This slim book-length essay is essentially defensive in its aim and tone. But the effect is confusing, partly because Nelson seldom quotes or cites the dismissive commentary that Swift has been subjected to.
I kept thinking of any number of singers, musicians, transcendent superstars, and neglected avant-gardists I wished Nelson had chosen over Swift ... Nelson very persuasively casts both Plath and the female artist in general in Carson’s anti-sophrosyne terms ... What Nelson cannot do is ascribe anything like the vortical energy of the Ariel poems to the mature lyrics of Swift, who is now five years older than Plath ever was ... But one might just wish for a more audacious object of Nelson’s attention.
Nelson essentially argues that any criticism of Swift is the result of the patriarchy’s obsession with silencing women. This is hard to take seriously ... If this is the kind of silencing Nelson is worried about, I would quite like to live in her version of patriarchy ... Finishing this hopefully intentionally unserious book, I felt an overwhelming sense of anxiety emanating from its pages. It struck me that Nelson, who made her name as a brilliant, subversive chronicler of queer sex, cruelty and desire, is afraid of being judged for liking something so blandly common denominator. I want to tell her it’s okay – she’s allowed to like the popular thing without having to anxiously argue that it comes from a place of maligned feminist indignation.
Feels stuck in 2015 ... Nelson sees some profound connection between these two women—specifically in the unfair way she feels their work is regarded—but in the end fails to convincingly demonstrate it. One peril in writing about what 'people' are saying about an artist is that each of us swims in a different soup of party conversations, social media posts, online articles, comment threads, and classroom discussions ... The only evidence Nelson offers for the pervasive biases against Swift turns out to be both tenuous and disingenuously presented. She leans way too hard on a presumption of gendered disgruntlement that hasn’t prevailed in a decade. I may not care about Taylor Swift, but I do care about good criticism, and The Slicks isn’t that.
Reading Maggie Nelson is like drinking from a well. It refreshes and brings clarity to the mind ... Her sensitivity to complicated dialogues about Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath is well considered, measured, and researched ... Nelson is notably lucid in her construction of this unlikely comparison.
The book is ill-conceived and poorly wrought, a cynical scripture from the Church of Taylor Swift that relies on circular, shallow argumentation leading the reader nowhere. The central premise, that Swift and Plath are both victims of the patriarchal distaste for prolific woman artists, comes off as tired and outdated; parts of the book read like they belong back in 2015, on the shelf beside a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mug ... There’s a notable absence of many of Nelson’s usual strengths ... The reader is rushed through a series of progressively harder-to-swallow claims and meandering paths of contradictory evidence about Swift and Plath’s careers ... The landscape of repression upon which Nelson’s entire argument relies is only somewhat persuasive on a first read and nearly vanishes upon review ... Her 'feminist' argument is so poorly supported that one wonders if Nelson herself believes it.
