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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Chu is an insightful writer with a sharp eye and little tolerance for hypocrisy. This is a sparkling read, timely and relevant.
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