AUTHORITY

A critic wields a sharp scalpel.

Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Chu has collected 25 of her essays—including book and television reviews, autobiography, and reflections on the work of the critic—written between 2018 and 2023, all except two published in the literary journal n+1 and in New York magazine. Chu sees criticism “as a genre of assertive prose,” and certainly her stance is nothing less than assertive, uncompromising, and sometimes snarky. Poet and memoirist Maggie Nelson’s essay collection On Freedom, for example, strikes Chu as representing the kind of mediocrity pervasive in academic writing. Nelson’s approach, Chu writes, is “to present six or seven academics on a topic and then say of one, ‘I like this.’” She deems Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Rodham “nothing but a large commemorative stamp, dependent wholly in use and function on the reader’s willingness to lick it.” Yellowstone is, simply, not a good show; neither is Phantom of the Opera, or anything else conjured by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Her identity as a trans woman informs “On Liking Women,” which she calls her first “proper essay” and “Pink,” about her vaginoplasty. In a postscript to her scathing critique of a memoir by Joey Soloway, creator of the series Transparent (she calls the book “incompetent, defensive, and astonishingly clueless”), Chu concedes, “It is a vicious piece, which I would distinguish from a cruel one. Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days; cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty.” But she aims not simply to wound: “The only criticism worth doing, for my money, is not the kind that claims to improve society in general; it is, as the late John Berger once wrote, the kind that helps to destroy this particular one.”

Acerbic social and cultural critique.