Review by Booklist Review
Authority collects Pulitzer Prize--winning essayist and critic Chu's book reviews and literary essays published between 2018 and 2023 as well as two new works. Her topics range from the crisis of criticism today to the popular neo-western series Yellowstone to works by Zadie Smith and Octavia E. Butler and Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera and the state of musical theater. Chu offers codas at the end of some of the selections, sometimes with updated information, other times describing readers' reactions. The positive response to her first "proper" essay, for example, "On Liking Women," a moving account on her coming out as trans, led to a book deal. In her essay on authority, she asks, "Why do we ask the critic to have authority?" but not, say, painters or short-story writers. In a review of Bret Easton Ellis' White, she calls out the book for being "whiny" and Ellis himself as "disingenuous." Chu is an insightful writer with a sharp eye and little tolerance for hypocrisy. This is a sparkling read, timely and relevant.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This brilliant collection from Chu (Females) showcases the Pulitzer Prize--winning critic's reflections on literature, television, and the art of criticism. Reviewing novels by some of contemporary literature's biggest names, Chu dismisses Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise as a "book in which horrible things happen to people for no reason," and argues that the off-putting characters in Ottessa Moshfegh's Lapvona illustrate how "disgust does not preclude delight--and, in fact, it often enhances it." In "Bad TV," Chu offers a nuanced take on how such "woke" shows as Master of None and Transparent blurred the lines between politics and entertainment in such a way that by the time the #MeToo movement arrived, it was received like a TV show, complete with complaints about "believability." The two strongest essays reckon with the role of critics. In the thought-provoking "Criticism in a Crisis," Chu argues that critics must bring a clear-eyed understanding of their own politics and values to elucidating the moral meaning of the art they interpret. The eponymous essay explores how throughout history, critics and ruling classes have appealed to similar sources (tradition and religion during the Middle Ages; rationality and law during the Enlightenment) to legitimate their authority. Intellectually rigorous and lucidly argued, this affirms Chu's status as one of the most incisive critics working today. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Co. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A critic wields a sharp scalpel. Pulitzer Prize--winning critic Chu has collected 25 of her essays--including book and television reviews, autobiography, and reflections on the work of the critic--written between 2018 and 2023, all except two published in the literary journaln+1 and inNew York magazine. Chu sees criticism "as a genre of assertive prose," and certainly her stance is nothing less than assertive, uncompromising, and sometimes snarky. Poet and memoirist Maggie Nelson's essay collectionOn Freedom, for example, strikes Chu as representing the kind of mediocrity pervasive in academic writing. Nelson's approach, Chu writes, is "to present six or seven academics on a topic and then say of one, 'I like this.'" She deems Curtis Sittenfeld's novelRodham "nothing but a large commemorative stamp, dependent wholly in use and function on the reader's willingness to lick it."Yellowstone is, simply, not a good show; neither isPhantom of the Opera, or anything else conjured by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Her identity as a trans woman informs "On Liking Women," which she calls her first "proper essay" and "Pink," about her vaginoplasty. In a postscript to her scathing critique of a memoir by Joey Soloway, creator of the seriesTransparent (she calls the book "incompetent, defensive, and astonishingly clueless"), Chu concedes, "It is a vicious piece, which I would distinguish from a cruel one. Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days; cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty." But she aims not simply to wound: "The only criticism worth doing, for my money, is not the kind that claims to improve society in general; it is, as the late John Berger once wrote, the kind that helps to destroythis particular one." Acerbic social and cultural critique. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
