who's the critic now?

reconciling epic takedowns with literary criticism

This week, a tweet leaked an as-yet-unpublished fragment of a critical book review, and a Coliseum of jeering Romans demanded the release of the lion. When Bookforum eventually published Ann Manov’s review online on Tuesday, hundreds (thousands?) joined the conversation (to put it mildly), engaging with various critical reviews of author and critic Lauren Oyler’s recent book of essays “No Judgment.” To my surprise, many people were upset that such critical reviews were published at all. 

The spectacle challenged me to reconsider the role of literary criticism in today’s fragile media environment – especially the criticism that both appears in and concerns itself with “the online.” As someone who has been actively, or at least passively, following hyper-online literary discussions for a decade, I’ve certainly witnessed some changes to the landscape, some for the better and others for the worse. Today I am convinced that well-researched, sharply critical essays – and strong-willed authors who welcome criticism – are more necessary to the literary landscape than ever before.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the essay “Like This Or Die” by Christian Lorentzen, published back in 2019. It makes the argument that internet algorithms, anti-intellectualism, and contemporary ways we use the internet have fundamentally shaped the market for literary criticism, which has cascading impacts on how we regard and share culture with others. We live in a confusing world full of content that we don’t have time to consume, and critics are essential to help us make sense of it. Lorentzen writes “We are cursed only by too many options and too little time to consume all the wonderful things on offer.” In today’s challenging, content-saturated life, it might seem rational to assume that the social role of the critic would be elevated. But it hardly seems that the media landscape is platforming intellectual literary criticism at the scale one would assume based on the outcry displayed this week, compared with the glut of shallow recommendations pushed by any of the scroll algorithms on my phone. 

This is not to say that the market for serious criticism has entirely disappeared. I am aware of, and deeply excited by, the emergence of new publications in recent years (like the Cleveland Review of Books), but the fate of criticism at larger outlets is a different story. The big ones – the ones I can talk about with my neighbor or my mom – have grown too used to publishing clickbait, empty recommendations, reviews that are really just summaries, and reviews that talk to me like I’m in the seventh grade, almost ready to read Louis Sachar’s Holes. These publications fill an important social niche: they make lots of people think about things; they publish things that we talk about online; they reach people who ordinarily wouldn’t be reading about the thrilling life of expats living in Berlin. And they too can be intellectual.

Lorentzen describes losing his contract with New York magazine because – even though book coverage in the magazine was expanding – he was told book reviews had “little value.” He writes in his essay that book coverage now “rises or falls in the slipstream of social media” and has largely been “abandoned in favor of a nodding routine of recommendation.” (Based on her “No Judgment” essay on Goodreads, I think Lauren Oyler would agree with this.) There’s just a lot of schlock floating around. In my brief time wading into the waters of the trendiest, youngest literary community online (#Booktok), I’ve observed that the majority of content is either literally sponsored (#sponcon) or recommendations so uniformly positive that I wonder if the Tiktoker should have been compensated for the review after all. And where’s the sport in that? It goes without saying that recommendations and listicles are not just the domain of #Booktok – it’s a large amount of the online literary ecosystem, from publisher rags to The Atlantic to Buzzfeed. 

“But it seemed to me,” Lorentzen writes of the latter, “that by ruling out the negative and becoming in essence a cheerleader for certain books, BuzzFeed had embraced a formula of literary irrelevance by disavowing a spirit of disputation. Who cares what you think if your every word is a compliment?”

Lorentzen highlights the shallowness of these recommendations, but we click them anyways. (I certainly do.) The “embarrassing personal essay industrial complex” emerging recently out of The Cut goes viral again and again. It can’t be denied that there exists an editorial incentive to publish this kind of writing, precisely because we know it works. The tools we have today make it shockingly easy to tell how individual articles perform, much unlike the guesswork involved in assessing the popularity of a printed newspaper article. But as these sites then focus on the dumbly controversial, destined-to-go-viral pieces, they lose their punching weight, and the sophisticated nature of real criticism suffers as a whole.

I think a great counterargument to what I’m saying here is Ryan Ruby’s “A Golden Age?”, which notes that despite “stagnation of fees for freelance writers at rates first offered by magazines a century ago, the decline of the average book advance, the conglomeration of publishing houses, the endangerment of the species of the midlist author, and the role of Amazon as a distributor and publisher; whether it’s the extremely precarious financial position of little magazines, the collapse of book reviews sections in newspapers, and the oceanic supply of free content (i.e. published writing that is not paid for by the consumer), some of which is no longer even being generated by humans; whether it’s the state of the PhD job market, the casualization of academic labor, the drying up of tenure lines, the downsizing or wholesale closure of humanities departments; or whether it’s the cost of living crises and the collapse of economic protections in the societies in which these workers are embedded” – that, remarkably, some of the best works of criticism are coming out today. He lists out 50 critics – fantastic ones, from Andrea Long Chu to Jennifer Wilson – and lists a number of publications, new and old, which platform them. He’s right;  I love reading criticism by those people in those magazines. And his reasoning, that university jobs drying up pushes people to the critical field and that Twitter is exceptionally good at proliferating criticism, I think is also correct. 

But I am not sure if the inherent vulnerabilities in this content ecosystem (where there are no paid staff, no fair wages) are really fostering the best environment. We could do a lot better, where the best content doesn’t oscillate between the extremes of “published in a journal 50 people see” and “hundreds of people read this and call for the end of the author’s literary career.” To create a middle-ground for that kind of great writing, we as readers need to advocate for and support real, reasoned criticism and support the authors who welcome it. (I buy the books I can afford at Dog Eared or Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and I check out the ones I can’t at SFPL. I subscribe to the London Review of Books and the Paris Review. And I follow the clever people I find out about from these publications on Twitter.)

Finally, this brings me to Lauren Oyler, who suffered something like a Comedy Central roast on Twitter this week. She received two sharply critical reviews (the aforementioned one by Ann Manov in Bookforum and another by Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post). Both were well-written and well-supported by textual references. But the memetic spread of both reviews seemed to be a clear consequence of the pressure we exert on writers to develop a strong brand (Oyler made herself an easy target, having become well-known for “take downs” of Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay, Sally Rooney, and Greta Gerwig while marketing a confident, funny persona—deeply dangerous for any woman to do online) combined with the easy proliferation of the internet take-down (which I hesitate to call the reviews, which are certainly more than that).

I deeply enjoyed reading both reviews, and, while I didn’t love all of “No Judgment,” I’m glad I read it. There were parts I really enjoyed, like her writing on anxiety (an edited version is in the New Yorker). I found it to exist somewhere between the critical reviews and what I’d expect from writing so authentically “online” – which is to say, featuring essays that are overly long (like this one!), language that is frank and oscillates wildly between irony and seriousness, and occasional signposting that’s necessary to keep the reader looped in. I found Rothfeld’s classification of the book as “criticism as lifestyle brand” hilarious, Manov’s Wikipedia findings to be genius, and Oyler’s recent interviews to be funny and insightful. (In Interview Magazine, Oyler says at one point, “In general, writers are supposed to be ashamed of themselves. I can’t think of another medium or art form where the practitioner is supposed to pretend like they didn’t mean it.”) This discourse…it’s healthy! It’s fun! I can’t tell you how fantastic it is, as someone who lives in San Francisco and has a normal 9-to-5 job outside media, to read literary criticism and responses to it that doesn’t make me think “Oh, I bet they’re all grabbing drinks together at a natural wine bar in Brooklyn after this.” 

But after reading dozens of tweets about them, I grew frustrated by the mob — which had metastasized into something far less intellectual than any of the writers who provoked it. The writing had lost its meaning in favor of dumb jokes and empty proclamations of various careers starting or ending, and I was quickly reminded that Twitter and Goodreads and Instagram — the platforms of the people — unfortunately cannot match the serious intellectual depth of real literary criticism. If you’re like me, and you enjoyed reading any of the pieces mentioned, you should keep reading pieces like them, and subscribing to those publications which publish works of comparable quality, and acknowledging that that work is something infinitely different than the clickbait we all have on our timelines.

How else would critics be motivated to slog through poorly-written 600-page books about 19th Century Naval expeditions for minimal fame and essentially no money? Even Lauren Oyler notes in “No Judgment” that she doesn’t really know why she likes writing criticism. It is a delicate and precarious industry compared with The Listicle, which easy to compile yet forgotten about minutes after reading. By comparison, criticism is it’s own art form, actually shapes culture, and can serve as a real, authentic recommendation to something that might actually mean something to you one day. So if you’re like me, we had some fun reading this week — but we can’t forget about how different criticism is from clickbait, and how we must support the critics and writers working essentially for free to perform vital duties for us. We cannot lose to 10 HOT SUMMER READS GUARANTEED TO MAKE YOU SMILE.

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