The American critic Lauren Oyler is fun – very fun – to read. Not just because she is funny, although she is, nor because she is mean, which she can be, though her reputation for viciousness is overstated: her fabled takedown of the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino indulges in mockery, and although this is surely partly why the essay allegedly crashed the London Review of Books’ website, it is not wanton. The fun to be had reading Oyler owes something to her mastery of the internet, as does her popularity. She cut her teeth writing for Vice and her career has been distinguished by “lily-pads of semi-viral critical articles”. A self-described internet addict with a sizeable Twitter/X following, Oyler is fearsomely fluent in digital culture, especially the idioms and humour of social media. She knows how to sound interesting online and this has left its mark on her style. Her prose has the taut, incessant wit of repartee, as though each sentence had to be worthy of a tweet.
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