Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who writes for Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker, believes her metier is under threat. “I am a professional, and I am in danger,” she declares in My Perfect Opinions, one of eight previously unpublished essays gathered in her first nonfiction book. She wonders if popular digital platforms such as Goodreads, where users can upload book reviews with minimal editorial filtering, will have long-term ramifications for the more considered, rigorous literary criticism that she gets paid to write. What these online communities lack in intellectual acumen, they make up for in sheer weight of numbers. Are they reshaping literary culture in their own image?
The answer seems to be yes. Oyler believes a facile populism has crept into arts and culture commentary in recent years, premised on the notion that, since all taste is ultimately subjective, anything can be as good as anything else – evidenced, for example, in some critics’ insistence that Marvel comics deserve to be treated as serious art. “To reduce appeal to a matter of taste and temperament is the most boring way to be irrefutably correct,” Oyler notes. This tendency, a kind of philistinism dressed up as anti-elitism, lies at the heart of what she calls “today’s crisis in culture criticism”.
Oyler has a talent for cutting through hype and getting to the nub of things. In one essay, she calls out the pseudo-revelatory claptrap of Ted Talks: “Their content is so soluble that it’s the kind of thing you don’t notice has been in the tap water for ages.” In another, she unpacks the hand-wringing discourse around the “autofiction” of authors such as Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, apropos the ethics of putting real people in your novels: “It doesn’t matter whether it’s about me or you … it just has to be interesting.” In a meandering meditation on wellness culture, Oyler recounts her own struggles with various nervous ailments (she suffers from bruxism, anxiety, insomnia and a sleep disorder called “exploding head syndrome”). The absence of any resolution or epiphany is shrugged off with a wry quip: “Catharsis for me is boring for you.”
A thoughtful chapter on expat life in Oyler’s adoptive city of Berlin (the setting of her 2021 debut novel, Fake Accounts) interrogates the fetishisation of “authenticity” among a certain class of globe-trotting Bohemian. She points out that realness, per se, is readily available: “the omnipresent branding of international startups is as authentic as a restaurant that’s been serving the same pork recipe since the 1500s … This is how we live, how we eat, how we get around, now.” What people specifically crave is the invigorating pleasure of novelty: “something different, new, or even actually foreign, something that produces the gaps in understanding that allow us to imagine possibility there”.
The essays in No Judgement demonstrate an agile and discerning mind. Oyler’s intellectual earnestness is offset by a disarmingly chatty prose style – her voice is by turns anecdotal, playful, ironically self-deprecating. (At times perhaps too much so: one very short paragraph reads: “Just kidding. Sort of.”) She is stimulating company on the page, and rarely dull. However, one or two of the talking points here feel ever so slightly old hat: a widely shared 2010 Ted Talk on the importance of vulnerability; the demise of the gossip website Gawker, following a 2013 lawsuit; the online media landscape around 2016; Berlin being a thing.
A quibble, perhaps, but cultural discourse moves frighteningly fast these days. In stark contrast, the pace of book publishing is notoriously glacial. This presents something of a challenge for literary agents and editors, who have to try to bottle the good stuff before the fizz goes out. What’s taking them so long?
• No Judgement: On Being Critical by Lauren Oyler is published by Virago (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
