Authorial fragility and the enemies of poptimism

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I don’t pretend to know why someone does something. Why Richard Joseph, a graduate student at McGill University, wrote an article questioning the motivations behind literary ax jobs and why his editors at the Los Angeles Review of Books gave it the title bland Everyone is critical, when the article is actually about a few specific prominent critics? I dunno. Why did Yair Rosenberg, a political journalist, write in his newsletter Atlantic that the problem with critics is that they are alienated from the appetites of actually existing audiences? I dunno. Why did a prominent novelist who claims not to read reviews of her work tell a New York writer that she doesn’t think much of one of his harshest critics and followed that assessment with Je hate his handwriting. Impossible to say.

Poor reviews! In Joseph’s account, they are cowardly click-seekers who launch personal attacks on memoirists and novelists. At Rosenbergs, they are slaves to the winds of Twitter, declaring artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda and JK Rowling dying even though people still love them. These arguments present critics either as sadists acting in bad faith or as spineless conformists trapped in myopia-inducing digital consensus bubbles. In this context, it’s somewhat refreshing to hear an author say she hates the guy who slammed her latest book. Whoops ! She just hates her handwriting nothing personal.

Joseph argues that hatchet jobs are little better than nasty gossip. (He presents this as a new insight and fails to mention that gossip superior is a common term for review, biography, and the novel itself.) He comes to the defense of Jia Tolentino and Sally Rooney, two authors who received overwhelmingly positive reviews in a strictly quantitative sense. He suggests that much of the negative criticism comes from intellectuals who put middlemen in their place. It’s an old argument, one he largely borrows from an Australian academic, and I guess that’s a mode of negativity that exists. However, it seems to me that this is to criticize the critics for having taste. Joseph further asserts that critical hostility has caused fiction writers to be unduly self-conscious. He quotes a passage in which Alice, a character from Sally Rooneys Beautiful World, Where Are You, complains about her image as mediated by author profiles:

I keep meeting this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate the way he speaks, I hate the way he looks, and I hate his opinions on everything. And yet, when other people read about her, they believe she’s me. Confronting this fact makes me feel like I’m already dead.

Poor thing. But literary publicity and success have always been part of Rooneys’ subject matter as a fiction writer: the opening pages of Conversations with Friends are about profiling, and Normal People ends with a character entering an MFA program. In the new book, Alice becomes so wildly famous that she has to go to a mental hospital, that didn’t work for me. But this sends Joseph into a truly inebriated state:

There is something distinctly disturbing about this passage, as it is clearly Rooney, herself, addressing not only her detractors but all of us in this literary ecosystem. Reading this, I felt ambushed, like someone I had happily chatted about for years had suddenly confronted me on the subway. It is a mirror to the online frenzy of capital D discourse, revealing its essential ugliness and inhumanity.

Oh please. First, Alice talks about her profiles and interviews, not her reviews. She is driven mad by her own publicity, in which she participates fully and thanks to which she earns a lot of money. She didn’t choose to behave like Thomas Pynchon. Joseph is a sucker for Alice’s auctorial fragility, which is Rooney’s most effective way to generate sympathy for a cold, uninteresting character who spends much of the novel writing whiny letters to her friend full of summaries. of Wikipedia pages she has read. There is also mechanical fucking and moaning.

It strikes me as odd that people have to invent ulterior motives for critics who don’t lavish every new novel, movie, TV show, or art exhibit with slobbering praise. Not liking most of what you see and hear seems to me the natural way of things. All the more fun when you find something that grabs your attention. Reading novels, watching movies, and looking at paintings and sculptures are hedonistic pursuits. Negative reviews are just an expression of dissatisfaction. The reviews that write them are usually not normal people, because if they were, their reviews would be boring and no one would print them or read them. In any case, the rating is not the ultimate point of criticism, although in the raw wake of social media it is generally seen as such.

Rosenberg understands himself as being on the side of pleasure or at least enjoyment. He makes an essentially poptimistic argument that when the critics’ consensus does not conform to the public consensus, something is wrong with the critics. I hate poptimism because I hate being like everyone else and I think most extremely popular things are bad (Taylor Swift, superhero movies, almost all TV shows) so I’m not sympathetic to Rosenberg’s argument. However, his enemies here are not idiosyncratically tasteful critics breaking away from the mainstream, but enforcers of Twitter and TikTok’s Moralizing Consensus. He is defending JK Rowling, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Parks and Recreation against various cancellations, tearing of clothes and clutching of pearls. I’ve never seen or read any of the works in question because they all seem corny to me, so I can only understand the conflict on a meta level.

It’s usually fun to watch a factional brawl when you hate both sides in this case, prudes and narcs versus cheerleaders and fanboys, but I find the constant repetition of these arguments depressing. Why this perpetual questioning of the political points of view and the personal behavior of writers and artists? Why this slavish interest in popularity and box office receipts? Why do people post lists of books they have read at the end of the year and why are they all reading the same books? Coalitions and mass movements are necessary in politics. And a government needs ethics committees and inspectors general. But art and criticism must be zones of indifference to consensus and reasonable permissiveness. If we all end up hating each other, so much the better, and there’s no harm in saying that.

Christian Lorentzen is a writer living in Brooklyn.

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