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Against the odds, Lauren Oyler is a phenomenon. Although she is a member of that endangered and increasingly irrelevant species, literary critic, she is famed and feared for her scathing reviews of books that everyone else is too afraid to admit to hating. The attacks in question have appeared in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, among other publications, and they are faithfully circulated and remarked upon on X (formerly Twitter). Love her or hate her, you have to read her, at least if you hail from a milieu no less real for being rarefied, interbred and roiled by internecine disputes. In the literary world, a new Oyler essay is an event.

“No Judgment,” Oyler’s debut collection, contains six essays, therefore six events, and it begins by loudly proclaiming its own title to be a joke. “There is never no judgment,” Oyler writes in the introduction, “and certainly not in this book.” By “judgment,” she appears to mean something that contrasts with opinion: A judgment, Oyler suggests, is not a flimsy feeling or a personal preference, but a fortress buttressed by arguments. Critics make judgments by marshaling evidence, while everyone else seethes with inarticulate, pre-rational affinities.

It is fairly obvious where the kind of person who sketches such a hierarchy would place herself in it. Oyler assures us that she is no lowly opinion-haver, but her book’s title is more accurate than she thinks. Her essays contain not arguments or judgments so much as advertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality. She is beloved for her unrepentantly implacable persona, but a persona is always at risk of calcifying into a shtick.

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The essays in “No Judgment” are nominally about gossip (Oyler happily indulges in it), literary criticism in the age of Goodreads (Oyler fears it may be doomed), Berlin (Oyler has lived there on and off for more than a decade but brags that she cannot be bothered to master the German language), the strand of contemporary writing known as autofiction (Oyler likes it), vulnerability (“yuck”) and anxiety (Oyler suffers from it but writes about it so acerbically that she cannot be accused of mushy self-exposure).

In reality, all the essays are about Oyler, which is not necessarily a problem. The truth is that she is her own best subject, and when she is not too busy straining for profundity, she can be bitingly funny. “I do not know how I could go on if I couldn’t justify all bad or even inconvenient things that happen to me as possible future material,” she writes in one piece. In her essay on anxiety, by far the best in the collection, she recalls that she took a “Jaw Release Workshop” designed to combat her teeth-grinding and privately called it “jaw yoga.”

There are plenty of quips in “No Judgment,” and many of them land, but are there any judgments? Oyler acts as if there are (she often refers to various flourishes as “my argument” or “the argument”), but they are difficult to locate even with the aid of her irksomely condescending signposting. Instead, there is an atmosphere of ambient disapproval. The critic Lionel Trilling once wrote that conservatives make “irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas”; Oyler makes suggestive motions that seek to resemble arguments. The general thesis, transmitted by osmosis, seems to be that we are awash in consumerism and cowardice, that our culture is hostile to rigorous assessments of artistic merit and hospitable to the mindless assertions of personal predilections, and that we are generally worshipful of the mediocre and crowd-pleasing artifacts that the mid-century critic Dwight Macdonald (whom Oyler does not mention) called “midcult.” These are all claims that I happen to agree with, but not for any of the reasons Oyler offers on the few occasions when she offers reasons at all.

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The occasional judgments that can be found in this book-length apologia for judgment are predictable and facile. All of the fruit that Oyler picks is so low-hanging that she would do better to leave it rotting on the ground. “My women friends and colleagues are not angels,” she writes in a section on #MeToo, as if the unimpeachability of all women were a premise of the #MeToo movement, or something any reasonable person would ever defend. She thinks Marvel movies are bogus, as do most of her peers (including me) and one Martin Scorsese, hardly a marginal figure in American culture. About TED Talks she is especially eloquent. “Yuck, and I mean that,” she writes. Not for a moment does she display any interest in discovering why the things she scorns are so wildly popular. She does not mention a single Marvel movie by name, even if only to eviscerate it.

Few of her drive-by insults are substantiated by evidence or examples. Contemporary critics, she insists, “avoid more difficult fare by devilishly advocating for pop culture.” Which critics? The reason she concludes that “vulnerability is the triumphant value in cultural criticism” (is it?) is that the word appears often in certain publications. “Between May 14, 2021, and May 14, 2022, the word ‘vulnerable’ appeared in 3,494 articles on the New York Times website,” she writes without providing any further analysis of the articles in question, at least some of which were about “evacuating the vulnerable amid the terror of war” in Ukraine and offering coronavirus vaccines to “vulnerable” populations — and not in the least about soppy personal disclosures. If we applied her methods to her own writing, we might conclude that vulnerability is an ascendant value for her, too: In the course of sloppily denigrating the concept in her book, she uses the word upward of 40 times.

“No Judgment” is full of lines with the cadence, but not the content, of zingers. “I despise a happy ending” sounds daring until you realize that it means Oyler despises Jane Austen and all of Shakespeare’s comedies. It is not a serious pronouncement: It is just an accessory, designed to present the person who wears it as a provocateur.

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Oyler is fond of casual, conversational locutions. I can imagine “I find the concept of plot oppressive” printed on a T-shirt or tote bag, an irreverent alternative to “Well-behaved women rarely make history,” and it is the kind of throwaway claim that often appears in “No Judgment.”

For the most part, the prose in the book sweats to be chatty, with the result that it often has the slightly plaintive quality of a text message from an older parent intent on using outdated slang. Oyler employs the phrase “totally whack” without apparent embarrassment; a piece of salacious gossip is “truly like Christmas.” Attempts at more lyrical writing are unmusical, assonant, sometimes even lightly ungrammatical. In the winter in Berlin, the apparently undigestible “daytime is only fibrous for a few hours” (and perhaps packed with protein for the rest?). At one point, Oyler suggests that writing should strive for “aesthetic beauty,” as if there were any other kind, and later she writes of a “deep dark depth,” as if there were shallow ones.

How do we square her suggestion that “the natural voice of a writer should be a bit more literary, a bit more refined, than your average person” with her juvenile description of a photograph of street lamps as “striking, because, well, lights,” or her assurance that “it sucks” to experience unpleasant emotions? How can we reconcile her repeated professions of passion for “difficult” art with her tendency to anatomize her essays for her readers as if we were grade school students? “Here’s the interesting part, historically,” she interjects in the middle of a long aside about the origins of rating systems. When a literary device looms up ahead, she warns us so that we can steel ourselves like drivers preparing for a pothole. “Okay, so here’s the metaphor,” she tells us, before embarking on an extended analogical slog.

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Is she serious? As she herself says in one cloying passage, she is “just kidding. Sort of.” In her polemical essay against champions of vulnerability, she complains of their “argument’s classically maddening structure, through which all objections to it, no matter how elegant or meticulously reasoned, can be funneled into its rock-bottom logic: my rejection can only prove its point.” Setting aside the rather vexing question of how an argument can be “funneled” into a “rock-bottom logic” (or what “rock-bottom logic” even is) — this mixed metaphor, too, should have come with a warning — “No Judgment” is outfitted with a similarly all-purpose excuse. Oyler is constantly retreating into sarcasm, interrupting herself to remind us of her wry distance from everything she says, squirming in the face of commitment or conviction. Any ugly sentence, jumbled argument or exhausted platitude can be passed off as a bit and thereby disavowed.

But how satisfying is it to have to resort to claiming that vast swaths of your book are forgivable because they are presented in jest? And do Oyler’s many infelicities even succeed as parody? Who, exactly, is she mocking when she tags a metaphor as such? She is so desperate to demonstrate that she is in on the joke that she neglects to ask if the joke is even funny.

Another joke that isn’t really a joke (and isn’t really funny) is the title of her essay about Goodreads, “My Perfect Opinions.” As far as I can tell, the tacit ambition of “No Judgment” is in fact to establish that Oyler is a sophisticate with opinions that are, if not perfect, at least enviably elevated.

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In the essay in question, she characterizes herself as “a snob, highbrow, elitist” who enjoys “an unfamiliar vocabulary word.” “At the movies, I prefer subtitles,” she writes. “At the museum, I can probably identify a decent percentage of the permanent collection by sight.” Of course, she is sort of joking — she is always sort of joking, if also often sort of bragging — but it is revealing that she does not name any of the movies with subtitles or any of the artworks she can supposedly identify by sight. This joke or not-quite-joke could easily be mistaken for the parts of the essays she really means (if she has ever “really meant” anything), because it is certainly no joke that she does not discuss any particular creative work at any appreciable length until halfway through the book. When she does comment on specific writers, her remarks are glancing and generic. She stresses that critics are distinguished from everyone else insofar as they engage in a “careful consideration of [a work’s] qualities rather than yelling about how it’s soooo good,” but she herself characterizes Elizabeth Hardwick’s ornate prose, with its fabulous embroidery of verbs, as “good” and “clear.”

“I would like to say that dedicating any time or energy to criticism comes from a belief in the importance of art,” Oyler writes in the one passage when she approaches sincerity, albeit from the safe outpost of the conditional tense. She would like to say so — so why doesn’t she? All she can bring herself to say instead is that, “for my money, there are few things as fulfilling as encountering a difficult text, film, or work of art and then spending some time thinking about it, discussing it, and uncovering the meaning in it.”

The best she can come up with in her manifesto on behalf of criticism and judgment is yet another appeal to personal fulfillment, a piece of therapeutic pabulum at least as vapid as any exhortation to vulnerability. But what passes for criticism in “No Judgment” has little to do with art — which is terribly important, by the way, even when it is not “fulfilling” — and everything to do with self-styling.

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There really is no judgment here. Instead, there is something like Goodreads, the website Oyler reviles, in reverse: Instead of listing likes and interests, these essays list dislikes and tediums. They may deviate from the substance of social media, but they retain its forms, insofar as they, too, collect and display a series of tastes without grounds in an effort to flatter their author. This is not criticism as a practice; it is criticism as a lifestyle brand.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction critic for The Washington Post.

No Judgment

By Lauren Oyler

HarperOne. 275 pp. $28.99

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