No Judgement: On Being Critical
Lauren Oyler VIRAGO
LAUREN OYLER HAS OPINIONS. The writer best known for her scathing critiques of popular writers such as Sally Rooney and Jia Tolentino, and who famously caused the London Review of Books website to crash not once but twice due to increased traffic, has released a debut book comprised of six essays. No Judgement: On Being Critical is about many things: the attention economy, internet gossip, the role of criticism. Above all, it is about how we communicate to ourselves and to others.
The collection starts broadly with essays centred on Oyler’s gripes with contemporary cultural criticism. The final three essays are more personal, though she states she “no longer ha[s] any idea what counts as a ‘personal essay’.” Oyler describes how each essay is sparked by the tension between thought and feeling, reason and impulse, and what gets to be private knowledge versus public. She chose the book’s title “because the phrase has become a discursive shield against the discomforts of these tensions. ‘No judgement!’ – it’s almost always spoken in a patronisingly casual tone … Regardless, it’s always ironic. There is never no judgement”.
The first essay, “Embarrassment, Panic, Opprobrium, Job Loss, Etc”, begins with gossip: what it is, what it isn’t and why we do it despite it being immoral. It then opens up to analyse the rise and fall of Gawker, the website that changed digital media with its irreverent approach. Using the inner workings of Gawker as a template, Oyler depicts how internet media functions and how information spreads. The movement of the text also simulates the experience of consuming information endlessly on the internet. It is as if we look over Oyler’s shoulder as she clicks through her web browser, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, topics morphing.
The book is laden with facts, and Oyler’s tone is reminiscent of so much internet writing: it’s self-deprecating and cynical and self-certain. Despite there being so much information, passages don’t build to anything sustained, and at times “discursive shield” seems an apt descriptor of the collection itself.
Some of this effect is attributed to Oyler’s defensiveness. She frames the reader as an attacker, the position she more typically holds. As she sets about safeguarding herself, her lines of argument become blurred. In “Why Do You Live Here?”, an essay about expatriate living, Oyler begins, “Like many people who live here, I moved to Berlin for no good reason and have no excuse to stay.” She had no job in Germany, no romantic love, no love for the country that drew her there. She had no connection to the place, really, nor did she even like it. She goes on: “The following story is necessary, but I warn you its conclusion will be dissatisfying; you will finish it probably still not understanding why I live here.” It may be that Oyler is pointing to the tension between reason and impulse, as mentioned in her introduction. What are big, life-altering decisions made up of? But the experience of reading these passages is one of ambivalence.
The highlight of this collection is, unsurprisingly, a discussion on literature. “I Am The One Who Is Sitting Here for Hours and Hours and Hours” is what Oyler refers to as “my autofiction essay”. Using writers whom she’s written on extensively as case studies, along with personal anecdotes of reactions to her debut novel, Fake Accounts (2021), Oyler deconstructs the public’s offence at autofiction’s mixing of fact and fiction. From her collective ex-boyfriends all assuming to be the same character in Fake Accounts, to Sally Rooney snapping “How do you know I’m married?” at a reporter only for them to reply that she’d thanked him in her acknowledgements, each moment of this essay is engrossing. The strength of this section eclipses any earlier frustrations of No Judgement, and makes it clear that Oyler will continue to be an influential voice in cultural criticism.