The Death (and Life) of Takedown Culture

Why the Bookforum piece on Lauren Oyler resonates

I’m reading a new piece of literary criticism at the Mars Review of Books party next week in New York City. Buy a ticket and come say hello.

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Lauren Oyler is one of the most prominent literary critics working today. She made her name, in the last few years, writing acid takedowns of lauded writers like Jia Tolentino, Sally Rooney, and Roxane Gay. In 2021, she published an autofictive novel, Fake Accounts, to both acclaim and scorn; the novel was reviewed almost everywhere, and Chris Rock told Esquire it was a book he was planning to read (or had read already.) Oyler’s criticism can be found in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books, and she was recently the subject of a Paris Review interview, one of the great old-world feathers in any writer’s cap. She grew up in West Virginia, graduated from Yale, and now lives in Berlin. Among certain literary-minded millenials and zoomers, she exists as a character, an idea, something to celebrate or loathe, depending on which social pond you swim in, whom you might know. My own view of Oyler is that she is talented but did not live up to her talent in Fake Accounts. The novel left me unmoved.

Oyler has now published a new collection of essays, No Judgment. Some have offered qualified praise. Others have lashed it. I have not read it, so—pun possibly intended—I can offer no judgment. I have quietly enjoyed the reactions, the criticisms, the higher-minded spats. It’s good to see, in this age of macrocultural desiccation, a literary culture still exists, that there are young people who are still animated by words and ideas, or at least their approximations. Over the last few weeks, a particularly scathing review of No Judgement in the revived Bookforum was passed around in a PDF file to various writers and media types. The review, by a writer and lawyer named Ann Manov, quickly gained traction on Twitter/X as a number of commentators reveled in the excoriation of Oyler. Oyler had her defenders, but the general tone of the discourse was one of schadenfreude, as well as wonder. The review itself seemed to take on a life of its own because it was so plainly negative.

I never saw the PDF. I merely, like a plebe, read the print edition on the subway. Assessing the quality of the review is difficult without having read No Judgement. Manov is in possession of voice and style, which is what matters here, and she had me convinced of the essay collection’s insipidness. But again, I cannot judge. Rather, I’ll reproduce a few choice bits and explain what this contretemps is really about.

Manov, on Oyler:

Oyler is contemptuous of disagreement, quickly bores of research, and rigidly attempts to control the reader’s responses. As a result, the writing is cramped, brittle. Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot—but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so.

On Oyler’s research:

Oyler claims she is well read, even a “snob,” but great swaths of No Judgment rely on the thinnest of online research. “Vulnerability has come to be seen as a first principle of living,” Oyler concludes from a single search for the term on the New Yorker’s website. Having decided to write about the concept, she shares, “I was hoping for some surprising etymology, specifically involving a relationship to ‘vulva,’ that would, in its obviousness, lead me to my argument.” When a Google search reveals to Oyler that the terms are not related, she undertakes “research”—these are her words—into “historicizing” vulnerability and subsequently “discovers” that professor-cum-corporate-consultant Brené Brown’s 2010 TED Talk on the subject is “accepted as the source of the concept’s contemporary popularity.” Typically, “historicizing” a concept entails finding a “source” more than ten years old; Oyler’s argument here is as impressive as “historicizing” contemporary discourse on “threats to democracy” with a Vox explainer from 2016.

Yale-on-Yale crime:

Having been a teaching assistant in the department Oyler is so proud to have matriculated at, I am familiar with the less-than-Herculean intellectual labors needed to get an English degree from Yale. But I digress.

And finally:

No Judgment is an Empress Wears No Clothes moment even more embarrassing than that occasioned by Oyler’s novel. One wonders why her reviews, those diatribes against such easy targets, ever made such a splash. Perhaps the problem was that during the Trump presidency, literature really was a little bit too self-righteous, so people were thrilled to have a politically acceptable opportunity to call bad books bad. In the context of that “Great Awokening,” people were understandably eager to read Oyler’s screeds against the “moral obviousness” of contemporary fiction—the cruder, the better.

But what, beyond the thrill of the tweetable insult, is the point of reading Oyler?

One theory of the glee Manov’s review provoked is that Oyler has been coded as “anti-woke” and throttling her in the pages of a left-leaning literary magazine is a good way, in the 2020s, of staking out one side in a banal cultural tug-of-war. The tiring outcome would be to have some dissident, right-wing figures who don’t read “reclaim” Oyler as one of their own. I don’t think we’re headed there, thankfully, but it’s clear Oyler as a media character has burned bright enough to incur backlash. Given that most media creatures don’t read very deeply—how many commenting on Oyler have completed a full-fledged print book in the last two months?—all of this might amount to rank symbolism, a day or two of shadowboxing, a hate object properly identified and defenestrated.

Another current, though, is at work here. Oyler first gained attention for her literary takedowns, creating the impression, for a period at least, this was a practice contemporary critics still engaged with; if Oyler did it very well, or at least savvily, others must also be competing with her. But outside of a few distinct literary critics— Christian Lorentzen, the genuine best, comes to mind—such a manner of writing and being is mostly extinct. Few writers of renown and acclaim face such a scalpel. Literary feuds, quite common in the twentieth century, have vanished. Manov v. Oyler, in some sense, may represent a revival of an old genre. If so, that’s welcome. (One caveat is that takedowns do happen of figures who are already apostates or have a history of being mocked. Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, and Pamela Paul all fall into this category.)

Feuds connote a healthy culture; literary culture, right now, is not very healthy. This is a story of grinding economics, not ideology, though it’s inarguable diversity of thought is not prioritized in the particular worlds of fiction and essay-writing. Today’s novelists are studious left-liberals. None are much interested in debate culture. In almost every case—no matter race or gender—they are college-educated and float among the affluent. A writer fears, above almost all else, social death. To write or think the wrong way is to be ostracized, to lose out on an advance or a grant or a chance to teach at a nice little program. One way to face ostracization is to write a very negative review of a writer who is popular, who is well-liked, who has already racked up coveted awards and grants. Remember, it’s a small world. That teaching post you’re battling fifty other applicants for is less likely to be yours if you’re deemed, in some form, a problem. One’s literary citizenship can be revoked at any moment.

When the literary world was on firmer economic footing, writers and critics had far less to fear. In the twentieth century, American newspapers and magazines were successful businesses; the internet had not swallowed up all of their advertising revenue. Many local and regional papers had book review sections. A novelist did not merely have to sweat whether the New York Times deigned her worthy of interest. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the Milwaukee Sentinel, Newsday, and the Miami Herald might all review her work. Magazines like Time and Newsweek maintained book sections. An entire universe of alternative newspapers—helmed by the Village Voice—wrote on books too. Not long ago, New York Magazine published weekly and employed talented, full-time critics like the aforementioned Lorentzen (and, once upon a time, Walter Kirn) to review new books in every issue. And there were the many smaller literary journals, all of them chugging along, taking notice of the novels tumbling forth from publishing houses that had not yet been swallowed up by conglomerates.

A writer could make a living writing. Not through the publication of novels, necessarily—not everyone was going to be Philip Roth—but through freelance reviews, essays, and journalism for newspapers and periodicals. Magazine pay rates, not adjusted for inflation, were higher in the 1960s and 1970s. A glossy magazine could pay $2 or $3 a word. With rents in major metropolitan areas far lower—cheap apartments in Manhattan could be had for a few hundred a month or less—it was plausible to cover rent and groceries with a handful of magazine pieces. Or, if one merely wanted to produce literary criticism, one could. Review sections and supplements were everywhere. Dwight Garner, the Times’ top critic and one of the last of a dying breed—a critic who only criticizes, who is not a working novelist—notes he does not “review books by people I know” and rarely attends “book parties or other industry events.” Garner can write freely because the Times pays him a comfortable salary. His career cannot be threatened by a perturbed Pulitzer Prize winner. The same, obviously, is not true for the freelancer, the writer barely scraping by and hoping to get a toehold in a fading industry. If the choice, really, is between rave or pan, why not choose rave each time? The writer of the book getting reviewed will be satisfied. And in satisfaction is an excellent networking opportunity.

As newspapers collapse, review sections disappear. Most writing on books devolves into coverage: exhausting “best of April” lists and “books to look forward to” and soft focus profiles and brief, inoffensive Q&A’s. Percival Everett, rightly praised, told an interviewer he’d like one “scathing” review but he’s not going to get one. His new novel, James, seems quite good, but I haven’t read it yet and I have no conception of its quality, really, because I can’t trust most literary criticism. When I read Everett’s The Trees, I knew it wasn’t as good as Erasure or So Much Blue, but the literary establishment had canonized Everett and dissent wasn’t going to be permissible anymore. In that sense, Lauren Oyler is easy game. She’s in her thirties. She hasn’t won any major awards. The very preening liberals who Everett so wonderfully satirized in Erasure now view Everett as a totem of what is good and right—never mind that they probably haven’t engaged much with his work, beyond watching the neutered American Fiction. Oyler, meanwhile, cannot be a validator of such taste.

Why did literary feuds happen? How did Norman Mailer end up headbutting Gore Vidal and raging against him on national television? How did Truman Capote coldly dismiss Jack Kerouac as a typist, not a writer? How did Elizabeth Hardwick savage best friend Mary McCarthy’s magnum opus? How did Michiko Kakutani—Ann Manov is in good company—make an entire career of eviscerating the leading writers of her time? How did Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul spend a lifetime sniping at each other in print? The answer is not merely cultural, something bound to a lost zeitgeist. It is more straightforward: all of these writers felt safe. Mailer’s career wasn’t endangered by warring with Vidal, and vice versa. Hardwick might have fretted a strained friendship, but her sinecure at the New York Review of Books wasn’t going to vanish. The literary world was large and functional enough to hold together a startling array of individuals who did not act and think like each other. Though many of these writers would turn to academia or the conference circuit for safe harbor, it wasn’t incumbent on them to save friendships in order to save careers. Literary existence wasn’t so precarious. It was possible to declare, if you felt that way, a book was very bad. It was possible to hold in contempt someone who was, in most other contexts, revered. Manov, for the gun-shy, does offer another way forward today: distinguish yourself. Write, truly, what you think. If certain colleagues flake away, a greater audience might await you. In this uncertain age, your voice is all you have. If, once in a while, you write with furious honesty—if you aren’t boring—you’ll have the greatest prize of all: people who care about your work. And the culture itself might just be less tedious.