Literary Critics Who Hate Literary Critics

JOIN THE LITERATI. IT IS VERY FUN AND COOL.

Now that she’s finished with the Sheila Heti book, she can begin the next and equally important part of engaging with literature: reading reviews. Because art exists in community, and community exists online. It is also midnight, which is the best time to get cultured.

She puts sheila heti review into the search bar and begins with an Atlantic article. She reads its first two paragraphs until the paywall fogs over, and then she moves the article’s link into a paywall breaker and finishes her read.

Next, she finds an interview between Heti and Lauren Oyler, a name that is familiar to her for reasons she can’t remember, which, of course, forces her hand to google lauren oyler. She won’t be able to focus on the Heti interview until she figures it out.

How could she be such a philistine! Lauren Oyler is the woman who wrote the famously negative review of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror. This is a review that she knows—how could it not be! It’s a review that temporarily broke the London Review of Books’s website! She has never read Trick Mirror, but that has never mattered. She googles lauren oyler reviews, just for good measure.

The search reveals that the negative Tolentino review supercharged Oyler’s writing career: Oyler released a novel in the following year and a book of essays in 2024. Public opinion slammed both.

And public opinion is what she needs. She commits herself to understanding the literati. She uncovers the value of the written word about the written word, link by link by link. Viral literary criticism is always harsh, and it’s important to attack an author’s character while you do it, especially when it’s autofiction and the protagonist is the author’s character.

She gets a Vulture trial for Andrea Long Chu’s condemnation of Rachel Cusk’s gender fundamentalism, and then she gets a New Yorker trial for S.C. Cornell’s critique of Andrea Long Chu’s new book of criticism. In another fresh tab, she learns that S.C. Cornell has a forthcoming book from Penguin Press. What perfect timing for a splashy critique of a splashy critic!

Is this comeuppance? Either criticize as a hero or write long enough to see yourself become the criticized?

Maybe this is just what a writing career looks like in the age of the dying internet. Everyone wants to write something to crash the London Review of Books. Maybe, with her takedown of Oyler’s No Judgement, Ann Manov wishes to be Lauren Oyler—to replicate Oyler’s success-built-from-buzzy-hate, even if it means positioning herself as the next domino apt to fall. How can criticism be trusted in a world like this? Words are so fun! And so is the internet, and so is capitalism!

—

She gets an email notification: someone else has just liked the comment that she left on another person’s Substack post. The comment was a perfect joke—not totally nice, but not fully mean, either. All engagement is good engagement! Twenty-five people have liked this comment that she left under a stranger’s writing. The stranger, the author, is not one of those people.

There is so much to consider, and also nothing at all. It is 3 AM now, and her eyes are tired and watery from staring at her bright screen in the dark. She has been scrolling through the juiciest, most redundant, literary-adjacent, gossip-adjacent criticism for hours, and she does not know how much more millennial hostility she can culture herself with tonight.

It is not so different from her, and this makes her feel strange. Hasn’t she written negative reviews of books by trendy authors? And that writing, to her mild distress, has reached the most eyes of any of her writing, ever. Already, she is the tiniest domino in a self-published line. A Substack domino? Pshaw! She reminds herself that she’ll be famous one day.

The Critic is a good thing, surely. She needs to educate herself on the history of criticism, and then she’ll feel much better about writing it. She’s not sure where to start on the history of criticism, though. She would have to read some reviews first, to know which books are good.

—

The next day, she tells her Editor about her night. She explains how she wants to take it upon herself to enlighten the masses. She will post a book review of book reviews. It will be about literature—and more importantly, about culture.

She explains to her Editor: there’s this internet thing where people love dramatic reviews but then the dramatic reviewer gets too big, and then they become the prime subject of the hate that they used to dole out. A positive feedback loop built on internet negativity. Everyone just desperately wants for their writing to be able to pay for their life, and it’s actually pretty sad. Some of these people probably want to be taken seriously, but how seriously does anyone take anything online? People have dreams, probably, but they’re too busy freelancing themselves to write anything and everything in the hope of getting enough clicks to build a big enough following to maybe have enough freedom to finish the thing that they wanted to write at fifteen. And then everyone hates that, too, probably, because of the internet and also because it’s a bad book. Of course, she says, she doesn’t actually know whether or not these books are bad because she’s been too busy reading their reviews to check.

She informs her Editor that she’s recently gone micro-micro-micro viral for a mocking comment on an inane Substack post. His writing was pretentious and stupid, she says, but she still feels icky about the comment. She dislikes that everything she does online is so public, but that’s where community is! She would prefer not to be virtually liked for being an internet troll, but she thinks it’s better to be a bit of a troll than be entirely nonexistent when it comes to online.

So she’ll write about it. She tells her Editor that it’ll be ironic and self-aware. She’ll probably hate it more than anyone who reads it, but it might be fun to write, and what else is her Substack for? It’s only for her to have fun. And for her to get famous. This is whispered by a tiny voice in the back of her mind—a voice that she would never share with her Editor or the internet.

Her Editor listens patiently to her proposal and then says: “That sounds pretty insufferable and navel-gazey”. She hears, she nods, she agrees. Rats! She’ll think of something better to write soon enough.