Last week, the literary world was treated to the closest approximation of what the Soviets must have felt when a hot new piece of samizdat made the rounds, as Ann Manov’s Bookforum review of Lauren Oyler’s new essay collection, No Judgement, was shared across twitter and various intraoffice messaging programs via hasty and increasingly deep-fried pictures of the review. Bookforum hadn’t put the review online yet, so the only thing non-print subscribers could get, for a couple of days at least, were bits and pieces of a memorable pan: Manov describing Oyler as wanting to be “the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot,” pointing out a number of facts and anecdotes that Oyler appeared to have lifted from cursory Wikipedia research, and declaring the collection an “Empress Wears No Clothes moment” among a litany of other complaints and picked nits. Oyler, who made her own name penning takedowns of bigger names like Roxane Gay, Jenny Offill, and Jia Tolentino, has had to take a number of her own licks with this new book; Manov’s review followed less-than-kind reviews in The Guardian (a pan of Oyler’s persona more than anything actually in the book) and The Washington Post (Becca Rothfeld cannily self-promoting her own concurrently released new collection of literary essays by rigorously poking holes in all of Oyler’s arguments, or, more accurately, gesturing towards the arguments that simply aren’t there). If you dish it out, expect to get it back, I suppose, and Oyler has mostly remained publicly mum on the round of pans besides intimating, in Interview, that one of the most cited passages in her book is actually a bit of ironic trolling that credulous critics had misread. The cycle of pans is all a bit exhausting; every participant would be better off touching grass, or simply reading a book instead. Weren’t we supposed to be talking about that anyway?
Manov’s review, and many of Oyler’s early reviews, as well as those of New York Magazine’s sleeper-agent Andrea Chu Long, who emerges from hibernation every couple months to go in on someone like Hanya Yanagihara or Maggie Nelson, follow a similar pattern: a series of snappy lines and bon mots with some pretty forgettable stuff inbetween, structured like a Rodney Dangerfield set and designed to be screenshotted on twitter. The target is always someone ‘above’ the writer (so as not to be accused of ‘punching down,’ although it’s hard to find someone below the majority of book critics) and already somewhat overrated (once a writer has broken through to some kind of mainstream success, then comes the attendant taking down of stuff that was already palatable enough to become popular); if that sounds like shooting a fish in a barrel, well, the public reception to these pans is akin to the entire Coliseum reveling in their favorite gladiator taking out those fish with extreme prejudice.
Every time one of these pieces come out, there’s discourse on how ‘literary culture’ has become too nice, how pans are too infrequent, how in the good ol’ wild west days of The Partisan Review writers would take their dinner party arguments into the public record. As Ross Barkan wrote in his newsletter Political Currents, “such a manner of writing and being is mostly extinct” in the literary world.1 At least to my eyes, pans and negative reviews aren’t any less frequent; there are just fewer book reviews in general. If every major newspaper was reviewing all the new books that came out, we’d see plenty more negative reviews, since most new books aren’t all that great. What we have instead is a couple major newspapers with small in-house staffs reviewing a couple books a week, farming out the rest of their reviews to other novelists (which means the reviews will be professionally boring, full of plot summary and couched criticism next to generic praise) or genre-specific freelancers (who will assess whether a book works on the merits of its genre and not aesthetic quality). The privileged few full-time, in-house book critics mostly get to pick their own assignments, which means generally things they find good or at least interesting (why read and review a book you think is going to be bad?) unless they are forced, as it were, to review a new book from a Big Literary Name (a vanishing breed, but let’s say a Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie (pre-attack), Zadie Smith, or Marilynne Robinson), where you might see a mixed or less-than-stellar review every once in a while. (Most big authors’ reviews these days are simply reporting that the person you’ve heard of has a new book out.) There are scores of new books that don’t even get reviewed at all outside of the trades like Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly; that’s a whole universe of unrealized pans out there for books that are instead met with total indifference.2 A new book, to even get panned, has to be somehow notable, and has to find a critic with either total job security (countable on two hands) or a critic with a certain kind of career ambition: to rise as a pot-shot critic speaking truth to critical consensus, eventually getting a target on your own back with enough notoriety. If that situation seems rare, well, it’s just an indicator of just how much the pie has shrunk in the book reviewing world.
Is it even fun to write a pan? Sure, but it also means reading a bad book, and nobody wants to do that for long, and there’s something slightly dishonest about choosing to review things you think you’ll dislike (or already know you dislike): set ‘em up, knock ‘em down. I’ve written my fair share of negative reviews here,3 though I do try to go into everything I read with an open mind, slanted neither towards positivity or negativity. Since I never give up on books – blame some undiagnosed OCD, or my general appetite for punishment – I select what I’m reading pretty carefully, given that our time on earth is precious and I can’t lay on my deathbed thinking about some midlist crap I read just so I could be mean about it. If I don’t have high hopes for a book – my default setting for most contemporary fiction, to be honest – what I choose to read and review has to be interesting for some reason, whether from widespread acclaim and hype or some unexpected move in the author’s career. If it turns out to be good, great; it feels nice to spread the word on something of actual quality, and writing about why something is good is more of a challenge – in a good way! – than outlining why something is not. What usually ends up occurring with a book I end up disliking is an accumulation of passages and choices that irk me, and then the review is something like the airing of grievances: I gotta lotta problems with this book! And now you’re gonna hear about it! But No I am not Frank Costanza nor was meant to be, and while there is a service journalism aspect to stepping in front of bad novels for your audience, I’d rather point five people to a good book than point five people away from a bad one. That being said, give me five bucks a month (or 50 a year - what a steal!) and I’ll read whatever you want, so if you like to see me suffer, or have a bone to pick with a certain bad book, you know how to make it happen:
The internet version of the pan – essentially a stringing together of quote tweets – might mercifully end sometime soon; I’m not sure the world is hankering for that many more internecine litworld beefs, though I suppose there’s always another bottom to reach. There’s another, rarer form of literary criticism that might persist, if we’re lucky: a good writer taking on a worthy opponent, making an argument that allows for the gap between critical consensus and ‘greatness’ and one’s personal and aesthetic feeling. I’m thinking of Patricia Lockwood’s LRB essays on David Foster Wallace and Elena Ferrante and Rachel Cusk, or Oyler’s essay on WG Sebald, or some of those old Elizabeth Hardwick essays from, yes, back in the good old days, which feel like actual contests rather than carnival dunk-tanks. Ambiguity, antithesis, and dialectics don’t make for good one-liners, but they do make for good essays; they’re also much harder to write well, and even harder to sell to time-peg obsessed magazine editors who need a clear angle. Maybe you only get to write those once pieces start getting assigned to you, and the only way to get things assigned to you is to get big with a pan or two…. and get so big as to get panned a couple times yourself… and so on, and so forth…
I’ve got pieces coming soon on Carys Davies’ new novel Clear, Natalia Ginzburg’s novellas Valentino and Sagittarius, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. No pans, though, sorry!
Whole piece is a good summing up of the whole to-do between Oyler and her critics, and a general view of the literary world, though I disagree at some points on what, exactly, is up with ‘literary culture’ now.
Any attention is better than none; a book simply being reviewed in the Times, pan or no, will boost sales.
Bonus points for the Costanza shout out. A Festivus miracle!