Judge Now, Judge Quickly!
REVIEW: No Judgment by Lauren Oyler
One of the first reviews I wrote for this blog was of Lauren Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts, and I wrote it because I wanted revenge. I felt tricked by that book! It seemed to me to be the ultimate book reviewer’s trap — full of apparently human content but actually secretly empty, a perfect emptiness in which nothing happened and no one changed, in which the artifice called “autofiction” was mocked and the larger one called “fiction” was nullified. Its busy emptiness was designed to lure reviewers to project their own feelings onto it, to get them talking long enough for them to expose their secrets — their fantasies and pet theories, their blind spots, their bad taste.
The more I looked through the other reviews of the book, the more I felt perplexed. What exactly was everyone discussing? This thing had no substance, it didn’t exist. Or, it had been written to exist only as much as it was talked about, and it was talked about a lot. I felt sure of this, and the only way I found I could write about it was to politely refuse its invitations to interpretation. “I will not read myself into this thing,” I said, “I suspect I am being fooled.”
I found at least one other convincing way to read the book, but I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by what I took to be its aggressive metafictional self-awareness. And so how could I turn to this new essay collection, No Judgment, and not feel wary?
I also tend to be skeptical of essay collections by a single author. Did it really need to be a book? Why couldn’t these essays just have been published as magazine pieces? Are we meant to read each essay on its own, or should we expect the collection to come together as a whole?
The introduction of No Judgment offers the multiple meanings of its title — judgment of art, judgment of each other, judgment of ourselves — as the center that brings these pieces together. Seems like a natural theme for a critic. The critic’s judgment comes from taste, which is cultivated from experience, and they work this judgment into authoritative writing that demonstrates the value of art and its relevance to our daily lives. The critic persuades us with carefully reasoned arguments derived from principles, in a concise and lucid style. The critic teaches us how to pay attention, and this is vital in a time when our attention is often captive to meaningless distractions and the careless opinions of the uninformed masses, especially when we’re online. This has gone so far that many people wonder whether we need critics at all. You seem to hear it all the time — that it’s a tough time to be a serious critic. So a book taking up this theme should be a defense of the art of criticism, it should remind us all of why we need it.
Some negative reviews of the book— one in the Washington Post and another in Bookforum — have argued that it fails to achieve this standard, and I found myself sympathetic to some of their complaints. I agree that some of the statements made in the book can come off as predictable or too easy. I see also how someone could become frustrated with the informality of the writing style or the overly tricky sentences that sometimes don’t land, and I appreciate careful critical reading of diction and the picking apart of mixed or mediocre metaphors.
But I would dissent from these reviews in that I don’t think the book is best read as a failed defense of criticism. I think this actually mistakes the spirit of the book. It is not an attempt to erect a fortress of well-built arguments supported by evidence, superior to mere flimsy feelings and preferences, as the reviews assert. It is rather a letting down of the drawbridge, an opening of the castle gates to let in the crowds of feeling, opinionating, judging humanity. It implies that we have no other choice now, especially when we’re online.
In public, readers (and other writers) will judge, and they will do so in waves of book reviews, blog posts, forum discussions, Goodreads rankings, tweets, video essays, Instagram posts, and Book Tok clips. They say what they say because of arguments and evidence, yes, but also because of feelings, preferences, foibles, anxieties, obsessions, resentments, professional calculations based on real or illusory apprehensions of market demands, social media cliques, restrictions enforced by their business relationships, or opportunities for self-promotion.
Public ironies also flow into private ones, which are more universal. People may say one thing in public and another in private. The thing said in private may leak to the public, and their public face then must be adapted to the accident of their gossip becoming news. In this world, everyone is in some degree dishonest, except (hopefully) with themselves.
What is the role of the professional critic, the writer who works to hone her opinions into the authority of judgments, in a landscape in which “judgment” has such metamorphic uncontrollability? How to judge in a realm where seemingly no reliable, consistent judgment is possible? And can the critic be trusted to judge themselves reliably, and in public? Do they get better at it as they get older, or worse?
The best answers this book offers to these questions are not its explicit arguments, but its implicit ironies. It is more interested in suggesting a dramatic context in which many different attempts at judgment are offered and compete with each other. The motives for these judgments are often questionable, and the fruits of their competition uncertain.
I found myself congenial to this open, metaphorical approach. I think if you can relax your expectations based on the perceived image of “this notable critic has gathered together their most authoritative jottings from recent years on a variety of subjects just for you in a new published volume,” then you may find yourself surprised by the effects this book achieves when it succeeds. Frustration with its diffidence and incessant half-joking, which can seem at first like an abdication of critical authority, can give way to an unexpectedly useful openness, a knowing that you may be being deceived, or may be deceiving yourself. It makes you more alert to how a critic, a writer, a reader, or a loud voice online may be deceiving you, or themselves. It is a reminder that one day we may come to know the value of our own judgments and their consequences (the same goes for others’ judgments of us), but only after we allow ourselves to surrender to them.
But this only comes through when it succeeds, and I think it has to be admitted that this book has a peculiar unevenness that it can’t quite shake off. It needed more time to be shaped to perfection as a whole, for maximum effect. Again you have the annoying point that the “essay collection” format can just refuse to form a perfect whole, but it would have made No Judgment a better book if it had tried harder to make these pieces fit together and to develop its central theme.
The introduction sets the stage for a theatre of “no judgment,” where we can watch the world’s characters attempt to judge others and themselves. We are meant to feel a sense of dramatic irony growing as the judgments accumulate and each person is forced to reckon with their public and private identities. This is a winning setup, and it is pulled off to real effect in the opening essay on gossip, which is the best in the book. It successfully mixes journalistic reporting, cultural commentary, joking anecdotes, and autofiction-style personal reflection. It persuades us that the last several years of gossip journalism have been absorbed back into literature, and this apparently specialized topic is magnified to universal significance. The personality of the author herself is offered as the best symbol of this significance, and it is convincing. This transcends the complaint from the Washington Post review, which said the book amounts to “self-advertisements.” I think this is something more like “self-repletion,” an assertion of the value of personality itself, and a celebration of literature’s power to liberate us from mere political, cultural, and personal history.
But after this success, the essays on Goodreads and autofiction are a diminishing. They are similar in their attempt to enclose reporting, criticism, and autofiction into the theatre of an essay in the approach I’ve sketched, but they succeed at this only in parts. Unlike the confidence of the gossip essay, their atmosphere is closer to the sour and anti-social feeling of Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts. On these, the negative reviews are mostly right. Whenever these essays exit dramatic storytelling — which do they well — and turn to thinking, they falter. Why don’t they work? Something about the terms of their thinking, the over-simplicity. Who cares about the finer meaning of star ratings in book reviews, or the difference between “populist” and “elitist” visions of culture? These are empty abstractions, petty material from the real world, that literature is meant to play with and mock, and to make human again. I took Fake Accounts as knowing this and successfully thrusting these illusions aside, but these essays seem to have forgotten this lesson, or they should have been reworked to make the triumph over the material more complete.
They are instead too intent on jousting with generalities. There’s a moment at the end of the Goodreads essay where Martin Scorsese trashes Marvel movies and then later relents, an accomplished artist in mediocre retreat from the rabble of online culture. How to be a critic in a world where even the director of undisputed classic films throws up his hands and admits that his sense of art is just another opinion? This should have been a high point, but something in the delivery, the essay’s insistence on descending back into abstract arguments and simplistic terms, stops this from having its full dramatic effect.
The essays on Berlin, anxiety, and vulnerability are more straightforward personal essays, and would have made amiable magazine pieces. They are allowed to wander longer than most magazine pieces, and then they end on a note of personal epiphany. You’ll like these if you’re interested in the subject matter, but you’ll wonder why they were in this book and not just in magazines or online. My complaint with these is that the moments of epiphany, which should have been opportunities to flesh out the private side of the book’s theme of “no judgment,” are not developed enough. In general, the “public” essays are too unfocused and experimental, and these “private,” more personal ones are not experimental enough.
The introduction of the book mentions that a new novel is in the works, and at times the essays in this book seem more like experiments preparing for a larger work of fiction. I think a novel could more convincingly bring together this book’s various perspectives and writing styles. Its dramatic atmosphere would persuade us more than any mere critical argument. The forthcoming novel’s theme is apparently “revenge.” For the revenge to be complete, these knives must be kept sharp!