What a strange book Authority, by Andrea Long Chu, is—brilliant, blind ... When you’re on the same side as Chu it is exhilarating ... Contain[s] moments of insight so accurate, and often funny, too—one of her outstanding strengths as a critic—that for me now they seem permanently etched onto those writers ... There’s a tremendous price to pay for Chu’s method. She never loves anything ... It badly damages our faith in her taste. It isn’t even clear she has anything to offer us on those terms; the highest praise in this book is, ludicrously, for the pat, well-made postapocalyptic HBO soap opera The Last of Us ... A hate read runs on hate: Beneath whatever veneer of intellectual objectivity, any book as incandescently furious as this one is ultimately a long cry of pain.
Long Chu insists that critics should abandon their desire to obtain authority, but she’s seemingly not all that interested in the vast tradition outside liberal criticism that already does this ... She has reconciled, in her work, a certain belletrism with the rigor and dispassion of an academic critic. She has achieved, at times, what Irving Howe said the New York Intellectuals achieved ... In her sensitive and searching piece of memoir on transitioning (On Liking Women) and in her most rigorously convincing takedowns, Long Chu not only demonstrates the value of criticism at its boldest and, yes, most authoritative but also finds a way to effectively marry—in a way that her predecessors often struggled with—experience and expertise, aesthetics and politics ... Even while negating others, she generates, through her eloquent and immense dissatisfaction, an experience of recognition in her audience ... Long Chu’s targets are often easy ones, but she dispatches them with such technical proficiency that you can’t help but admire the work she’s done.
[Long Chu's] approach borders on the psychoanalytical, and makes for fun reading ... A takedown of Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2020 novel, Rodham...is a withering indictment of hollow girl-boss feminism ... Refreshingly clear-sighted ... Can be a bit cloying, and the occasional adolescent turns of phrase feel jarringly regressive ... This is the striking thing about Long Chu’s authorial tone: she combines the expert and the naif in a single voice, which chimes with a similar dualism in her reader. These essays are essentially journeys—knotty and meandering, with moments of pithy, clarifying insight. If you can hold someone’s interest while figuring things out for yourself in real time on the page, you’re doing something right.
Turbulent ... Not coherent ... The pieces in Authority are better when they consider politics or gender directly, rather than using a novel as a thin pretext for the political discussion Chu obviously longs for ... She seems to have a general disdain for novels, a failing that she tries to contort into a virtue ... At the level of the sentence...Chu is hard to match. She can be biting, and she can be beautiful ... Funnily enough, one of the sharpest and most consistent ideas that surfaces in Chu’s work concerns the relative impotence of ideas when they are forced to compete with the superior pull of desire.
Chu is provocative, disruptive and very funny, and her criticism is as blistering as it is well-informed ... Entertaining ... You could easily focus on the joy of viciousness in these reviews...but better yet is to focus on how worthwhile it is to place our favorite things within a larger context.
