I’d Like to Report a Murder
Has contemporary criticism become sadomasochistic? A dispatch from Pioneer Works Broadcast
Over the next month, we’ll be highlighting select pieces from Pioneer Works Broadcast, a virtual and annual print magazine, that we think readers of The Believer will love. If you enjoy this dispatch, you can find the full article on the Broadcast website.
As Heidi Julavits warned, literary criticism has taken a sinister turn. More recently, Broadcast Contributing Editor Leon Dische Becker convened a showdown between two author-critics who have been on both sides of the violence—Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor—and invited clinical therapist hannah baer to moderate.
LAUREN OYLER: Have you read that Believer essay from 2003 by Heidi Julavits, which inaugurated an anti-takedown culture in literature? She’s writing 20 years ago about exactly the problems we consider a result of social media: the kind of gleeful wagon-circling and identifying a common enemy out of thin air. And then the cycle moves on.
She was saying there’s a vitriolic type of long-winded negative criticism that is fundamentally focused on the author’s career and not on the book. And yet, sometimes you do have to justify the presence of a negative review by explaining why the person you’re talking about is important or worthy of discussion. You have to say, “so-and-so is a New Yorker writer praised by the X and Z,” because otherwise it’s like, why are you talking about this random woman in the LRB for 5,000 words? But on social media, people are projecting weird identities onto everyone all the time.
HANNAH BAER: I’m curious how power dynamics in terms of fame, visibility, and identity play into the choices you make about who to critique.
LAUREN OYLER: It’s been quite trendy, I think, certainly during the Trump era, for authors to place themselves (or avatars of themselves) in their fiction as victims. It’s a defensive shield so that you can’t be criticized because so many bad things have happened to you. To return to BDSM, people are “topping from the bottom.” It creates a sense that you’re hurting them by writing a negative review, even though you write a book because you want it to be read.
BRANDON TAYLOR: You could write a perfectly studied negative review and publish it, and people would still act as though you’ve just walked into the author’s house and killed them and all their pets.
I recently wrote a negative review of Creation Lake, and I thought maybe five people would read it because it came out a bit late. But people cared quite a lot. Had I gone into it with some desire to destroy one of my literary forebears, then it would’ve felt very cathartic. But it was really miserable.
LAUREN OYLER: I actually thought that review was quite sexist. I found it quite offensive for you to say, about this well-published woman in her fifties, “Use your human mind!”
BRANDON TAYLOR: I would’ve used that phrase with a dude, but I didn’t review a dude. Weirdly enough, I very seldom get asked to review men.
LAUREN OYLER: They’re not writing any books.
This is the first dispatch from Pioneer Works Broadcast. You can read the full conversation on their website.
Related articles from The Believer:
“Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!” by Heidi Julavits
“Event: Table Season,” a department essay by Lauren Oyler
An Interview with Sam Mendes, conducted by Heidi Julavits