April Dispatch
This one includes my thoughts on Lauren Oyler's "No Judgment," among other springtime musings.
The speaker is blown out on the L train. All of the announcements are coming through garbled and distorted and I like it. I’m riding the train in the middle of the day because I’m off teaching this week for spring break. It feels nice to have a staycation in the city, to poke around little boutiques in the afternoon on a week day, to pretend as though I am someone who has enough money not to have to work. I’ve been staying in bed relaxing until noon or later rather than jumping up, disoriented, at my usual 6:30 AM wake up time. I arrive back home from my flaneuse cosplay. The sun is streaming through the windows and Rick is working from home, playing The Velvet Underground on the speaker, while I sit curled up on the couch writing this. It all feels very decadent, Parisian almost. I have to enjoy moments like this when they arise.
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In the introduction to her essay collection No Judgment, Lauren Oyler states that her book is called No Judgment because the phrase is “always ironic. There is never no judgment, and certainly not in this book.”1 I beg to differ. The essays in this collection are rambling, meandering, and largely fail — notably unironically — to make a qualitative judgment on any of the intriguing topics Oyler explores: gossip, vulnerability, autofiction, anxiety, et cetera. While reading this text, it was my feeling that Oyler needed, in each essay, to (a) narrow her focus and (b) unapologetically advance a claim. While she’s a certified hater, Oyler doesn’t seem to know how to advocate for the things she loves, or even the things she believes in. As in her 2021 novel Fake Accounts, wherein Oyler spends considerable time cruelly mimicking Jenny Offill’s aphoristic writing style rather than developing her own unique voice, Oyler doesn’t actually tell us who she is or what she endorses here, other than socialized healthcare (which any sane U.S. citizen should already support — we don’t need Oyler to tell us why this is good). Otherwise, Oyler rebuts any potentially fascinating claims almost as soon as she makes them; for example, “I don’t like the word ‘creator’ . . . because it has tech-industry connotations, and as an elitist I hate technology. Just kidding. Sort of.”2 Girl, what??
I won’t spend too much more time explicating the major failings of this text, because Ann Manov has already done so exceptionally, and Ross Barkan has explained why this healthy rivalry between Manov and Oyler is a good thing for the literary world. However, what I would like to definitively add to the discourse on No Judgment is this: there really is such a thing as too much prolepsis3. In the final sentences of the last essay of the collection, “My Anxiety,” Oyler writes: “One yearns for the breakthrough, the epiphany, that will make sense of [Oyler’s anxiety], and thus cure it; the reader here is just like me, waiting for some obvious climax and resolution. But catharsis for me is boring for you.”4 And that is where Oyler is wrong. Catharsis for her would not be boring for us, because an essay reaches a state of catharsis once it has made an actual claim, once it has effectively argued for something, anything — once it has made a judgment. Next time, I hope Oyler gives her readers — and most importantly, herself — that sense of release. It’s okay to risk being wrong, or disliked, as long as it is in service of unabashedly advocating for something in which you believe.
Oyler, Lauren. No Judgment. HarperCollins: New York, 2024. pp. 2. Print.
No Judgment. pp. 83.
Merriam Webster dictionary defines prolepsis as “the anticipation and answering of possible objections in rhetorical speech.” If you also took AP Language in high school, I’m sure you will recall this.
No Judgment. pp. 256.