Why do people like to watch boxing? We admire the fighters: their guts, their footwork. It is elegant yet brutal. It entertains. It is a form of proxy violence — someone else being hit and doing the hitting — that taps into our primal urges.
Lauren Oyler made her name as a pugilist. Her breakout essay on the website BookSlut famously begins, “I have always hated Roxane Gay’s writing.” Her reviews get attention partly because she voices the criticism that one may be too politic to express. Typically, that criticism is harsh. Typically, it is funny. Even her 2021 debut novel, “Fake Accounts,” contains a 40-page parody of the fragmentary novel form that was dominant in that moment, especially among women writers. It goes on for so long that the reader has time to love it, hate it, become exasperated with it, resign herself to it and, finally, admire its diabolical commitment.
Now Oyler has returned with “No Judgment,” a collection of eight essays written specifically for the book. Her sense of humor is present, as is her agile thinking. But fans of blood sport won’t find much here to satisfy their baser appetites. Far from incendiary, the book is cleareyed and grounded. Several essays here provoked the surprising thought, “This is the sanest thing I have ever read on this topic.”
The book begins with an introduction explaining that some of the essays were inspired by “a growing agitation about what I perceived to be misunderstandings and fallacies spreading in cultural criticism and commentary.” Others center on personal experiences. Topics include: the evolution of internet gossip, the flawed social network Goodreads and the creep of the word “vulnerable” into arts criticism. The uniting idea, if there is one, seems to be about how people are using or absorbing media wrong, and how this is annoying.
The essays are long and unhurried, and the fare will be familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time online. Many of them involve Twitter discourses of the past few years. Martin Scorsese’s views on Marvel movies make an appearance, as do the online sagas of the writers Lauren Hough, Kathleen Hale and Elizabeth Gilbert, each of whom raised the hackles of the online reviewing community with a variety of consequences.
The first essay, “Embarrassment, Panic, Opprobrium, Job Loss, Etc.,” traces gossip through the 21st century, from the rise and fall of the website Gawker to #MeToo and whisper networks, and the notorious anonymously sourced list of “bad media men” that shook up the magazine world in 2017. These episodes are fluidly stitched together with added context from history and literature, which is the structure of most of the essays in the book. At its best, it feels like your smart friend explaining to you something you missed on the internet, why it’s important and what it means. Occasionally, it feels like your friend overexplaining these things.
Oyler is a sharp and confident critic, and some interpretations in the book are outstanding. For instance, her reading of the film “Tár,” in an essay called “The Power of Vulnerability,” suggests it is not about cancel culture, as many critics wrote when it first came out, but about what would happen if a woman acted like a man. She writes: “We see Tár from rise to downfall, playing the man the entire time. We see her being called maestro. … Most important, we see her in this astounding, unrealistic career, which, in reality, a woman like her would never achieve. Not only because she is a woman, but because she is a woman who acts like a man: cocky, selfish, self-important, rude, on closer inspection a total fraud.” This is an invigorating way to think about the film, and one that sidesteps trite notions of cancellation.
Likewise, in an essay about the forever war of irony versus sincerity, sparked by David Foster Wallace’s 1993 essay “E. Unibus Pluram” and rehashed every few years online, she proposes that the binary itself is fake. “These oppositions are, have always been, reductive, false: A complex work will almost always have both irony and sincerity, and it is possible to express sincere — or authentic, or true — feelings through irony, a rhetorical device that is useful when you want to represent the tension between two conflicting ideas at the same time.”
The collection’s most ambitious essay is an assessment of autofiction as a form rather than a genre. There are many interesting reflections here on Oyler’s own work (“Fake Accounts” is autofiction) and on the work of others — Vladimir Nabokov, Sheila Heti, Sally Rooney and more.
I had never considered, for example, the space between the reader’s projection of an author of autofiction, and who the author really is. That the author can play with this — either defying or reifying the reader’s preconceived notions — is a tool, and a very cool one.
Still, the book’s measuredness cuts both ways. While it likely demonstrates Oyler’s growth as a writer (you can’t be an edgelord all your life), it lacks the boldness of her novel and magazine writing. It is oddly safe. “TED Talks are stupid,” she writes. Well, yeah; The Onion launched a series making fun of them in 2012.
That these essays were written specifically for the book, meaning they did not run as magazine stories or pegged to news events, made me wonder, sometimes, at the why of them. Why these particular topics? Why this set of minor irritations? Is there anything new or definitive about them? Is there a sense of risk, aesthetically or otherwise?
Luckily, the execution is fresh enough to keep one reading. And the barbs, when they do come, are good — in the final essay, a cheap dentist is described as “a tan man in a linoleum hole.” Maybe it’s best to follow the book’s lead and approach it with equanimity: We can appreciate and mourn its maturity both at once.
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