Lauren Oyler thinks she’s better than you

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The provocative critic’s new collection features an uneasy mix of joking and bragging

Against the odds, Lauren Oyler is a phenomenon. Although she is a member of that endangered and increasingly irrelevant species, literary critic, she is famed and feared for her scathing reviews of books that everyone else is too afraid to admit to hating. The attacks in question have appeared in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, among other publications, and they are faithfully circulated and remarked upon on X .

Martin Scorsese, hardly a marginal figure in American culture. About TED Talks she is especially eloquent. “Yuck, and I mean that,” she writes. Not for a moment does she display any interest in discovering why the things she scorns are so wildly popular. She does not mention a single Marvel movie by name, even if only to eviscerate it.

“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.Oyler is fond of casual, conversational locutions.

Another joke that isn’t really a joke is the title of her essay about Goodreads, “My Perfect Opinions.” As far as I can tell, the tacit ambition of “No Judgment” is in fact to establish that Oyler is a sophisticate with opinions that are, if not perfect, at least enviably elevated.In the essay in question, she characterizes herself as “a snob, highbrow, elitist” who enjoys “an unfamiliar vocabulary word.” “At the movies, I prefer subtitles,” she writes.

 

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