“LITERARY CRITICS do fulfill a very important role, but there seems to be a problem with much contemporary criticism,” Simon Leys once wrote. “One has the feeling that these critics do not really like literature—they do not enjoy reading.” This was a line my mind kept drifting to as I plodded through Lauren Oyler’s debut essay collection, No Judgment. The book was originally to be called Who Cares, and perhaps that title should have been retained. Who cares, really, about any of this? Gawker, the firing of Ben Mora, a TED Talk from 2010, Richard Brody’s New Yorker review of Tár, an Instagram ad for a meditation app Oyler once saw, bad Goodreads reviews she once got, the fact that customers leave negative Google reviews for her friend Laurel’s “successful bagel shop and café attached to an English-language bookstore in Berlin” and thereby “project a particular logic of capitalism onto their relationship with . . . Laurel that lends the consumer dictatorial power”? When writing Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly said he aspired to write a book that would last for ten years. Much like Oyler’s debut novel, Fake Accounts, with its Women’s March plot, long meditations on social media trolls, and thirty-nine-page parody of Jenny Offill, No Judgment is already dated, even before its release.
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