Andrea Long Chu is a really interesting case to me in that the first essay by her I ever encountered was her n+1 essay about Valerie Solanas, the anti-trans tendencies in some second wave feminism, and her own relationship to feminism - and I thought it was brilliant and witty and illuminating and personal in a way that wasn't cloying or overly precious. But she sort of lost me with her "takedown" of Moshfegh's Lapvona. Lapvona was actually panned by a number of critics, most of whom just seemed to find the novel deeply unpleasant, but Chu's specific critique - that she thought the book's grotesques and quasi-religious themes were ultimately just the hoary parable of a self-righteous church lady - didn't really sit with me. I kept thinking, "Does Chu think this about Graham Greene or Flannery O'Connor too?" I mean she very well might, but I don't know if she'd find as little pushback for saying so than she would with Moshfegh, who's incredibly successful in a landscape where a lot of fiction writers are struggling.
Eileen Jones, likewise, lost me when her review of Asteroid City characterized Wes Anderson thusly: "a friend of mine said that Wes Anderson seemed like somebody who, as a kid, was dressed by his parents in a miniature seersucker suit, as worn by desiccated Southern gentlemen, just to see how precious he’d look. Then he never stopped wearing it, having larger and larger seersucker suits made until he developed a kind of seersucker suit of the soul." Is she saying his soul is ... breathable & unfussy enough to skip the dry-cleaner's? What does such an observation have to do with the film? Why make up a caricature of a child to heap scorn onto? She clearly found the film vacuous, but instead of explaining why, she just inserted a cartoon-y southern stereotype alluding to the director's Texas roots (even though he clearly lives the life of an expat aesthete in France now) instead of where she found voids in the substance of the movie - which was directed by, y'know, an adult man.
that's one of the things I find so unsatisfying about Chu's criticism, the lack of interest she seems to have about placing the work she's looking at into its lineage. she very rarely references other works/writers when looking at a book -- I know that is part of the kind of university-taught way of writing, close reading and so on, but I think one effect of that is that I don't actually know what Chu thinks of fiction older than say 10-15 years. which makes it hard to figure out how to think about her criticism, because I can't get a sense of the intellectual framework in which she is working.
plus her eagerness to diagnose a kind of political pathology to the writer, like her calling Rachel Cusk a gender essentialist. I don't know that that is true! I feel it is more complicated than that, that she does struggle with the way these identities are imposed upon her due to her gender, class, social standing and so on. chu creates this diagnosis (gender essentialism!), then describes the symptoms outward from there. not just cusk, but the zadie smith (liberalism!) review, the moshfegh, etc. I liked that n+1 essay you mentioned, I thought it was really good when it first came out. but her literary criticism, not so much.
Zadie Smith seems to attract a certain brand of criticism aimed at deconstructing or dismantling her alleged political ideology, even though some of her novels ("Swing Time" comes to mind) contain some pretty obvious skepticism, if not outright lampooning, of bourgeois liberalism themselves. I think what some of Smith's younger critics dislike about her is less her alleged "liberalism" - her books just aren't dogmatic enough to assign any one ideology to - and more her general humanism, which these critics conflate with "liberalism". Smith is the opposite of a writer or a critic who pans or "takes down" her subjects - she's far more likely to use her essays and novels to try finding something to empathize with, even with characters or subjects she disapproves of. That's a fair enough tendency to critique on its own, but "I find her humanism sentimental and gutless" doesn't seem to ripple the way simply calling her "a liberal" (boo, hiss) does.
The problem with this conflation is that a number of conservative writers in anglophone literary tradition were/are also dedicated humanists (Willa Cather), and a number of conservative writers were/are also incisive social satirists (Tom Wolfe). The willingness to tease out reasons for sympathy in a difficult character or subject is not necessarily a "liberal" tendency and the ability to viciously indict the decadence of the wealthy isn't something only "the left" does well. Where does someone like Chu square Smith, Moshfegh, Cusk etc. (or someone like Eileen Jones square an obvious sentimentalist like Wes Anderson) in this tradition? Do we dismiss everything Tom Wolfe wrote because he also ... wore affected southern gentlemen suits and had conservative politics?
I am happy to say that I think Zadie Smith is a fine novelist but also I find her work very boring. I get the frustration with her politics when she writes essays on political subjects. But there's a need to theorize her as a writer in totality, to say if the essay is bad because of her liberalism then the novels must be bad, too. Which is why I think Chu is so popular, her criticism says, yes, actually, this is the correct way to think about writers.
Anyway, it's probably a mistake to spend any amount of time thinking about this.
I blow hot and cold on Zadie Smith. She's ... kinda like Wes Anderson to me. I'm not bothered by either's politics - that would be like watching Whit Stillman and being bothered by whatever his politics are (someone a lot of people who go after both of them seem to be less bothered by?).
I think the first piece of criticism I read by Chu was her take down of Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis is an easy target; The review didn't bother me but I wasn't "wowed" by the observation that he's hack-y, shallow & reactionary. It does seem like NY Mag gives her books they know she will pan; And it might be that she doesn't realize this isn't a favor to her.
Andrea Long Chu is a really interesting case to me in that the first essay by her I ever encountered was her n+1 essay about Valerie Solanas, the anti-trans tendencies in some second wave feminism, and her own relationship to feminism - and I thought it was brilliant and witty and illuminating and personal in a way that wasn't cloying or overly precious. But she sort of lost me with her "takedown" of Moshfegh's Lapvona. Lapvona was actually panned by a number of critics, most of whom just seemed to find the novel deeply unpleasant, but Chu's specific critique - that she thought the book's grotesques and quasi-religious themes were ultimately just the hoary parable of a self-righteous church lady - didn't really sit with me. I kept thinking, "Does Chu think this about Graham Greene or Flannery O'Connor too?" I mean she very well might, but I don't know if she'd find as little pushback for saying so than she would with Moshfegh, who's incredibly successful in a landscape where a lot of fiction writers are struggling.
Eileen Jones, likewise, lost me when her review of Asteroid City characterized Wes Anderson thusly: "a friend of mine said that Wes Anderson seemed like somebody who, as a kid, was dressed by his parents in a miniature seersucker suit, as worn by desiccated Southern gentlemen, just to see how precious he’d look. Then he never stopped wearing it, having larger and larger seersucker suits made until he developed a kind of seersucker suit of the soul." Is she saying his soul is ... breathable & unfussy enough to skip the dry-cleaner's? What does such an observation have to do with the film? Why make up a caricature of a child to heap scorn onto? She clearly found the film vacuous, but instead of explaining why, she just inserted a cartoon-y southern stereotype alluding to the director's Texas roots (even though he clearly lives the life of an expat aesthete in France now) instead of where she found voids in the substance of the movie - which was directed by, y'know, an adult man.
that's one of the things I find so unsatisfying about Chu's criticism, the lack of interest she seems to have about placing the work she's looking at into its lineage. she very rarely references other works/writers when looking at a book -- I know that is part of the kind of university-taught way of writing, close reading and so on, but I think one effect of that is that I don't actually know what Chu thinks of fiction older than say 10-15 years. which makes it hard to figure out how to think about her criticism, because I can't get a sense of the intellectual framework in which she is working.
plus her eagerness to diagnose a kind of political pathology to the writer, like her calling Rachel Cusk a gender essentialist. I don't know that that is true! I feel it is more complicated than that, that she does struggle with the way these identities are imposed upon her due to her gender, class, social standing and so on. chu creates this diagnosis (gender essentialism!), then describes the symptoms outward from there. not just cusk, but the zadie smith (liberalism!) review, the moshfegh, etc. I liked that n+1 essay you mentioned, I thought it was really good when it first came out. but her literary criticism, not so much.
Zadie Smith seems to attract a certain brand of criticism aimed at deconstructing or dismantling her alleged political ideology, even though some of her novels ("Swing Time" comes to mind) contain some pretty obvious skepticism, if not outright lampooning, of bourgeois liberalism themselves. I think what some of Smith's younger critics dislike about her is less her alleged "liberalism" - her books just aren't dogmatic enough to assign any one ideology to - and more her general humanism, which these critics conflate with "liberalism". Smith is the opposite of a writer or a critic who pans or "takes down" her subjects - she's far more likely to use her essays and novels to try finding something to empathize with, even with characters or subjects she disapproves of. That's a fair enough tendency to critique on its own, but "I find her humanism sentimental and gutless" doesn't seem to ripple the way simply calling her "a liberal" (boo, hiss) does.
The problem with this conflation is that a number of conservative writers in anglophone literary tradition were/are also dedicated humanists (Willa Cather), and a number of conservative writers were/are also incisive social satirists (Tom Wolfe). The willingness to tease out reasons for sympathy in a difficult character or subject is not necessarily a "liberal" tendency and the ability to viciously indict the decadence of the wealthy isn't something only "the left" does well. Where does someone like Chu square Smith, Moshfegh, Cusk etc. (or someone like Eileen Jones square an obvious sentimentalist like Wes Anderson) in this tradition? Do we dismiss everything Tom Wolfe wrote because he also ... wore affected southern gentlemen suits and had conservative politics?
I am happy to say that I think Zadie Smith is a fine novelist but also I find her work very boring. I get the frustration with her politics when she writes essays on political subjects. But there's a need to theorize her as a writer in totality, to say if the essay is bad because of her liberalism then the novels must be bad, too. Which is why I think Chu is so popular, her criticism says, yes, actually, this is the correct way to think about writers.
Anyway, it's probably a mistake to spend any amount of time thinking about this.
I blow hot and cold on Zadie Smith. She's ... kinda like Wes Anderson to me. I'm not bothered by either's politics - that would be like watching Whit Stillman and being bothered by whatever his politics are (someone a lot of people who go after both of them seem to be less bothered by?).
I think the first piece of criticism I read by Chu was her take down of Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis is an easy target; The review didn't bother me but I wasn't "wowed" by the observation that he's hack-y, shallow & reactionary. It does seem like NY Mag gives her books they know she will pan; And it might be that she doesn't realize this isn't a favor to her.
Long Chu is looooooooooooooong (winded)