Her sense of humor is present, as is her agile thinking. But fans of blood sport won’t find much here to satisfy their baser appetites. Far from incendiary, the book is cleareyed and grounded ... Oyler is a sharp and confident critic, and some interpretations in the book are outstanding ... The book’s measuredness cuts both ways. While it likely demonstrates Oyler’s growth as a writer...it lacks the boldness of her novel and magazine writing. It is oddly safe ... Luckily, the execution is fresh enough to keep one reading. And the barbs, when they do come, are good.
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 ... 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 ... Not for a moment does she display any interest in discovering why the things she scorns are so wildly popular ... 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 ... 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with the result that it often has the slightly plaintive quality of a text message from an older parent intent on using outdated slang ...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 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 ... She is so desperate to demonstrate that she is in on the joke that she neglects to ask if the joke is even funny ... This is not criticism as a practice; it is criticism as a lifestyle brand.
The book was originally to be called Who Cares, and perhaps that title should have been retained. Who cares, really, about any of this? ... Already dated, even before its release ... Oyler is contemptuous of disagreement, quickly bores of research, and rigidly attempts to control the reader’s responses. As a result, the writing is cramped, brittle ... No Judgment displays many of the flaws Oyler once so forcefully identified in others. To begin with, it is often hard to tell what she is trying to say ... Oyler doesn’t want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature ... The resulting collection reads like a juvenile burn book, totally uninterested in the world outside her group chat.
Although I’m revealing my inane approach to sidebar commentary...this holds true for much of No Judgment: My excited underlined passages or comments of 'haha' and 'omg so true' and 'okay, fair' balanced out with many an annoyed 'uh no' or 'oookay' ... Oyler’s liberal usage of the royal 'we' at various points in her essays...is grating, especially as she is clearly excellent at writing from her own particular perspective and is capable of admitting to the subjectivity of an 'I' statement. There are moments when she is vague in her arguments or abstracts to the point of confusion, but her writing is so good that it’s easy to gloss over these ... Ultimately, though, I found Oyler’s work invigorating. That I was at times deeply convinced by her arguments and at others wanted to argue right back is, to me, the mark of successful critical writing.
If you are a person who spends an inordinate amount of time reading articles you found through X (né Twitter), you will likely be familiar with many, if not all, of Oyler’s reference points ... One begins to wonder if the Internet might not necessarily be such a bad thing ... Turned out to be something not so negative after all.
This uncertainty within Oyler — I don’t care what you think! But I can’t afford to be unaware of what you’re thinking! — is engrossing because it’s more often dialectical instead of just an expression of ambivalence ... This is a book that foregrounds its integrity, which means attempting to exist outside of the bounds of the internet.
Oyler has a talent for cutting through hype and getting to the nub of things ... The essays in No Judgement demonstrate an agile and discerning mind. Oyler’s intellectual earnestness is offset by a disarmingly chatty prose style---her voice is by turns anecdotal, playful, ironically self-deprecating. (At times perhaps too much so: one very short paragraph reads: 'Just kidding. Sort of.') She is stimulating company on the page, and rarely dull. However, one or two of the talking points here feel ever so slightly old hat: a widely shared 2010 Ted Talk on the importance of vulnerability; the demise of the gossip website Gawker, following a 2013 lawsuit; the online media landscape around 2016; Berlin being a thing. A quibble, perhaps, but cultural discourse moves frighteningly fast these days.
The rarefied niche into which we’re about briefly to wiggle. It is an airless place ... Already I sound like I hated her new book, an essay collection called No Judgement. In fact, I didn’t, or not all of it...But nor can I say that I liked it, exactly ... Literature – novels, criticism, all of it – seems to be draining away before our very eyes, and it makes me feel very sad and depressed.
Will please Oyler’s admirers ... Her journalistic explorations of gossip and of online reviews, especially those on Goodreads, are both enlightening and provocative.
An essay is the opposite of a tweet: it allows for complication, doubt, space to breathe. And in this collection, Oyler, one of nature’s contrarians, does the opposite of what most people do online: she cartwheels gracefully through a series of reverse virtue signals (vice flashes?). She’s suspicious of popular opinion, Ted talks, vulnerability and rising above. She likes snobs, Henry James and talking about people behind their back. Brilliant ... I loved her essay 'The Power of Vulnerability,' a blast against the corporate world’s love affair with everyone showing their soft sides, and the ending of her essay on expat life in Berlin, a beautifully clarifying account of nostalgia and the tug of new places ... The style is a little chewy. Oyler likes digression, anecdote, playfulness and puns, all of which are fun but they come at the expense of pithiness, something I enjoy in an essayist. I want to be able to lift a punchy little quote to save in my Notes app. Still this is a seriously thought-provoking book, one that contends with what the internet is doing to us. I too love gossip because it confirms 'the existence of other people really living.' No Judgement made me want to live a little more.
