Andrea Long Chu: ‘Being trans can teach you about the stakes of argument’

Andrea Long Chu is one of the US’s foremost critics, and one of its most fearsome. Witty, rigorous, and rarely afraid of a challenge, Chu has meticulously dissected the work of many of contemporary literature’s luminaries: Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson, Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk. The list goes on. At 30, she’d already secured a Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for her work at New York Magazine. She is also, to our collective benefit, very funny. Take her Bookforum review of Bret Easton Ellis’s White, “a lecture on kettles from one of our leading pots”, which is full of more zingers than a key lime pie.

But comedy is firmly secondary to Chu’s political project as a critic. Authority: Essays on Being Right, Chu’s new book of essays, includes 22 of her previously published pieces and two new essays, which she uses to explore the history and purpose of literary criticism. The collection covers an enjoyably wide range of topics, from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Yellowjackets, but it is undergirded by a steely focus on the stakes of her craft, and on the need for the left to fight for public intellectual territory. She is not just a critic; she is one of our most powerful polemicists, staking her claim on a field that often rewards the complacent and the reactionary.

We talked to Chu over Zoom about one-liners, the state of contemporary literary criticism, and the topic of her next project.

The two new essays you’ve written for Authority – the titular essay, and the opening essay, ‘Criticism in a Crisis’ – are both about the state, purpose, and practice of criticism. We’re used to some writers publicly interrogating their own jobs and fields, but critics, perhaps less so. Why was that kind of introspection important to you in writing Authority?

Andrea Long Chu: For me, it’s really important that those essays are located at specific points in time. Some of the stuff in there goes back seven or eight years, and in that time you change, you develop, and it can be hard to revisit old material, even material that you understand is good. So, I would rather try to contextualise them than edit them; I’m not against editing old essays, but there’s something a little dishonest about that to me, particularly since most of them are still accessible online. But also, I do feel that my work – especially the work I’ve done at New York [Magazine] – has often felt like a single project. I was interested in trying to surface that project, which I had some implicit understanding of: questions about politics, about liberalism, about a kind of liberal-intellectual formation in the US that I am increasingly irritated with.

When I work on a piece about a writer, I tend to do a very deep dive, I’ll usually try to find everything they’ve written. I’m always trying to put together a chronology of a person, an intellectual biography. I’m not doing that to the same extent with my own work, but I was looking at all these essays together, trying to understand what was going on with myself intellectually. And obviously I have more behind the scenes information there than I usually do with the people I write about…

When I was reading the book, I was thinking about how few trans women wield authoritative voices in the public sphere like you do. Transness can often strip its bearer of authority. What do you think about the political affordances of occupying that kind of authoritative tone and position, despite the relative ‘emptiness’ of authority you identify in ‘Authority’?

Andrea Long Chu: There are very few trans public intellectuals in the English-speaking world. There’s real responsibility that comes with that, obviously. I go back and look at ‘On Liking Women’ now, which was the first thing I ever wrote for a public audience, and I think, would I write something like that today? Probably not. For one, I suppose, I’m living in a world where that piece has already been written. But there’s this kind of freewheeling tone, and also I had… probably not nothing to lose, but as a writer, I had nothing to lose. Now, I know that I’m only going to say so many things in the course of a year, in the course of my career. The longer you work in a job like this, the more you realise how little you get to say, and how little you get to say well. So, I try to be very judicious about not just what I say, but about what the right moment is to say it.

Like you say, there’s a loss of authority that can accompany the decision to transition, although lots of people who choose to transition don’t have very much authority to begin with. That’s not even necessarily for insidious reasons, but just because they’re people, they’re civilians. But part of what’s intolerable to some about transness as an identity claim is that it’s not based on something they consider real. Transition is maybe exposing the emptiness of authority that you mention – exposing not that authority doesn’t exist, but that it doesn’t exist because it has some sort of transcendental source. It’s not God, it’s not expertise, it’s not the law. It’s actually just you and me and everyone we know.

To be trans, right now, is to be living in a situation where consensus has not been reached about you. That can be difficult and painful; it can also be, I think, energising and interesting, depending on context. But it does mean that to be trans is to have a visceral understanding of what it means for something to be ‘up for debate’. So, it can teach you something about the stakes of argument.

There are very few trans public intellectuals in the English-speaking world. There’s real responsibility that comes with that

You are often described as someone who does literary ‘takedowns’, which tends to characterise your most virally popular works. How do we deal with the popularity of the ‘pan’ in literary criticism more generally, and how that might potentially lead to quick, provocative takes being prioritised over well-thought-out ones? Or do you think we’re dealing with the opposite problem: journalists being materially pressured to be overly positive?

Andrea Long Chu: On the one hand, I’m moved by the argument that pans can go viral on Twitter because I have been on Twitter. But I think, when it comes to reviews, that audience response is probably less of a factor than the conditions under which the thing is being written. I think if you look at all reviews, you’d find more positive than negative, but it depends on what counts as a review. A lot of work is less review than ‘coverage’, where the idea of a negative approach is not part of that kind of journalism. I can do big, sweeping, 5,000 word negative reviews of very famous people because I have a sinecure that has allowed me to do that. I don’t really have to worry about reputational harm for that because it’s already part of my reputation. And I have the time and space to rigorously back that up, whether you agree with me or not.

Does the New York Times Book Review, for the most part, put out very bland, positive reviews of novels by other novelists who might know, or later run into, the novelists that they are reviewing? Absolutely. But I think that is less about ‘the culture’, or readers, and more about the material conditions under which these pieces are written.

That makes sense. I do think there is sometimes this libidinal impulse to want to kill sacred cows, which can be seen in some of the negative reviews of Ocean Vuong’s new book, which seem to take the tack of ‘he’s been beloved for long enough that now we get the joy of bursting that bubble.’ But I don’t think that stands in for the full culture, either.

Andrea Long Chu: Ocean is a great example of someone who has received an enervating amount of praise that has been bad for him as a writer. It’s been bad for him, receiving that much praise for work that mostly did not deserve it. In some cases, the reason to want to kill the sacred cows is that the ingrownness of literary success has become criticisable, when it leads to writers being out of touch or leaning into the wrong parts of the work they’ve been putting out. Those responses aren’t just about the book – they’re referenda on literary culture. In other words, it’s sort of about the sacred cow under consideration, but it’s maybe a little bit more about the sacred cow farm.

I don’t really have to worry about reputational harm for that because it’s already part of my reputation

I want to ask you about your use of one-liners, which I think contribute to your reputation as a ‘takedown’ artist. Do you see yourself as having any particular influences in your love for the caustic one-liner? It’s not a super common formal focus in criticism nowadays.

Andrea Long Chu: The really punchy, pithy one-liner is probably coming, for me, out of a comic tradition that isn’t literary – trying to say funny things on Twitter or wherever else. There are more flattering influences I could name, but that’s probably more truthful. 

I am finding myself using more of what I’d still call one-liners but that are longer and use more parenthesis, ones that allow for contrast. I can give you an example of a line that I don’t think we’re going to use, for this piece about Thomas Chatterton Williams. He claims to be against orthodoxy and ideology of all kinds, a stance that is actually the topic of my next book, which is about what I call the ‘far centre’. He’s against orthodoxy and ideology but he also tells us that we should return to the family as our fundamental political unit and that we should be ‘inculcating’ – he uses that word – our children in the values of liberalism. So a line I think space won’t permit is: ‘It is amusing to find an author who spends his whole book rejecting orthodoxies of all kinds recommending that we inculcate our children not four pages into said book,’ or something like that. The expletive – ‘it is amusing’ – that’s the basic sentence. You put all of the joke into the noun clause and then you put all the space you can between the setup and the punchline.

This might sound pretentious, but I think there’s some Austen in there. The sense of restraint and withholding, of tucking the sharp thing in an unexpected part of the sentence, that Regency gossip voice. There’s probably a little bit of that in there.

There’s a piece in the book, ‘No One Wants It’, that I’ve been a fan of for years. It’s a very negative review of a memoir by Joey Soloway, and in the book you add a postscript that is a kind of partial disavowal of it: you talk about it as a ‘vicious’ piece, and that you aim these days for a calmer, more detached ‘cruelty’. It made me wonder about how we write about certain subjects without being too overtaken by personal animus, or too eager to attack things in print in a way that solidifies them as more important than they are.

Andrea Long Chu: It’s hard to write about things that are, in and of themselves, not only insubstantial but aspiring to insubstantiality. The Soloway article is one answer to that – ie write about something else and bring that to it. Because I have the time to do so much background reading, I’m often able to develop thoughts in reference to other, more interesting or sophisticated things. Chatterton Williams has made the mistake of referring to Tocqueville, and so I’m going to read Democracy in America and find more interesting things that I can respond to, and use Tocqueville against him. There are all of these other sources that I can use to have a conversation with more intelligent or more interesting people than the specific person I’m writing about.

Where do you think good criticism is happening right now, aside from New York Magazine and n+1, which are both heavily featured in Authority?

Andrea Long Chu: I think there’s some great stuff at the New Yorker, I’m a fan of Lauren Michele Jackson and Julian Lucas. Namwali Serpell does very interesting things in the LRB. I have to name my friend Sarah Chihaya, who’s written for The Nation and The New Yorker. Bookforum continues to put out great stuff; it’s probably the highest quality criticism per cubic centimetre that there is. I do think there’s a lot of great work happening. As is probably obvious, I try to avoid being a pessimist about criticism, both because that’s intellectually uninteresting and because it’s not true to my own experience.

Authority: Essays on Being Right is available now.