current events or personal experience. Rather than face a subject head-on, the writer will invoke other essayists (bonus points if it’s Ernaux or Gornick) with a slurry of pull-quotes before revisiting the anecdote or headline in the conclusion graf. The result is neither criticism nor memoir — it’s more Greek chorus, signaling to the audience with aspirational referents.

I understand why this happens on Substack: we’re circling a drain of keyword-based discovery, which favors literary moodboards. Oyler has spoken of her efforts to sidestep nut-graf theses in No Judgment, bypassing the clickbait economy’s mode of linear argumentation. But that’s window dressing — No Judgment is almost entirely about the clickbait economy. She’s recapping the late internet for readers desperately bored with it, casting about for subjects to fit her hardened attitudes. Oyler’s readers already know Goodreads is the domain of guileless Mormons and wine moms. Did we need a 50-page essay telling us so? I’d already read some 80% of the articles cited in the book’s endnotes, and I work for a living!

Over the holidays I tore through Maybe the People Would Be the Times, Lucy Sante’s most recent book of criticism. Sante’s columns are constrained by the alt-weekly format, but her source material is consistently fascinating — even the more formulaic essays sent me chasing after obscure novels and records. Sante is, like Oyler, an evasive first-person narrator, glimpsed via catalogued consumption. Still, her criticism captures a time and place, the excitement of engaging with media under those conditions. Her corpus is a product of intellectual curiosity, the thrill of the hunt, decades spent plumbing archives and swap meets.

Lucy Sante, suffice to say, would die before granting precious inches to Jeanine Cummins or Charli XCX. Then again, Sante actually has interests. Oyler is hip to trends and memes; her wit and mechanics qualify her for broad-remit outlets like Harper’s and Bookforum. She has more in common with generalist, discourse-hashing, pop science-spouting magazine critics like Adam Gopnik — her purview is miles wide and inches deep.

Her taste, I’m afraid, is pretty basic. The Goodreads essay doubles as a critic’s manifesto, parroting Martin Scorcese’s anti-poptimist stance: Oyler champions prestige art and dismisses lowbrow pulp. Yet No Judgment is concerned almost exclusively with mass-market titles and viral articles. Ink is spilled over Parks and Recreation, Sally Rooney, and random TED Talks. (To say that Mating is your favorite novel tells me only that you spent 2020 on Twitter.) There’s no exploration or discovery — she reads the books on the syllabus and websites owned by Condé Nast. I dont care if Oyler’s a snob, but snobbery is earned! No Judgment is an apropos title: she never defends anything on its merits.

“For my money, there are few things more fulfilling than encountering a difficult text, film, or work of art and then spending some time thinking about it, discussing it, and uncovering the meaning of it,”¹ Oyler writes in the Goodreads essay. There’s little evidence of this claim in No Judgment — the closest she gets is rehashing the plots of Lolita and Tár. Perhaps Oyler has honed opinions on olfactory art and cubism, which HarperCollins couldn’t or wouldn’t ship to Barnes & Noble. But if she did, I expect she’d find occasion to write about them, instead of penning 15,000-word responses to Katy Waldman articles. I don’t know why a writer of Oyler’s stature would devote three years to this, but I suppose it’s preferable to a day job.

1. page 101 in my ebook.