No Judgment: Essays
Her sense of humor is present, as is her agile thinking. But fans of blood sport won’t find much here to satisfy their baser appetites. Far from incendiary, the book is cleareyed and grounded ... Oyler is a sharp and confident critic, and some interpretations in the book are outstanding ... The book’s measuredness cuts both ways. While it likely demonstrates Oyler’s growth as a writer...it lacks the boldness of her novel and magazine writing. It is oddly safe ... Luckily, the execution is fresh enough to keep one reading. And the barbs, when they do come, are good.
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Her essays contain not arguments or judgments so much as advertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality. She is beloved for her unrepentantly implacable persona, but a persona is always at risk of calcifying into a shtick ... The occasional judgments that can be found in this book-length apologia for judgment are predictable and facile. All of the fruit that Oyler picks is so low-hanging that she would do better to leave it rotting on the ground ... Not for a moment does she display any interest in discovering why the things she scorns are so wildly popular ... No Judgment is full of lines with the cadence, but not the content, of zingers. 'I despise a happy ending' sounds daring until you realize that it means Oyler despises Jane Austen and all of Shakespeare’s comedies. It is not a serious pronouncement: It is just an accessory, designed to present the person who wears it as a provocateur ... For the most part, the prose in the book sweats to be chatty, with the result that it often has the slightly plaintive quality of a text message from an older parent intent on using outdated slang ... Oyler is constantly retreating into sarcasm, interrupting herself to remind us of her wry distance from everything she says, squirming in the face of commitment or conviction. Any ugly sentence, jumbled argument or exhausted platitude can be passed off as a bit and thereby disavowed ... She is so desperate to demonstrate that she is in on the joke that she neglects to ask if the joke is even funny ... This is not criticism as a practice; it is criticism as a lifestyle brand.
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The book was originally to be called Who Cares, and perhaps that title should have been retained. Who cares, really, about any of this? ... Already dated, even before its release ... Oyler is contemptuous of disagreement, quickly bores of research, and rigidly attempts to control the reader’s responses. As a result, the writing is cramped, brittle ... No Judgment displays many of the flaws Oyler once so forcefully identified in others. To begin with, it is often hard to tell what she is trying to say ... Oyler doesn’t want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature ... The resulting collection reads like a juvenile burn book, totally uninterested in the world outside her group chat.
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