Lauren Oyler is an American writer, very tall and very smart (or so I read). In 2021, she published her first novel, Fake Accounts, a plotless story about a young woman not unlike herself who is, as they used to say, very online. But she’s best known, at least in the US, as a critic whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, and whose 5,000-word takedown for the London Review of Books of Trick Mirror, a collection of essays by another thirtysomething American writer, Jia Tolentino, reputedly went viral (I am unable to verify this, being not very online).
I always put these kinds of details in a review somewhere: if I didn’t, an editor would soon be in touch. But in this case, I’m getting them out the way early in order to give you, from the off, a sense of the rarefied niche into which we’re about briefly to wiggle. It is an airless place. If Jane Austen worked on two inches of ivory, Oyler’s territory is at once vast (the internet) and minute (her part of the internet). The very online – I would say the very, very online – may know all about her slightly defensive, periodically anxious and (at moments) hugely self-congratulatory style: an ironic, somewhat callow tone born of her addiction to what used to be known as Twitter. But for the rest of us, she brings in her wake (should we read her) the exhausting feeling of only half-knowing what – in truth, I mean who – she is on about.
Already I sound like I hated her new book, an essay collection called No Judgement. In fact, I didn’t, or not all of it. If I were the kind of person who kept a journal, I might have been moved to scribble down the odd, dubious aphorism from it (“the fictional ‘I’ is always truer than it purports to be, and the non-fictional less”); it brought me to order a novel Oyler says she likes (Mating by Norman Rush), and I laughed out loud at the line: “In the US, we have only three stages of grief.” (This was provoked by the case of a woman who responded to betrayal by a friend first by feeling betrayed, then with embarrassment, and finally by becoming litigious.) But nor can I say that I liked it, exactly. While I understand its modishness perfectly well – its preoccupations could not be more Small Circulation Lit Mag, spring 2024, if they tried – it’s also rather cold and blank and small. There’s something emptied out about it, which is also how it makes you feel, in a bad way (I’m talking about hollowness, not catharsis). Where are the trees, you think. Where is the real world? It’s almost a surprise to look up from it and see not a screen, but a window.
There are six full essays. One is about vulnerability, that quality we’re suddenly all expected to encourage in ourselves (I refuse this particular form of self-optimisation and so, I think, does the author). Others are about Oyler’s not-quite-crippling-but-almost-so anxiety; the value (or not) of gossip; the rise of the star rating system, particularly as it pertains to books and those who write them; and life in Berlin, where she now lives. But the longest of them, and the one into which she seems to have put most effort, is called I Am the One Who Is Sitting Here, for Hours and Hours and Hours, and it is about so-called autofiction, something that she has, of course, written herself, and which seems to fascinate her to the point where she feels the need to be as definitive about it as it’s possible to be (which is to say, not hugely). This essay comes with bossy subheadings such as What It Is, What It Isn’t, What Does Lolita Have to Do With This? and Scene Inspired by a Popular Misreading of Another Essay by Roland Barthes.
Three years ago, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates lobbed one of her periodic stink bombs in the direction of X (then Twitter) by posting her light disappointment at the rise and rise of what she called these “wan little husks of autofiction with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer” (cue lots of younger writers holding their noses). While Oyler quotes this in her essay, she doesn’t precisely rip it apart – and in her novel she sent up the “white spaces” beloved of Jenny Offill and co. But she also devotes 50 long pages to the subject of autofiction, a piece of writing that by necessity means she must chew – and chew – on other people’s wan little husks.
This doesn’t strike me as very nourishing: for her, the poor little squirrel, or for the reader. Or not this reader, at any rate. Again, that feeling: an emptying out. Middlemarch, metaphorically speaking, is now as distant as the brightly shining moon. Literature – novels, criticism, all of it – seems to be draining away before our very eyes, and it makes me feel very sad and depressed.
• No Judgement by Lauren Oyler is published by Virago (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
