If you’re reading this, chances are that you read BookPage as devotedly as I do, and you know that you won’t find a negative book review in these pages. That’s BookPage’s core philosophy: genuine recommendations only, no pans. If a book is not worth your time, BookPage doesn’t review it. The only downside to this is that BookPage readers miss out on the fundamental pleasure of an absolutely vicious review—the takedown, the hatchet job. For that, we recommend Andrea Long Chu.
Chu is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and critic for New York magazine whose first book, a 112-page work on gender and desire titled Females, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction in 2019. Her second book, Authority, includes 22 previously published essays, plus two new pieces, “Criticism in a Crisis” and “Authority.” The book features a quad of n+1 essays, including “On Liking Women” (Chu’s iconic 2018 essay that discusses her gender transition alongside a vast analysis of feminist philosophy over the years, which is now taught in many gender studies programs), as well as spectacularly edible pieces on Yellowstone, The Last of Us, Myra Breckinridge, Curtis Sittenfeld’s weird Hillary Clinton novel, Zadie Smith’s entire literary career and more.
If it’s possible to sum up the satisfaction of reading a Chu review, it’s that her evaluation of a piece of media—be it a single book, an author’s oeuvre, a television show or a webcomic—is so profoundly well-informed that it feels encyclopedic, which is what makes her angle-grinder critiques so valid. Even if you’re a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Chu’s evisceration of The Phantom of the Opera is defined primarily by her clear devotion to musicals. (“The music in Phantom rarely served a dramatic end—rather, it strutted around the stage like it owned the place,” she writes.)
“I think that there needs to be a good reason to be that negative, probably more than just the face pleasur,” Chu tells BookPage. “When I’m writing these negative reviews, I’m not going in, first of all, trying to make them negative. I’m going in with high expectations that are dashed. And I am really trying to understand what the person is doing. I think in the best cases, I am really trying to understand what this person’s whole deal is and see them in their wholeness. . . . I think some of [the reviews] reflect the agony of recognizing someone and coming by the negativity kind of honestly.”
Considering the intensity of Chu’s work, it feels necessary to ask, what does it feel like to talk about—be interviewed about—a book like this? When you write this brutally, you’re inevitably inviting someone else to be brutal to you.
“This is the first interview that I’m doing in this press cycle, so you’re really just handing me an on-ramp to this whole experience,” she says. “I’m excited and nervous. There’s a breadth of things that I could be asked about. [When] you collect a bunch of essays together, it’s a little tricky to anticipate what someone might want to talk about, so I do feel a kind of need to, you know, square my shoulders a little bit.”
But other than that initial inclination to square up and gird loins, it’s apparent she’s not intimidated by what could come her way during the book’s promotion. That steadfastness is reflected within Authority as well, as all the essays included are printed exactly as they were originally published, regardless of whether she agrees with them now. In a few rare cases, she includes a short note to address any leftover thoughts. Her review of Bret Easton Ellis’ book White—“a deeply needless book, whose existence one assumes we could have all been spared if Ellis’s millennial boyfriend had simply shown the famous man how to use the mute feature on Twitter”—ends with her reinstating the hilarious original ending that an editor purged prior to its 2019 publication. “On Liking Women” includes a note in which Chu reflects on how the essay came about, how it was received and how “reading it today, I am irritated by the obscurity of the antagonists and the amateurish tone,” she writes, “that kind of bloggy ‘voiceyness’ was dated even then—and I am amused by how little I understood about myself, including my own gender.” (Chu’s follow-up to that essay, “The Right of Anybody to Change Their Sex,” is not in Authority—it came out too late to be included.)
“If there is a criticism of [Authority], I probably also have it, or at least there is a good chance that I do.”
To resist updating your old work shows a tremendous amount of restraint, especially when an essay is five or six years old, as many of these are. But to do so would be anachronistic to Chu. She describes each piece as being like an “artifact,” and gathered together they become an exhibition of her work to date. Each essay includes the year of publication, which Chu considers to be one of the most important elements of the book: “[This] tends to be the way that I think about an author—especially one with a breadth of work, someone like Zadie Smith,” she says. “Understanding a writer through a progression of their work is something that I am doing a lot in my day-to-day, so to get to do it a little bit for myself is actually quite pleasing. It also is a way of saying, happily, while I need to be responsible for everything that appears in the book, I don’t have to necessarily defend it, and that is a nice feeling, being able to distinguish those two functions from each other. It is actually very freeing in that way. If there is a criticism of [Authority], I probably also have it, or at least there is a good chance that I do.”
One of the collection’s two original essays, “Criticism in a Crisis,” includes some of those self-critiques. Chu has been seen as one of the trailblazers in pop culture criticism’s shift away from the concept of “art for art’s sake,” with more readers expecting their movie and book criticism to include politics, rather than shy away from it. But “Criticism in a Crisis” is ruthless toward critics who bemoan a “self-aggrandizing existential crisis” in the profession, who worry that “the health of the republic turns on one person’s review of the latest film or novel.” Rather, Chu writes, “The more relevant changes to the profession are the material ones—the decline of print, the merging of the publishing houses, the evaporation of staff writing positions, the pressure to churn out ad-supported content.”
Indeed, Chu argues that in order to have excellent criticism, you must pay writers more. (I think you can expect that any number of book reviewers will soon have the essay wallpapering their offices.) Chu attributes much of her success to having consistent work, which allows her and her editor to push her work to the next level. “I’ll do some exploratory reading on a topic,” she says, “and then my editor and I will get together and try to be like, what is the bad question that is being asked about this—or like, either wrong or insufficient or misleading? In cases of more established authors, there can be a very obvious answer to that question.”
“I really like those moments in reading where you’re reminded that someone actually wrote this.”
To an invested reader of literary fiction, Chu’s evaluations of novelists are always her best work. She writes about Smith, Maggie Nelson, Ottessa Moshfegh and others consummately, consumingly—and at the precise moment in their careers when you’d be tempted to shruggingly accept that the author is just going to do what they’re going to do, and either you like it or you don’t. That’s when Chu steps in and pushes back, because someone has got to talk about how much Hanya Yanagihara tortures her poor gay characters, or how much Moshfegh writes about poop.
“The ‘takedown’ quality of it is, in a way, a kind of byproduct of a desire to really try and see what’s going on with an author,” Chu says. “That, to me, is where it can be the most valuable, rather than just attacking for the sake of attacking. Not that I am completely against such a thing. But I’d like to think it’s in service of, I don’t know, a very aggressive form of friendship. . . . The moment when you start to notice, as you read through someone’s oeuvre, words that they use too much, or a metaphor that is the same between two different [works]—Rachel Cusk loves to describe things as glittering, for instance. It’s a very important part of [her work] and often a very key moment. I could write a couple hundred words about the meaning of the word glittering in Rachel Cusk’s work. . . . I really like those moments in reading where you’re reminded that someone actually wrote this.”
Authority reveals that to be critical is not necessarily about gathering all the information you possibly can in order to poke holes in a piece of art, but more about organizing the knowledge you’re tending and then applying it to the media you’re consuming. Why do you love what you love, and why do you devote yourself to your own personal temples of entertainment? Chu asks a lot of her subjects, but she asks just as much of herself, and the result is the finest criticism of our time.
Photo of Andrea Long Chu by Beowulf Sheehan.
