Turbulent...not coherent, except insofar as any oeuvre acquires some measure of coherence by dint of its author’s recurrent preoccupations. Only two essays in the book...are new ... If Chu had written nothing but 'On Liking Women,' she would have earned her reputation as one of the most dazzling writers of her generation. But for the past seven years she has been busy complicating this status by writing other essays, a few of them as virtuosic as her first, many of them significantly cruder ... 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 — one of my favorite levels — 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.
