Here are the subjects of the six big essays in Lauren Oyler’s first collection, No Judgment: gossip, criticism, Berlin, autofiction, vulnerability, anxiety. But what they’re really about is living with instability — the way gossip forces us to balance a craving for social order with the questionable morality of our snooping on others’ lives, or the way living in a foreign city lets us nest but never quite get comfortable socially or linguistically, how it always makes us touristic. It’s evergreen stuff, but Oyler is alert to the ways contemporary life has shifted, warped, or wrecked these old instabilities. Which is to say that each of the essays is really, really about this: the internet, the internet, the internet, the internet, the internet, and the internet.
You don’t have to be extremely online, as Oyler confesses she is, to understand this, or to be affected by it. The internet, she notes, has fueled our distrust of information, flattened the authority of the critic, and created a culture where writers (especially women) are expected to put their most personal experiences on display. It has elevated autofiction to the role of the dominant literary form of the past 15 years; social media has inured us to a culture where sharing — or, more to the point, artful sharing, curated sharing — of our private lives has attracted us to writing where the line between truth and fiction fogs up. Oyler argues that this now makes for a literary culture that requires a broader understanding of the Discourse to appreciate a work in full; Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World Where Are You may be just fine in itself, but it’s better if you possess Sally Rooney Discourse Awareness. So here we are, at the moment when Instagram has delivered a stake in the heart of the New Criticism. And if that sounds like a bad way to be reading things, well, Oyler suggests, tough — it’s how we’re reading. “The autofictional voice that creates the illusion of a thinner boundary between the author and the reader is most similar to the effect created by social media,” she writes. “Which, to be clear, the form predates. But they did both become popular in the Anglophone world at the same time.”
Given that, some Lauren Oyler Discourse Awareness may be in order. I’ve surely missed all manner of Oyler-centric squabbles — who can keep up? (“Who can keep up?” being the central anxiety of our times.) But the prevailing theme of it is that Oyler, a critic for the New Yorker, Bookforum, London Review of Books, and other bespoke outlets, is unkind. (A New York magazine profile of her was headlined “Talking Shit With Lauren Oyler.”) The proof of her unkindliness is in the negative reviews of writers who’ve attracted intense enthusiasm, like Roxane Gay or Jia Tolentino. But one thing you might notice quickly in No Judgment is that there’s no whoosh of the hatchet. She’s less a Dale Peck than an acolyte of Elizabeth Hardwick, who made hymns out of her disappointment as a reader. Does Oyler know that her negative reviews have had an impact? Sure. Does she care? She doesn’t … not care, but observes that caring too much about it is playing a different game than what the critic does. “The only way critics can truly sustain their practice is by fearlessly facing Hardwick’s ‘drama of opinion’ and attempting, as much as possible, to ignore the increasing pressures of popularity,” she writes, then adds parenthetically: “(Internet.)”
That (internet), looming over everything, is something Oyler wants to acknowledge not as something separate from “real” life, but the force that batters literary types around, like it or not — it is the water we swim in. She’s implicated: It threatens her status as a critic and puts her under the microscope as a novelist. In her essay on autofiction, she considers how much of herself is in her 2021 novel, Fake Accounts, and concludes that “the answer, for me, is 72 percent,” she writes. It’s a joke, but also not — writers now are hyper-alert to how stories are reworked, manipulated, how those reworkings and manipulations are litigated in public; when identity is all we have, ownership of story becomes a fraught business, so it’s best to do a close accounting. Oyler’s escape hatch from this frustration is that art is always art, no matter what others apply for it: “The work of art creates a sphere of agency that is always separate from reality, inside which the artist controls everything that goes on,” she notes. But the artist doesn’t control everything that goes on once it’s out in the world, which is why so much of what she writes about is about things falling apart — how little it might take to undermine a career, a person, to be canceled.
This uncertainty within Oyler — I don’t care what you think! But I can’t afford to be unaware of what you’re thinking! — is engrossing because it’s more often dialectical instead of just an expression of ambivalence. In an essay on vulnerability, she laments how a culture fixated on trauma plots compels writers to put their scars on display for some paltry fee. (The term “for exposure” is cruelly apt here.) But the essay following it is part of the genre — Oyler describes her anxiety, her teeth-grinding, her at-best-moderately-successful attempts to address it, her distrust of medications, the way she craves an internet-esque solution to it. (“I wanted a body hack. I wanted one weird trick.”) Oyler’s goal here, though, is to deliver all of this with a flat, intentionally almost bored affect. She describes her anxiety but declines to narrate it; there is no story here, no trauma plot, just a series of dead ends.
Publicity rhetoric around a book is usually irrelevant to reviewing a book. But since Oyler has pushed the-text-is-all-that-matters off a cliff anyhow, perhaps it’s worth noting that the PR around No Judgment stresses that none of the essays in the book have been previously published. The message is that she’s not cobbling an easy fix-up of old book reviews, or litigating old literary squabbles, or rehashing matters that have already been argued about online — this is a book that foregrounds its integrity, which means attempting to exist outside of the bounds of the internet. (At least until the reviews run online.) It’s a strategy that reflects a certain arrogance — Lauren Oyler isn’t playing your game, internet! But, again, Oyler is thinking dialectically; she knows she can’t escape the game. “I have an outlet, several outlets, to discuss my reading, for pay, for now,” she writes. “I am a professional, and I am in danger.” For now. In danger. You don’t have to be a critic or novelist to understand that precarity — just being online is enough. Who can blame us for trying to play ball with it? Who can blame us for desperately trying to escape it?
[Published by HarperOne on March 19, 2024, 288 pages, $28.99 US hardcover]