Authority: Essays
Turbulent...not coherent, except insofar as any oeuvre acquires some measure of coherence by dint of its author’s recurrent preoccupations. Only two essays in the book...are new ... If Chu had written nothing but 'On Liking Women,' she would have earned her reputation as one of the most dazzling writers of her generation. But for the past seven years she has been busy complicating this status by writing other essays, a few of them as virtuosic as her first, many of them significantly cruder ... The pieces in Authority are better when they consider politics or gender directly, rather than using a novel as a thin pretext for the political discussion Chu obviously longs for ... She seems to have a general disdain for novels, a failing that she tries to contort into a virtue ... At the level of the sentence — one of my favorite levels — Chu is hard to match. She can be biting, and she can be beautiful ... Funnily enough, one of the sharpest and most consistent ideas that surfaces in Chu’s work concerns the relative impotence of ideas when they are forced to compete with the superior pull of desire.
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What a strange book Authority, by Andrea Long Chu, is — brilliant, blind ... When you’re on the same side as Chu it is exhilarating ... They contain moments of insight so accurate, and often funny, too — one of her outstanding strengths as a critic — that for me now they seem permanently etched onto those writers ... There’s a tremendous price to pay for Chu’s method. She never loves anything ... It badly damages our faith in her taste. It isn’t even clear she has anything to offer us on those terms; the highest praise in this book is, ludicrously, for the pat, well-made postapocalyptic HBO soap opera The Last of Us ... A hate read runs on hate: Beneath whatever veneer of intellectual objectivity, any book as incandescently furious as this one is ultimately a long cry of pain.
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It’s hard to ignore whom [Long Chu] leaves out of her version of history, those figures who might have had the right questions to pose for the problem at hand ... Long Chu insists that critics should abandon their desire to obtain authority, but she’s seemingly not all that interested in the vast tradition outside liberal criticism that already does this ... She has reconciled, in her work, a certain belletrism with the rigor and dispassion of an academic critic. She has achieved, at times, what Irving Howe said the New York Intellectuals achieved ... In the best works of criticism in Authority, one finds this nervous, flashy, dialectical mode of thinking on full display ... In her sensitive and searching piece of memoir on transitioning (On Liking Women) and in her most rigorously convincing takedowns (of Hanya Yanagihara and Otessa Moshfegh), Long Chu not only demonstrates the value of criticism at its boldest and, yes, most authoritative but also finds a way to effectively marry—in a way that her predecessors often struggled with—experience and expertise, aesthetics and politics ...
For some, reading these pans is a form of intellectual entertainment in its own right. Long Chu’s arch dismissal of these writers is not just an opportunity to witness some critical street fighting but also an affirmation of her own style: Even while negating others, she generates, through her eloquent and immense dissatisfaction, an experience of recognition in her audience, who desperately desire someone to tell them that the popular and celebrated art of our times is ultimately hollow. Which is to say that Long Chu’s targets are often easy ones, but she dispatches them with such technical proficiency that you can’t help but admire the work she’s done.
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