I'm intrigued by this argument—because I really think that most problems people identify with literary criticism today are not really because of bad vibes (as in: people are too milquetoast, too lazy, too cowardly) but rather because of bad economics. There's hardly any money in literary criticism: very few staff jobs, very low fees (even for thoughtful, rigorous criticism…the publications just don't have the funding!)
One dynamic I've been thinking about, though, is how often the negative review functions as a careerist move for the writer…and how the frenzied attention paid to negative reviews basically feels like the literary world's equivalent of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, lol. Season 1 was Jia Tolentino versus Lauren Oyler, season 2 is Lauren Oyler versus Becca Rothfeld/Ann Manov, season 3 is Ann Manov versus…? It's voyeuristically absorbing, interesting, funny, &c but ALSO—Bookforum published some other very good reviews today! But we all love to read a takedown.
There *is* a careerist path to becoming a takedown artist. But it's risky. Oyler was fairly established already (I think she had been at Vice for a bit) and she was also, as someone who was a critic first, less reliant on the literary community's web of opportunities - grants, teaching jobs, the conference circuit - to be able to do her job, to succeed. I think it is smarter than it looks to be a takedown artist because so much criticism has become dull, insincere, friends praising friends.
I didn't put this in my essay about one subtext here is Colson Whitehead. I think Whitehead is fantastically talented. I thought The Intuitionist was a great book, Sag Harbor is really good ... and in 2016, I read The Underground Railroad which, at that point, was one of the most praised novels to have been released in the last decade. Rapturous reactions, awards, etc. And I'm like "this book ... is not good. It is not good at all." You felt almost gaslit. And there is this sense, once certain novelists or essayists "arrive" they are mostly untouchable. A freelance literary critic who's also a writer is terrified of getting on the wrong side, of seeming like a problem.
But given all of that, yes, it's better (in the long run) to zig where others zag. Of course, best to do it sincerely.
To the "literary community's web of opportunities"…the advice I repeatedly see for aspiring/already published novelists is that you DON'T write negative reviews. No three star ratings on Goodreads. No tweets about how much you disliked a recent release. This is advice geared to people who are purely novelists, not critics. But anyways, it's an etiquette rule that seems to come from this idea that you don't punch down, ever. It's just that punching "down" means anyone who is trying to make money in the literary world, aka all of your peers…
So I'm really fascinated by people who can be critic-practitioners, who write serious criticism and then put their own work out there. It seems to require a different ethical mode, a belief that great criticism (including great negative criticism) is not personal. It's about articulating and advancing a vision for what contemporary literature and writing should be, and insisting on that vision whenever you look at one particular work. I agree very strongly with your argument that negative criticism, even a feud, signals a healthy literary ecosystem—because people feel invested in literature, they have things to say about it, and they feel that they can go out on a limb with their opinions, instead of stifling negativity because it's simply not done.
And that sense of untouchability is annoying—for the readers, too! I really, really enjoyed Sally Rooney's novels, but I've also enjoyed the more critical reviews of her, simply because they gave me another dimension to consider.
Negativity is intellectually satisfying (though it can't be the only emotion that a review offers—have been thinking as well about how takedowns tend to perform exceptionally close readings, and this is often absent from supposedly positive reviews…if a reviewer likes a work so much, why aren't they using TEXTUAL EVIDENCE to showcase what's so good about it!!)
I've received some scathing reviews over the years. Time Magazine once called me "septic with unappeasable fury." I printed that on a T-shirt and played basketball in it.
Jessa Crispin is real good at using the scalpel! Manov used to have a podcast with another woman who has since moved to the Right. it was a pretty good pod. Oyler should do translations for a while (she's in Berlin where lots of Eastern European lit is translated and promoted) and then come back to criticism to own her critics hehehe.
The weirdest thing about Oyler is her pride in the fact that she can barely speak German even though she's lived in Berlin for a decade. It is such an Ugly American way to act! If she wants to insist that she's an educated snob that's fine, but shouldn't an educated snob find things to interest her in Germany, if she lives there, and not just write about American subjects? She should take a German class with a bunch of Turkish immigrants (*they* can't live in Berlin without learning German so they learn it quick) and write an essay about it.
I don't really believe it, tbh. Maybe she doesn't quite speak German well as she'd like so she exaggerates for effect. She has one pretty good essay about Sebald. If her next move were to translate Ilse Aichinger or Martin Walser that would be a great comeback.
"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."
I find that universities used to be able to debate too, like Foucault and Chomsky, Searle and Derrida. Some of these were even recorded, but not live. Today, academics have a precarious job-security, and it is nearly impossible to secure employment, not to mention the lexical pruning required.
"Canfora says she's inspired by what she's seeing from college students today, noting that they have much less free time for activism than her generation did — in part because so many have to work to afford tuition.
Her college tuition was $197 a quarter, and room and board came out to $450 a year, which she was able to pay for with her minimum-wage job and spending money from her mom. In contrast, she sees many of her own students balancing full course loads with 40-hour work weeks.
"These students today don't have that time," she says. "And they are finding that time to act, to make their voices heard."
The fact that university post-docs and professors need to sell books to supplement their income, even though it was something academics did 50 years ago, means that they are going to be less interested in debating the merits of their thesis, even if someone buys the book. That they go on speaking tours and want to become celebrities though, is beyond the purpose of academia. Would I rather be an academic than a writer? Yes, but academia is poorer for essentially requiring actual intellectuals to sell books when the universities should be able to support their income to do that. A lot of the drama and cancelling happens in the Twittersphere because there aren't enough spaces in academia that encourage healthy discussions and protect free speech.
A shift in perspective might be in order. Reconsider the idea that novelists are liberal, coastal, Ivy League educated with the same tastes and ambivalences. People from all classes write novels, and plenty of them aren't any good, but that's how it goes. Some of them are pretty damn good. I've written a novel and a short story collection, and have an essay collection coming out in august. I don't fall into these categories, liberal, conservative, I'm not afraid of backlash or censure, and I'm not the least bit afraid of social death, I just don't give a shit about most officially controversial topics. I have a feeling many others feel the same way.
Lots of small presses put out excellent material from writers who don't fit this mold of dull establishment elite versus political/cultural dissident. Terrorhouse Press puts out books that are a bit more right leaning, but not always. Expat Press is an excellent small operation that really ranges all over the place in subject matter and sensibility. Apocalypse Confidential, Pig Roast, Amphetamine Sulphate. Weird people, many of them also working full time jobs, and still releasing novels, short story collections, poetry, genre bending stuff.
I don't know that feuding connotes a healthy literary culture. Those examples you listed, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Keruoac and Capote and McCarthy and so on; does anyone really think those clashes are high water marks of anything, or are they rather dubious outbursts of overblown egos? To be known for scathing commentary in a work is one thing, to be known primarily for withering insults of other people, even in the context of evaluating their work, isn't all that laudable.
Relevant perhaps that Manov is a lawyer. She’s not writing to pay the bills. I don’t think she’s super immersed in a literary social scene either, though could be wrong about that.
I first discovered Manov on the short-lived but fascinating podcast After the Orgy, with Katherine Dee. Her public persona is intermittent and an interesting mix between autofiction-style oversharing and high-minded judgement. She definitely has literary ambitions and according to her Twitter account (currently unavailable) edits her own literary magazine. She swims in literary circles, although perhaps not the fashionable ones. But I agree, having a legal career as a fall-back probably makes her more willing to speak her mind!
This reminds me of my long ago ambition, in the early 2000s, to create a network map of the various nodes of the blogosphere. We need a 2024 version for the various literary intellectual scenes, so that we can group Manov with her various associates and then fully understand the unique constellation of incentives and disincentives she's confronting when reviewing Lauren Oyler. I will not be creating this system, but I can imagine myself happily contributing to it, wikipedia style.
I agree this would be an interesting exercise. But ultimately, I think the question of Manov’s personal motivation is less relevant than whether her criticisms are fair. Since Oyler’s book (which I have not read) reportedly aims to distinguish between good judgement (Oyler’s) and bad judgement (the unwashed masses on Goodreads), I think providing evidence of the shallowness of Oyler’s critical approach is warranted. And I appreciate Manov’s point that irony cannot be used as a cover-all excuse.
My problem is that I agree with everyone on everything. I find value in your arguments in the main post here about the structural disincentives to write critical reviews, along with Naomi Kanakia's points about the ways in which we all tend to fall into certain social roles or archetypes within these debates, but then also Mary Jane's point that ultimately we need to take these texts on their own terms and grant their authors the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their motives and intentions. Manov's a serious person, as is Rothfeld, as is Oyler herself.
I'm not going to read the Oyler because I have too many unread things in my queue already and everything of Oyler's I've read previously has struck me as good but not exceptional. It's possible of course that this book is better than her previous work, but the reviews don't suggest that this is the case. I can't bring myself to read the book just to be a more informed participant in the debate around it.
So many books are published and not enough people are excited about reading. Why not write about books you love, instead of cheap takedowns about books you dislike?
Manov is not good enough to do what she was attempting to do; it's a horribly sloppy effort that was praised only because people are put off by its target's shameless ambition. And she's pulled the whole "oh haha this little takedown? haha lol lol thing" on Twitter, which I find excrutiating
"Even were she not quite to begin with Saint Paul’s “strength in weakness,” Oyler might at least have discussed Freud’s concept of “original helplessness”
All of culture (political, media, literary) is significantly more diverse than it was in the 60s and 70s. Why isn’t it healthier and more robust? Wasn’t that the promise?
This fits in with a recent podcast interview I heard with Becca Rothfeld, which prompted me to buy her new book, All Things Are Too Small, which I am enjoying. She argues for economic equality, so that we may have artistic and social inequality and diversity without fear of poverty.
Haven't read the criticism, or the essays, but I will say, if you're writing a takedown of someone, being obviously wrong on arithmetic is...a choice.
"Typically, “historicizing” a concept entails finding a “source” more than ten years old;"
Unless I'm very confused, 2010 was more than 10 years ago. I know this is nitpicky, but it jumped out to me. I guess I'm pretty convinced by Freddie Deboer's piece that if you want to engage in criticism you need to be a bit fairer than that.
I would have though Ann Manov coded as antiwoke also just based on the fact that she's written for Unherd so much. Don't really know her though. Would be refreshing if things could be judged on the merits and not on who is on which team.
Seeing Sam Kriss and Curtis Yarvin lock horns gives me hope that Substack can revive literary feuds.
I'm intrigued by this argument—because I really think that most problems people identify with literary criticism today are not really because of bad vibes (as in: people are too milquetoast, too lazy, too cowardly) but rather because of bad economics. There's hardly any money in literary criticism: very few staff jobs, very low fees (even for thoughtful, rigorous criticism…the publications just don't have the funding!)
One dynamic I've been thinking about, though, is how often the negative review functions as a careerist move for the writer…and how the frenzied attention paid to negative reviews basically feels like the literary world's equivalent of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, lol. Season 1 was Jia Tolentino versus Lauren Oyler, season 2 is Lauren Oyler versus Becca Rothfeld/Ann Manov, season 3 is Ann Manov versus…? It's voyeuristically absorbing, interesting, funny, &c but ALSO—Bookforum published some other very good reviews today! But we all love to read a takedown.
There *is* a careerist path to becoming a takedown artist. But it's risky. Oyler was fairly established already (I think she had been at Vice for a bit) and she was also, as someone who was a critic first, less reliant on the literary community's web of opportunities - grants, teaching jobs, the conference circuit - to be able to do her job, to succeed. I think it is smarter than it looks to be a takedown artist because so much criticism has become dull, insincere, friends praising friends.
I didn't put this in my essay about one subtext here is Colson Whitehead. I think Whitehead is fantastically talented. I thought The Intuitionist was a great book, Sag Harbor is really good ... and in 2016, I read The Underground Railroad which, at that point, was one of the most praised novels to have been released in the last decade. Rapturous reactions, awards, etc. And I'm like "this book ... is not good. It is not good at all." You felt almost gaslit. And there is this sense, once certain novelists or essayists "arrive" they are mostly untouchable. A freelance literary critic who's also a writer is terrified of getting on the wrong side, of seeming like a problem.
But given all of that, yes, it's better (in the long run) to zig where others zag. Of course, best to do it sincerely.
To the "literary community's web of opportunities"…the advice I repeatedly see for aspiring/already published novelists is that you DON'T write negative reviews. No three star ratings on Goodreads. No tweets about how much you disliked a recent release. This is advice geared to people who are purely novelists, not critics. But anyways, it's an etiquette rule that seems to come from this idea that you don't punch down, ever. It's just that punching "down" means anyone who is trying to make money in the literary world, aka all of your peers…
So I'm really fascinated by people who can be critic-practitioners, who write serious criticism and then put their own work out there. It seems to require a different ethical mode, a belief that great criticism (including great negative criticism) is not personal. It's about articulating and advancing a vision for what contemporary literature and writing should be, and insisting on that vision whenever you look at one particular work. I agree very strongly with your argument that negative criticism, even a feud, signals a healthy literary ecosystem—because people feel invested in literature, they have things to say about it, and they feel that they can go out on a limb with their opinions, instead of stifling negativity because it's simply not done.
And that sense of untouchability is annoying—for the readers, too! I really, really enjoyed Sally Rooney's novels, but I've also enjoyed the more critical reviews of her, simply because they gave me another dimension to consider.
Negativity is intellectually satisfying (though it can't be the only emotion that a review offers—have been thinking as well about how takedowns tend to perform exceptionally close readings, and this is often absent from supposedly positive reviews…if a reviewer likes a work so much, why aren't they using TEXTUAL EVIDENCE to showcase what's so good about it!!)
It's also a profoundly gendered phenomenon, and not one that's ultimately working for the benefit of ambitious literary women
I've received some scathing reviews over the years. Time Magazine once called me "septic with unappeasable fury." I printed that on a T-shirt and played basketball in it.
Jessa Crispin is real good at using the scalpel! Manov used to have a podcast with another woman who has since moved to the Right. it was a pretty good pod. Oyler should do translations for a while (she's in Berlin where lots of Eastern European lit is translated and promoted) and then come back to criticism to own her critics hehehe.
The weirdest thing about Oyler is her pride in the fact that she can barely speak German even though she's lived in Berlin for a decade. It is such an Ugly American way to act! If she wants to insist that she's an educated snob that's fine, but shouldn't an educated snob find things to interest her in Germany, if she lives there, and not just write about American subjects? She should take a German class with a bunch of Turkish immigrants (*they* can't live in Berlin without learning German so they learn it quick) and write an essay about it.
I don't really believe it, tbh. Maybe she doesn't quite speak German well as she'd like so she exaggerates for effect. She has one pretty good essay about Sebald. If her next move were to translate Ilse Aichinger or Martin Walser that would be a great comeback.
would read that essay
Crispin is very good
"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."
I find that universities used to be able to debate too, like Foucault and Chomsky, Searle and Derrida. Some of these were even recorded, but not live. Today, academics have a precarious job-security, and it is nearly impossible to secure employment, not to mention the lexical pruning required.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/04/1249023924/kent-state-shooting-activists-protests-survivor
"Canfora says she's inspired by what she's seeing from college students today, noting that they have much less free time for activism than her generation did — in part because so many have to work to afford tuition.
Her college tuition was $197 a quarter, and room and board came out to $450 a year, which she was able to pay for with her minimum-wage job and spending money from her mom. In contrast, she sees many of her own students balancing full course loads with 40-hour work weeks.
"These students today don't have that time," she says. "And they are finding that time to act, to make their voices heard."
The fact that university post-docs and professors need to sell books to supplement their income, even though it was something academics did 50 years ago, means that they are going to be less interested in debating the merits of their thesis, even if someone buys the book. That they go on speaking tours and want to become celebrities though, is beyond the purpose of academia. Would I rather be an academic than a writer? Yes, but academia is poorer for essentially requiring actual intellectuals to sell books when the universities should be able to support their income to do that. A lot of the drama and cancelling happens in the Twittersphere because there aren't enough spaces in academia that encourage healthy discussions and protect free speech.
A shift in perspective might be in order. Reconsider the idea that novelists are liberal, coastal, Ivy League educated with the same tastes and ambivalences. People from all classes write novels, and plenty of them aren't any good, but that's how it goes. Some of them are pretty damn good. I've written a novel and a short story collection, and have an essay collection coming out in august. I don't fall into these categories, liberal, conservative, I'm not afraid of backlash or censure, and I'm not the least bit afraid of social death, I just don't give a shit about most officially controversial topics. I have a feeling many others feel the same way.
Lots of small presses put out excellent material from writers who don't fit this mold of dull establishment elite versus political/cultural dissident. Terrorhouse Press puts out books that are a bit more right leaning, but not always. Expat Press is an excellent small operation that really ranges all over the place in subject matter and sensibility. Apocalypse Confidential, Pig Roast, Amphetamine Sulphate. Weird people, many of them also working full time jobs, and still releasing novels, short story collections, poetry, genre bending stuff.
I don't know that feuding connotes a healthy literary culture. Those examples you listed, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Keruoac and Capote and McCarthy and so on; does anyone really think those clashes are high water marks of anything, or are they rather dubious outbursts of overblown egos? To be known for scathing commentary in a work is one thing, to be known primarily for withering insults of other people, even in the context of evaluating their work, isn't all that laudable.
Relevant perhaps that Manov is a lawyer. She’s not writing to pay the bills. I don’t think she’s super immersed in a literary social scene either, though could be wrong about that.
I first discovered Manov on the short-lived but fascinating podcast After the Orgy, with Katherine Dee. Her public persona is intermittent and an interesting mix between autofiction-style oversharing and high-minded judgement. She definitely has literary ambitions and according to her Twitter account (currently unavailable) edits her own literary magazine. She swims in literary circles, although perhaps not the fashionable ones. But I agree, having a legal career as a fall-back probably makes her more willing to speak her mind!
This reminds me of my long ago ambition, in the early 2000s, to create a network map of the various nodes of the blogosphere. We need a 2024 version for the various literary intellectual scenes, so that we can group Manov with her various associates and then fully understand the unique constellation of incentives and disincentives she's confronting when reviewing Lauren Oyler. I will not be creating this system, but I can imagine myself happily contributing to it, wikipedia style.
I agree this would be an interesting exercise. But ultimately, I think the question of Manov’s personal motivation is less relevant than whether her criticisms are fair. Since Oyler’s book (which I have not read) reportedly aims to distinguish between good judgement (Oyler’s) and bad judgement (the unwashed masses on Goodreads), I think providing evidence of the shallowness of Oyler’s critical approach is warranted. And I appreciate Manov’s point that irony cannot be used as a cover-all excuse.
My sense is Manov's criticisms are fair, having read also Rothfeld, whom I do trust. No Judgement strikes me as lazy but, again, need to read it.
I'd love to read a map of the 2024 intellectual scenes!
My problem is that I agree with everyone on everything. I find value in your arguments in the main post here about the structural disincentives to write critical reviews, along with Naomi Kanakia's points about the ways in which we all tend to fall into certain social roles or archetypes within these debates, but then also Mary Jane's point that ultimately we need to take these texts on their own terms and grant their authors the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their motives and intentions. Manov's a serious person, as is Rothfeld, as is Oyler herself.
I'm not going to read the Oyler because I have too many unread things in my queue already and everything of Oyler's I've read previously has struck me as good but not exceptional. It's possible of course that this book is better than her previous work, but the reviews don't suggest that this is the case. I can't bring myself to read the book just to be a more informed participant in the debate around it.
Manov's criticisms do carry a little whiff of the presupposition that in order to write seriously you need to write like a graduate student.
So many books are published and not enough people are excited about reading. Why not write about books you love, instead of cheap takedowns about books you dislike?
Somebody’s been reading his Freddie….
I kid, I kid. Great article. Glad to see people demanding more from the literary world. Bravery is needed.
Manov is not good enough to do what she was attempting to do; it's a horribly sloppy effort that was praised only because people are put off by its target's shameless ambition. And she's pulled the whole "oh haha this little takedown? haha lol lol thing" on Twitter, which I find excrutiating
I disagree. It wasn't sloppy.
"Even were she not quite to begin with Saint Paul’s “strength in weakness,” Oyler might at least have discussed Freud’s concept of “original helplessness”
That is below undergraduate.
All of culture (political, media, literary) is significantly more diverse than it was in the 60s and 70s. Why isn’t it healthier and more robust? Wasn’t that the promise?
ross if you think manov is taking shots from oyler's left on behalf of an 'anti-woke' peanut gallery...boy do i have some news for you
This fits in with a recent podcast interview I heard with Becca Rothfeld, which prompted me to buy her new book, All Things Are Too Small, which I am enjoying. She argues for economic equality, so that we may have artistic and social inequality and diversity without fear of poverty.
Haven't read the criticism, or the essays, but I will say, if you're writing a takedown of someone, being obviously wrong on arithmetic is...a choice.
"Typically, “historicizing” a concept entails finding a “source” more than ten years old;"
Unless I'm very confused, 2010 was more than 10 years ago. I know this is nitpicky, but it jumped out to me. I guess I'm pretty convinced by Freddie Deboer's piece that if you want to engage in criticism you need to be a bit fairer than that.
I would have though Ann Manov coded as antiwoke also just based on the fact that she's written for Unherd so much. Don't really know her though. Would be refreshing if things could be judged on the merits and not on who is on which team.
Good piece, Ross. And James is unlike any book I’ve read. Well worth your time.