Criticism as Apologetics | Los Angeles Review of Books

Grace Byron interviews Andrea Long Chu about her new book, “Authority.”

ACHIEVING A STAFF writer position is nearly every critic’s dream. Yet not everyone who gets such a coveted role deserves it. The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Andrea Long Chu undoubtedly does. Her criticism, which has appeared in n+1, The New Yorker, The Drift, Jewish Currents, Artforum, and nearly everywhere else important to well-read left-leaning individuals, often straddles the thin line between cruelty and viciousness. Her eviscerating and intricate pans are infamous. I tell Chu that her work is “crystalline,” a word she admires for its implications: durable and tightly constructed.

Chu takes down the neoliberal paean with wry one-liners. She eviscerates the attempts at crafting highbrow literature that writers like Zadie Smith and Maggie Nelson aspire toward. But Chu is a careful reader—when she takes someone down, it’s with the scalpel of obsession rather than the mere might of a chainsaw. Better yet, her work surprises us. She delves into the novels of Sally Rooney as a recently engaged woman; she patiently explains the common misunderstandings we bring to Octavia Butler. She loves to change lanes. No single medium or topic confines her acidic barbs or psychoanalytic lens. She writes about Yellowjackets, Tao Lin, comics, and the pitfalls of vaginoplasty. Most of her greatest hits are included in Authority, a new collection focused on the body of work that earned her the Pulitzer back in 2023. Throughout her personal essays for n+1 and tenure as New York magazine’s book critic, she has occasionally tacked on little epigraphs dishing out behind-the-scenes intel. Sometimes she talks about critical hindsight; sometimes she talks about lines that didn’t quite make the cut. I’ve long admired Chu’s authorial wit and was grateful for a chance to speak to her about the profession. A profession, she argues in her new book, that is not an art but a craft.

We spoke at a café in Brooklyn about her new book and the labor of criticism, along with its economies, styles, and precedents. This inevitably led to talking about religion—from Kant to Christian apologetics. There’s a link, Chu notes, between theology and philosophy, between criticism and God.

¤

GRACE BYRON: Did you play The Last of Us (2013) when you were writing that piece? Are you a gamer?

ANDREA LONG CHU: I had played The Last of Us years before and I did actually replay some of it when I was writing the article. And then I started to replay The Last of Us Part II (2020), and then I said to myself, I don’t have to do this. This is so wrenching. I like to play on the hardest setting that I can possibly do too. So whatever the one step down from Nightmare is, that was what I was playing on, and it’s just so brutal. I’m playing Dragon Age (2024) right now; Star Wars Outlaws (2024) was pretty good. I was never a big Skyrim (2011) person. I don’t like first-person games as much. I will play first person games, but I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding that some developers have about what first person does. When Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) was first announced, it looked like it was going to be third person. Then at some point, they said it’s going to be first person instead. There was the whole debacle with the rollout. The reason they said is that it’s more immersive or something like that. But I’m not immersed in a character that I can’t see. I want to see the character so that I can identify—I want to identify with the character, not identify as the character. I don’t. I’m not here to play as me. It seems like a misunderstanding of media theory.

How often do you get to read for fun? Do you ever take a break and read a contemporary novel you’re not writing about?

At this point, I don’t generally do it for fun. I mean, it happens occasionally, but I do so much reading for work. I read way more than I need to read, because I’m looking for the one thing from 15 years ago that I can pull out. I was literally just skimming Pamela, as in the novel Pamela from 1740, today because I learned that that Pamela Paul is named after Pamela of the novel, which is crazy and makes a sort of strange sense, because the whole novel is meant to be a moral handbook but Pamela is sort of naive and committed to her virtues.

How long does it take you from start to finish when you’re working on a piece?

I typically write about 500 words a day. So then I am writing 2,500 words a week. When I sit down to write a draft, I take two weeks and I write about 5,000 words.

You have a new essay in Authority called “Criticism in a Crisis” that is about the relationship between capital and being given that sort of access—the keys to the kingdom of criticism. I’d love to hear why you chose to write about that.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s just obvious to me—an obvious part of what is happening, which is that I am buying books, I’m dispensing them, and sometimes those books are useful and sometimes they’re not, but there is a commitment to the research. I have that, you know—which is not to say I’m like a literary agent, and I have all of this lunch money. I don’t actually think that my expenses are that high. I wrote freelance, where you’re getting paid pennies, basically, and it doesn’t encourage depth. That’s not the fault of the freelance writer, right? You should do the amount of labor that is actually meaningfully reflected in the fee: most of the time, the fee is so low that that’s probably not even possible. So going from that experience to being at the magazine and having a position where, also, I’m not having to turn a bunch of stuff out … There are people who have staff jobs who have to publish a lot, have to publish shorter things, more quickly, less time, and I don’t have to do that. I get to take my time. I dislike the idea of rating work that is poorly compensated and done by someone who is overtaxed. It’s not that I think that we shouldn’t evaluate that for quality, but I just think it’s extremely important to understand where it is coming from. Of course, there are considerations of talent and style and all of that, but they are less important to me than the material issues. You know, solve the material issues first and the rest can follow.

I’m also curious about your relationship to Kant. I listened to your episode with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics. It was wonderful. The Kant jokes really got me.

I mean, that’s where my head comes from. You know, my graduate studies were mostly in philosophy. I’m a philosophy person before I’m a literature person, which sometimes means drawing on things or being reminded of things that I have already read. But you know, I’m a systematic thinker—whether one agrees with me or not, I am systematic to a fault, and so I really just enjoy reading that kind of stuff. I like a challenge. Kant’s like that. He is both systematic and also very sloppy. He would use eight different terms to refer to what seems to be kind of the same thing. Even though he’s trying to outline a system, he’s being very inconsistent about his names for different parts of the system. You have to really pay attention. You also have to do some of the work for him, to be like, “I think you actually meant this, Manny.” The actual system is not that interesting, but I am invested in having a philosophical account of experience.

Talk to me about style, about the language and flow of your writing.

Prosody is extremely important to me. Sometimes little words will get cut because we do an edit for the print magazine. There are certain things that just have to be in order to fit into the pages. Sometimes the syllable count will get wrong and I will need to put something back in. I feel very, very particular about rhythm, prosody, and assonance. I do really think about style when it’s happening on a tone level. There is a kind of withholding that the reader should feel.

Do you ever feel that any of it was polemical-like, or how do you think about the term polemic?

I am fine with applying the term polemic to basically everything I have ever written, including things that I wrote in high school. I mean, very, very low aggression. Interpersonally, I can’t fight. I mean, obviously I can’t physically fight, but I also don’t like to be in a fight or feel like someone is mad at me. I cannot abide it when it is someone that I know and someone that I have a relationship with. So I think a lot of that energy ends up going into the writing. Females (2019) is definitely a polemic. Some of the essays in Authority are polemics. I wouldn’t say the whole book is. Getting to test the mettle of an idea is, to me, part of the nature of writing. It can hold complex ideas and I can construct something very complicated and propulsive. I can build a whole machine and drive it into someone. Polemical writing is kind of built to do that.

I probably ask selfishly, because I’m working on a piece about polemics, so I’m asking everyone what they think.

I think I like a polemic, and I like the polemic. Reactionary liberals are always telling us that we’re not listening to whatever the other side is. That there should be tempering in our arguments and tone. I also just really enjoy a good right-wing polemic, but most of what there is is just like yelling. I think that’s why the structure of thought that I have is actually just Christian apologetics.

Interesting. I was raised Christian. I think that apologetics influences a lot of writing—even thinkers on the left and our ideology.

I mean, as it sounds like, perhaps both of us are examples. Apologetics teaches you something about argumentation. Theology is the root of my interest in philosophy. I like theology, like Anselm. The ontological argument for the existence of God remains to me an absolutely fascinating thing. Are you familiar? Vaguely, right? So St. Anselm, in a year of some kind, said, “Well, God is defined as the highest possible thing. He is the most perfect entity. Now the question is, Is it more perfect to exist in the real world, or just to exist as an idea? It’s clearly more perfect to exist in the real world. Therefore, God exists.’ It’s beautiful, it’s insane, and it is truly just defining God into existence. You couldn’t do that for anything else. This was one of the responses that he would get at the time. People would say, “So the most perfect Island must also exist.” This argument is saying that, in the entirety of being everything that exists, there is something that is more perfect than all of those things. And that thing must exist because existence pertains to perfection. I mean, such a God is not actually a Jehovah or, you know, Christ, or whatever, that kind of God has really very few actual qualities. He is very impersonal. What I tend to think these days, and I am not religious at all, is that the shape of the argument is completely sound—but that it is more perfect to be only an idea. Therefore God exists, but only as an idea.

¤

Andrea Long Chu is an essayist and critic at New York magazine. She was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for her work at New York. Her nonfiction book Females was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has been reprinted in Best American Essays 2022 and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. Her writing has appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents. She holds an MA in comparative literature from New York University, and she has published on academic subjects in differences, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Women & Performance, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. 

¤

Featured image: Photo of Andrea Long Chu by Beowulf Sheehan.