Authority: Essays on Being Right by Andrea Long Chu review – scorching hot takes
The Pulitzer-winning critic has some choice words for the likes of Zadie Smith, Hanya Yanagihara and Bret Easton Ellis
Andrea Long Chu stands accused of not playing by the rules, of appraising works of fiction as if they were essays or confessions rather than aesthetic objects. “It is true that I tend to treat a novel like an argument”, she writes in the introduction to Authority, a collection of essays and reviews published between 2018 and 2023 in outlets such as N+1, Bookforum and New York Magazine. Long Chu – who won a Pulitzer prize for criticism in 2023 – believes “all novels refract the veiled subjectivity of their authors”, and to pretend otherwise is to indulge a “pernicious form of commodity fetishism”. In her reviews, books betray their authors, invariably revealing some kernel of inadequacy – be it immaturity, myopia or just terminal dullness.
This approach borders on the psychoanalytical, and makes for fun reading. Long Chu diagnoses a case of “Munchausen by proxy” in Hanya Yanagihara, whose bestselling novels A Little Life (2015) and To Paradise (2022) are powered by “the misery principle”: “horrible things happen to people for no reason”, and the author is “a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health”. She notes a troubling tendency towards “infantile” idealisation of mothers and girlfriends in Tao Lin’s autofiction, and finds “something deeply juvenile” about the scatological motifs in Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels. Moshfegh’s medieval gore-fest Lapovona (2022), fails to shock, because “You cannot épater le bourgeois without an actual bourgeoisie”; “the leading coprophile of American letters” is trying too hard to convince us she’s not a prude.
