Enemies of Goodness

How do I get a book deal? How does an undiscovered genius get herself discovered? To these perennial questions emerged, over the past decade and a half, something resembling if not an easy answer, then at least a quick one. Go viral. Which is to say, write something that grabs the attention of everyone who reads it, write an essay that gets quoted, shared and discussed. Do the numbers. Get an agent. Sign the contract. 

A case study from my inbox: emails in April and May from The Point magazine with news of the imminent publication of a book titled What Are Children For?, authored by two editors of The Point, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. ‘If the title sounds familiar to long-time readers,’ goes the publicity material, ‘it’s no coincidence: the book grew out of the letter from the editors they co-wrote for issue 20 (“What Are Children For?”).’ The book was published in June and despite entering a market oversupplied with books about motherhood, the media profile of What Are Children For? stayed high over the North American summer. There were reviews, interviews with the authors, features, and of course, rolling discussions of the book’s titular provocation. What are children for? What are children for? If it was a masterclass in book promotion, the introductory lessons were all learned online.   

There was nothing remarkable at all about that announcement in The Point and the subsequent trajectory of What Are Children For? Indeed, most hyped debut works of non-fiction have a back-story like this: online success provides a marketing narrative. It brought to mind a line from a 2015 Los Angeles Review of Books essay, Briallen Hopper’s response to Spinster by Kate Bolick: ‘I love personal narratives laced with historical research and cultural criticism, and Bolick’s 2011 piece “All the Single Ladies” was my favorite of the many viral-Atlantic-stories-about-women-turned-book-deals.’ Hopper’s terrific essay went viral and she too got a book deal.   

Writers have long been signing publishing contracts on the basis of success in periodicals. Striking essays, rebarbative reviews, cultural correctives: these phenomena predate social media by centuries. But since the late 2000s the propulsive effects of social media have given such modes new prominence. As the public space accorded to literary criticism has shrunk, especially in newspapers, and as the prospect of making a living as a reviewer has receded for all but a few, it has become possible for critics to encounter huge audiences via social media if their work goes viral. Some readers remain blissfully detached from the gyres of virality (What discourse?), or so they think. But even those sensible folks who stay off social media platforms encounter the reverberations of virality in other media: on broadcast radio, on podcasts, at festivals, in opinion pieces. Just as agents track viral success closely, seeking to sign writers with existing audiences rather than betting on untested talent, so too do the producers who program panels and events and the editors who want to commission writers who can connect with audiences. 

None of this is to make a value judgment about writing that goes viral. Memes and lists go viral, and so does writing with loftier aesthetic ambitions, at least sometimes. To go viral is to be popular. As Charles Pidgeon notes in a Post45 discussion of the essay and SEO, the tensions between the literary aspirations of a contemporary essayist and her economic motivations are exemplified in the viral essay, which circulates as both internet content and as artwork: 

In other words, it can be difficult to distinguish clickbait from respectable provocations, as viral essays need to be legible within a rapidly changing online environment, even as they make claims about their aesthetic value offline. Often the ‘strategic’ essay is a hybrid of the optimisable forms Pidgeon lists: the corrective book review that swerves into personal essay; the counter-intuitive deep dive prompted by an apparently random authorial encounter. Success on the platforms is an index of consumer sentiment and bestows upon the critic a track record, whether they like it or not. They can reach readers, crash websites – and maybe sell books. 

Sometimes reviews go viral because they are wrongheaded, or just plain wrong, but generally, the viral review essay does not want for literary merit. As many have observed, including Larissa Pham in The Nation and Richard Joseph in the Los Angeles Review of Books, viral reviews are often provocations. Sometimes the discourse they provoke concerns the morality of criticism itself. Their authors are able to seize the attention of their readers and convince them of the novelty, urgency, and – most of all – the unambiguous correctness of their arguments. Rarely do they admit doubt or ambivalence. 

The viral-essay-turned-book-deal may now, however, be on the cusp of obsolescence as both digital and print media continue to warp, and so too the platforms that support them. Twitter once spawned literary discourse and made it possible for critical writing to go viral. Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and turned it into X there have been mass evacuations. Visibility on X might still draw the attention of agents and editors to a critic, but the audience has receded. Even those who insist that we are living in a golden age of criticism (debatable, if you ask me) concede that few critics are paid anything like fair rates for their work. The list of venues that both publish critical writing and offer critics more than a nominal stipend is not lengthy. Under these conditions, virality works like a funhouse mirror, one that allows critics briefly to be visible to a huge global audience on the basis of writing for which they were paid peanuts. As publishers trial sustainable business models, more new writing lives behind the paywalls of legacy media organisations, small publishers, or newsletter platforms, making it more difficult for new work to go viral. Critics are vulnerable to these structural shifts in the media, as arts journalism sits very low in the food chain of media organisations, and at most outlets has been substantially rationalised. 

In Australia and other smaller literary cultures, virality has never quite had the same force as it has had in North America. Certainly, critics and essayists rose to prominence on Twitter, and some of them signed book deals. Even so, the viral Monthly or Meanjin essay-to-book-deal pipeline is far from lucrative. The networks of Ozlit are smaller and the book deals aren’t lifesaving. In the epoch of the viral essay, the Australian expression of online literary discourse has been calibrated to the attitudes and postures of New York and the West Coast, which in return remain blissfully unaware of us, just as in previous eras, Australians looked anxiously to London and Paris for their prompts. 

It’s a painful truth, but try as we might, writing about Australian writers rarely seizes the attention of international readers. And unless they are writing for North American publications, Australians writing on North American writers tend to get lost in the noise. It’s small consolation to observe that, in fact, almost all critical writing gets lost in the noise, as the viral discourse circles around a very small roster of mostly North American contemporary writers that includes Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Garth Greenwell, Brandon Taylor, Kate Zambreno, Jenny Offill, Otessa Moshfegh, Maggie Nelson – and, well, I’ll leave you to fill in the rest. If the North American summer of 2024 belonged to Miranda July, autumn has been the season of Sally Rooney. Virality may reward provocation, but it does not encourage intrepidity. 

The themes of the viral literary essay are limited too: autofiction, the fragment novel, the personal essay, the ‘internet’ novel. It’s common to talk about small literary scenes as echo chambers and the term describes viral literary discourse well. We can see virality as an epiphenomenon of algorithmic curation, one that reinforces social media silos rather than militating against them. At most, viral essays redirect existing conversations and obsessions, rather than launching into new ones. For all the bluster, the canon of contemporary literature circumscribed by online success is narrow; virality hardly fosters a curiosity or openness to the many global modalities of literary inquiry. 

The Point had occasion earlier this year to email their readers about another book authored by one of their editors: Becca Rothfeld’s essay collection on taste-making, All Things Are Too Small. This collection includes a version of Rothfeld’s barnstorming essay on Sally Rooney, ‘Normal Novels’, which made a tremendous splash online when published by The Point in 2020. It went viral, for sure, as did her 2021 essay for Liberties, ‘Sanctimony Literature’, a veritable compendium of correctives, which is not included in the collection. 

All Things Are Too Small appeared at the same time as another collection of cultural criticism with roots in gladiatorial digital literary culture: No Judgment by Lauren Oyler, whose byline was for a time pretty much synonymous with the viral takedown. Not a single one of Oyler’s notorious online jobs – such as her essays on Jia Tolentino, Greta Gerwig, Roxane Gay, and the inescapable Rooney – is gathered in No Judgment, but this work featured prominently in the publicity for the book and has, for better or worse, framed its reception. 

The rapid rise of two compelling, talented critics, certainly two of the most visible critics of their generation, was undoubtedly lubricated by the success of their work on social media. Rothfeld has been prolific over the past five years, writing for publications with an eclectic range of ideological and intellectual alignments, from The Spectator and Liberties to The Baffler and The Nation. She is now a staff critic at the Washington Post and continues to moonlight for print and digital publications. Oyler, who is also a novelist, does not match Rothfeld’s critical output but the sheer volume of discourse each of her essays generates is incredible. 

It is fair to assert that Oyler and Rothfeld are among the pre-eminent contemporary practitioners of a form of cultural criticism that is conditioned by digital cultures – and that their timing was neat. They made their mark before the great fragmentation of audiences and the raising of paywalls. Perversely, as the phenomenon of the viral review ebbs, one of the standout viral literary essays of the year was Ann Manov’s takedown of Oyler in Bookforum, a review that recapitulated Oyler’s approach (zingers, gotchas, ad hominems) without saying a great deal about the book. Whether or not a collection of Manov’s critical writing appears in the next year or so will be a test of my thesis that the viral-essay-to-book pipeline has closed. 

Books are subjected to a different order of evaluation than essays – and both Oyler and Rothfeld know it. All Things Are Too Small and No Judgment register an anxious awareness of the competing norms and values that govern print and digital culture – and come down firmly on the side of print culture, expressing contempt for the ideas about cultural value that circulate online, especially on social media. So what can these books tell us about literary criticism at the end of the viral essay era? 

The near simultaneous appearance of two collections on criticism and taste by celebrated millennial female critics is itself noteworthy; what is even more remarkable is the contiguity of Oyler’s and Rothfeld’s concerns, the similarity of their approach to cultural criticism. The two writers differ in style, but on the democratisation of culture, on the puritanical tendencies of contemporary critics, on the need to wrench aesthetic reckoning away from deliberations on social and economic justice, they are in lockstep. They set the exultant, rebellious liberal imagination against censorious morality; this replay of Cold War cultural politics locates coercion not in totalitarian states, but in social media. Oyler and Rothfeld love Norman Rush and loathe superhero movies. Neither is above the pulverisation of a soft target. Rothfeld takes it as her earthly mission to debunk mindfulness and decluttering, which she interprets as insufferable injunctions against critical thinking. Oyler sets her sights on the Brené Brown school of vulnerability, which apparently was so vulnerable to criticisim that she neglected to undertake much in the way of research beyond Wikipedia, as Manov demonstrated in her Bookforum piece. As strident as Oyler and Rothfeld are in their condemnations of scolds and fools, aspirational self-helpers, fans of YA novels and superhero movies, they remain silent together in these books on knottier questions around culture and justice. A question posed by Merve Emre in her 2017 essay, ‘Two Paths for the Personal Essay’, remains apposite: ‘What should we make of writing that serves primarily, and sometimes exclusively, to present the author as a more admirably complicated type of human subject than others?’ 

Both Oyler and Rothfeld are present to their readers as admirable and complicated personas. ‘A snob, highbrow, and an elitist, I find the concept of plot oppressive, value style over voice, and enjoy an unfamiliar vocabulary word,’ writes Oyler. They stage a bold refusal of politics in favour of art, a form of self-dramatisation that is the literary equivalent of the carefully curated Instagram page. Both books feature vignettes of stalking their nemeses online, foraging for clues, and we can read the vigilant textual self-awareness of Oyler and Rothfeld as that of the ‘always online’; no disclosure, whatever the postures of candour, is inadvertent.   

Most of the essays in these collections are hybridised critical and personal essays, a form that has been a staple of the viral essay epoch, although of course its lineage reaches back to Montaigne. It’s fair to say that there’s more criticism, and more philosophy, in Rothfeld’s book, and a lot more vibes in Oyler’s. Writers like Leslie Jamison and Tolentino familiarised a generation of readers with writing that moves between texts and locales by means of personal experience. The Empathy Exams (2014) and Trick Mirror (2019) invited readers to recognise themselves in the experiences of Jamison and Tolentino; Rothfeld and Oyler are, by contrast, flagbearers for a new micro-generation of essayists who are more invested in prompting their readers to agree with them than to relate to them.    

At its best, critical writing laced with personal experience can suggest the interpenetration of art and life, and demonstrate how any interpretation relies on a point of view that derives from a living, thinking, reading critic. Often, though, it conforms to Anna Kornbluh’s characterisation of contemporary literary culture as buckling under the weight of the economic pressures of self-manifestation. In Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, she writes: 

This kind of critical writing pulses with the priority of subjectivity and experience, with immediacy, to use Kornbluh’s term, and is rarely compelled to historicise, or even to theorise very much, while reading. Although Oyler and Rothfeld cast themselves as zealous defenders of the imperative to be critical, their polemics do not enter into conversation with the discipline of literary studies, or the profession of criticism, as John Guillory would have it.  

All this adds up to a critical practice that works as a charismatic performance of reading and interpretation, one able to cast aside close reading and periodisation in service of the bit. As is the case with many charismatic performers, it can be difficult to hold these critics to a political position. Oyler and Rothfeld are resistant to identification with any form of collective politics, especially those that limit their capacity – their freedom – to issue critical judgments. Their imagined antagonist is something like a caricature of a second-wave feminist: a puritanical, humourless, online libido-zapper. A great deal of theatricality is required to present this as an expression of what Renata Adler called the ‘radical middle’ and not a sophisticated millennial contribution to the anti-woke front of the culture wars. 

Rothfeld penned an energetic, scathing review of No Judgment just weeks before her own collection was published, and when she summarises Oyler’s thesis, she is helpfully summarising her own: 

Rothfeld loves to offer reasons and at her best she is a tremendously lucid, and yes, provocative interlocutor. Her reviews for the Washington Post are highly focused, precise, and crammed with sharp readings. Her style in the essays in All Things Are Too Small is, by contrast, dilatory. A philosopher by training, Rothfeld narrativises ratiocination. She is an indefatigable writer, and like Lerner and Rooney, a high school debater (she wrote about it for The Baffler in 2019) who is dedicated to winning every point. And so Rothfeld pursues her arguments at a frenzied pace, closing off points of disagreement, bidding her sweaty reader to hasten along in order to keep up. All Things Are Too Small is organised as a rebuke to what Rothfeld calls the ‘misguided commitment to egalitarianism’ in matters of art and love, presenting instead an affirmation of desire and excess. In addition to her long essay on mindfulness, Marie Kondo, and the minimalist novel, there are essays on consent, on the feral carnality of David Cronenberg’s cinema, on love, on Eric Rohmer, on the TV series Mindhunter.  

A metaphorics of appetite, of longings that can never possibly be fulfilled, tunnels through the book: 

Insofar as her criticism draws heavily on the lexicon of gustation, it celebrates mess. Rothfeld’s hunger for art, sex, and experience is insatiable; she is voracious, she tells us, she is ravenous, she lusts, she craves, she wants more. Desire and excess are vehemently opposed to what she diagnoses as the contemporary tack towards minimalism. ‘At every turn’, she writes, 

This advocate for extravagance is, however, also a highly controlled writer whose ambitions are indexed in her careful prose. She is not so extravagant as to risk being wrong, or misunderstood.  

‘It is easier to discard than to amass,’ writes Rothfeld in ‘More is More’. She barely pauses in her long exegesis on the perils of mindfulness and decluttering, and leaps to correlate these ‘exhortations to smallness’ to the success of a group of well-known writers (Offill, Zambreno, Nelson and so on) who have authored minimalist, or fragment novels. The stability of this category is taken for granted, even though Rothfeld’s examples are drawn from quite disparate literary traditions. What they have in common is a ‘winnowed’ style, which Rothfeld reads as a retreat from imagination, drawing quite radical conclusions along the way.  

That ‘likewise’ is carrying a heavy load. I think of this as tweetable criticism – it involves outrageous claims and catchy lines that can easily be summarised and circulated, irrespective of their robustness. To liken minimalist style to the decluttered room introduces a striking analogy, but I’m not sure it’s helpful for understanding the narrative mode of The Argonauts or Drifts. Perhaps the contemporary popularity of mindfulness meditation provides one context for understanding the proliferation of pared back novels narrated by listless, unhappy women – but it’s hardly an important one, especially given Rothfeld exempts herself from considering both the long history of American literary minimalism (aside from a nod to William Gass, who loathed textual asceticism) and the shaping influence of French writers such as Roland Barthes. Mark McGurl’s analysis of minimalism in The Program Era (2009), not an obscure reference, might have helped Rothfeld ground her observations in the history of American literature and American literary institutions – even if the result might be a lot less fun to read. That’s the thing about extravagant, slightly scandalous readings: they are undeniably diverting, and they can hold the reader’s attention, even if she’s stuck to her phone on a crowded commute home. 

A long essay called ‘Only Mercy’ seeks to move beyond consent as the sole measure of sexual morality and to develop the account of good sex that Rothfeld argues is missing from the work of post-consent theorists both on the right, such as Christine Emba and Louise Perry, and on the left, such as Amia Srinivasan. ‘No Mercy’ is an erudite and indeed excessive essay, a lengthy objection to the juridical accounts of consent that undermine the liberatory force of eroticism, which is Rothfeld’s actual theme. And so Rothfeld is scathing of the puritanical conservatism of Emba and Perry, who essentially advocate for a restoration of marriage as the exemplary and exclusive frame for intercourse; her critique of Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is heavily caveated but conforms to the larger argumentative impulse of the book, which is to exile considerations of justice from the bedroom. The glee Rothfeld takes in refuting Emba and Perry sits oddly against her far more careful reading of Srinivasan, an imbalance that suggests that she is less sure of the second half of her critique (I wasn’t sure of it either). The essay braids readings of novels by Lillian Fishman and Alyssa Songsiridej, a set of propositions about eroticism based on the work of Johan Huizinga, Georges Bataille and Mikhail Bakhtin, and reflections on bathhouse sex and what she calls her own ‘magnificently perverted marriage’. There it is again, that ambitious combination of cultural criticism, personal experience, and dizzying counter-intuitive explorations of a familiar concept. ‘The truth is,’ she writes, ‘we consent in the strongest sense only when we are incapable of refusal, not because we are subject to external coercion, but because we are beholden to the imperative of our own wanting.’ We should all be so lucky. Such expressions of paradox and reversal are typical of Rothfeld’s style, and they are delivered with such aplomb you can almost let the fatuous glorification of being ‘incapable of refusal’ pass. Allow me my own apodictic flourish: the truth about consent is nothing like a high-school debating point.   

No Judgment is, by comparison, an undisciplined book. If Rothfeld delivers a brisk performance of intellectual capacity, Oyler puts on rather a louche show, although she’s no less convinced than Rothfeld that she’s right. Louche can be charming, effortless and wry, but louche always runs the risk of shading into incoherence. The essays in No Judgment are driven, Oyler writes, by ‘a growing agitation about what I perceived to be misunderstandings and fallacies spreading in cultural criticism and commentary, and a resulting feeling that I must say something to attempt to intervene, as futile an endeavour as that might be’. Whereas Rothfeld’s writing seeks mastery over her subject, Oyler’s prose relies heavily on outré propositions and non sequiturs. The cadences of the social platforms are audible in her strings of often unrelated clauses; picking a path through her paragraphs can feel a lot like scrolling a feed. When she does let up with quipping to take a position, she appears disoriented. See for example, ‘What I am going to argue is that while I can’t really assess whether criticism is deteriorating per se, as it has always been said to be deteriorating, criticism is certainly threatened, despite an undeniable flourishing of nuanced criticism appearing in publications new and old in recent years.’ More vexing than this waffling announcement of intention is that the promised argument never materialises. 

It’s strange and disappointing that No Judgment is so inferior in thought and style to the magazine pieces on which Oyler made her name. Perhaps magazine editors deserve more credit. Oyler’s pugnacious writing for the LRB, The Baffler, and Bookforum ripples with vitality; the essays in No Judgment do not. I did not expect to be bored reading a book by Lauren Oyler, let alone an essay by Lauren Oyler on gossip, and yet what other judgment to make of such banal reflections as this? ‘It’s a little bit nasty, the lust for gossip’s mix of schadenfreude and satiation, the guilty pleasure, that comes with a new piece of extended-network information.’ 

‘There is a disdain’, writes Oyler, ‘for people who do not like pop culture.’ Where is the there there, I wondered? On social media, I think. In a similar anti-poptimist spirit, Rothfeld complains about the motto, ‘let people enjoy things’, which, she writes, ‘is usually deployed to imply that all art objects are created equal and any suggestion to the contrary smacks of snobbery.’ Tension between critics and consumers is nothing new, and social media has certainly amplified a populist, quantitative approach to culture, one that equates sales with merit and celebrity with virtue, and places a premium on likes, traffic, engagement and other metrics. And yet as often as the rejoinder to ‘let people enjoy things’ has been sounded on Goodreads and social media, it has not hindered the professional advancement of Oyler and Rothfeld, whose approach to criticism has thrived online. Both boast extensive portfolios in which they are given the space to contest the aesthetic and intellectual claims of popular books. Their most popular essays have arguably gained momentum because they have taken on work by popular authors – and taken them down a peg. Whoever they think is trying to coerce them into silence, they’re not doing a very effective job. 

Oyler and Rothfeld have been particularly scathing about modes of cultural criticism that purport to serve the democratisation of culture. Oyler, in a 2020 Bookforum essay on morality in contemporary fiction, ‘For Goodness’ Sake’, sketches her nemesis: 

Rothfeld and Oyler are at pains to distinguish themselves from this type of reader, whom they do not wish either to resemble or to serve. They are not moralists, they are critics! They style themselves as contrarians who resist on the one hand the moral strictures of the conservative right and the puritanism of the progressive left; as in Rothfeld’s essay ‘No Mercy’, this can involve some contortions. Rothfeld’s 2021 Liberties essay, ‘Sanctimony Literature’, which quotes Oyler on morality with great approval, is contemptuous of books driven by the ‘Unimpeachably Good Politics’ of their authors: 

So don’t come to books by Lauren Oyler and Becca Rothfeld looking for unimpeachably good politics and performatively righteous opinions, right? Social media, of course, is to be understood as the domain of the censorious and small-minded, not of that cohort of readers and editors who swarmed to Oyler and Rothfeld’s essays and built their reputations. 

Rothfeld elaborates on ‘Sanctimony Literature’ in All Things Are Too Small by carefully distinguishing between the socioeconomic realm, which she argues must be organised in a proportionate manner, and the private and aesthetic realms, which have been pervaded, on her account, by the logic of justice, to their detriment. This is a straightforward account of liberalism’s separation of the public and private spheres, which is not, shall we say, without its critics, nor is the impoverishing opposition of the political and the aesthetic. ‘While economic disparities remain fundamentally intact,’ she writes, ‘we insist on equality in love and art, on order and proportion in our minds and houses.’ It’s a waste of time to apply the standards of justice to the aesthetic realm anyway, argues Rothfeld. From where she sits, the democratisation of culture has gone no way to improving the lot of most people: ‘it has only left consequential inequalities intact, while depriving us of the extravagance that is our human due.’ On this logic, social justice-minded critics – and by this I guess Rothfeld means Marxists and feminists and other such rabble since she never quite names them – delude themselves if they think their interventions go any way to righting the world’s wrongs, or if they try to wrestle art into the sphere of justice. 

As I read All Things Are Too Small, I experienced a kind of cognitive dissonance as I tried to reconcile Rothfeld’s delirious incitement to liberatory extravagance with the late imperial spectacle of a US presidential campaign, with the sheer excesses of American political rhetoric and so too their human and ecological cost. None of this figures in Rothfeld’s exultant prioritisation of the private and aesthetic realms, which allows her conveniently to dodge naming what’s at stake. Is she fed up with talking about representation? Is it anti-racist and feminist readings of texts that bother her – or the notion that to some readers, the telling of stories by writers from marginal communities does address a consequential inequality? She never spells it out, advocating for the affective intensity of aesthetic revolution – just one without a political program. And because Rothfeld is so mesmerising a stylist it is easy to lose sight of the fact that art is not only a product of consequential inequalities, it is often in conversation with and about those inequalities, that the modalities of politically-engaged art and criticism can be exuberant, extravagant and transformative.  

Oyler and Rothfeld are both adept hyperbolists; in their essays rhetorical excess deflects criticism, a strategy that shitposters and other very online writers use too. Rothfeld opens ‘Sanctimony Literature’ thus: ‘As many have noted and some have lamented, politics are multiplying: these days everything seems to have one.’ This is a catchy gambit, one that relies on the reader rolling her eyes in agreement after scrolling past one too many personal essays about the politics of eyewear or drinking straws. And yet the argument that all things have a politics is hardly indefensible or outrageous or even new. The personal has been political for at least half a century. Many other entities and concepts have had a politics for far longer, and this has been the subject of complaint by a motley coalition, from aesthetes to edgelords, for just as long. 

We see a similar manouevre from Oyler in No Judgment on the Trump years, during which period, she writes, ‘art was expected to do something politically in accordance with the values of the coastal elites assumed to be its main if not exclusive audience. Everything was reviewed in terms of the light it could shed on political injustice.’ Everything was reviewed this way! This is demonstrably untrue – and if there’s an argument to be developed here about the turmoil of the Trump years, Oyler simply passes by it. That turmoil included the social movements, on- and offline, around Black Lives Matter, kids being locked up in cages and shot in schools, migration bans, and so on – but you wouldn’t know it from reading No Judgement. 

Critiques of the performative righteousness that thrived on social media during Trump’s 2016 term are not without basis – although again, no one deplatformed either Rothfeld or Oyler. There is nothing easier to mock than earnest progressives and their cheap, effortful gestures of solidarity (except perhaps those earnest progressives who turn to mind-emptying mindfulness for solace or those who profess at length to be working on themselves and their vulnerability). Oyler and Rothfeld are both far too savvy to rail against cancel culture and woke-ism, as some retrograde middle-aged journalist might, but in the context of contemporary culture, that is the terminus of their complaints about the pollution of culture by politics. It’s a sign of the success of this strategy of refusing the political that the reviews to date of these two collections have had very little to say about their political orientations.

And reading these books in late 2024, it’s hard to ignore how dated their characterisations of social media cultural activism have become. This is a professional hazard for any critic – and particularly critics whose work is carried on the tide of digital trends and then published in the asynchronous form of the book. The platforms themselves have changed since the years during which Oyler and Rothfeld’s essays were written – who’s still sticking around on X? If people are signing book deals, it’s thanks to their Substacks. It’s become cliché to point to righteous and ineffective posting by white liberals about Black Lives Matter, for example, as Rothfeld and Oyler do, and thereby to diminish the protest movement itself, and the intensity of the response to racial injustice and police brutality in the United States after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Since October 2023 the war in Gaza has administered some jolts to online performative leftism, as has resurgent nativism and the second ascent of Trumpism. Yes, certain forms of righteous online posturing have been heightened, but jibes about unimpeachably good politics seem like yesterday’s news after a year of bombings, encampments, and crackdowns on political speech.

‘For Goodness’ Sake’ and ‘Sanctimony Literature’ get closer than anything in No Judgment and All Things Are Too Small to acknowledging that representation and identity have been the flashpoints of debates about ethics and literature on social media. But questions of race, gender, and sexuality are largely left out. Instead, Oyler and Rothfeld stage their arguments against the democratisation of culture around blockbuster culture and consumerism. There’s something disingenuous about the silence about identity politics in these two books, which are otherwise so outraged and loquacious about the censoriousness they claim is all around them. They just don’t want to talk about it. Oyler and Rothfeld let themselves off the hook from contributing to this urgent theme in contemporary culture with arguments about the tyranny of aesthetic egalitarianism.

Online publishing fosters the illusion of a sustained and unrelenting present tense and repels historicisation. When Oyler and Rothfeld go on and on about the moralising and ineffective forces of social media, and the need to keep the fight for social and political justice out of art, it’s like they’ve mistaken the recent past for the present. This is one of the risks of unshackling art from the political present, and thus from history. The only timeframe virality knows is a depthless right now, and it’s not unusual to return months later to essays that were hits for a week or two and to find them wanting. That is the problem with dazzling writing: its ability to dazzle diminishes, leaving exposed a writer’s tics and repetitions, the gaps in their arguments. That was my experience re-reading essays by Oyler and Rothfeld that had first fairly shimmered on screen, garlanded by the slogans, evaluations, and talking points of a thousand social media users. Liberated from the mirrored enclosures of online literary discourse, their effects were dulled.

In these two books we are provoked and entertained by two new interpretations of a familiar figure, the brilliant female intellectual. I think Oyler and Rothfeld probably identify themselves with the Partisan Review and New York Review of Books crowd, with Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy, and with Renata Adler. It’s no surprise to encounter Rothfeld writing about Lionel Trilling with admiration. There are, of course, other less glorious traditions of American contrarianism, such as the paths trodden by Katie Roiphe, Caitlin Flanagan and Camille Paglia. Elizabeth Hardwick wrote her great Harper’s jeremiad about criticism in 1959, and then went on to help found the New York Review of Books. A similar declinist energy to that expressed by Hardwick runs through No Judgment and All Things Are Too Small, even as the platforms that facilitated their rise are themselves in decline. Lauren Oyler and Becca Rothfeld rose to distinction during the epoch of the viral essay, and it is in this context that their work is legible. The elegies for viral criticism have not yet been written and when they are, it’s anyone’s bet which platforms and media a new generation of critics will use to capture the attention of their readers. My immediate curiosity is where Oyler and Rothfeld will go now that their debut collections are in print. They are angry with the culture – what, I wonder, do they plan to do about it?