No Judgement: Essays by Lauren Oyler: nonfiction review
Thoughts: I enjoy cultural criticism. I think it's a shame it's dying. I enjoy reading album reviews and book reviews. I'll even read criticism about movies I never intend to watch. I find people's various perspectives interesting. By the same token, I also read amateur reviews. I just like taking lots of different opinions and squaring them with my own. I wanted to be a music journalist. In many ways, I started the book inclined to agree with Oyler's thoughts on internet and literary topics. But she makes herself incredibly difficult to fully align with or take seriously in these essays. Most of her stances are mushy to start, indiscernible by the end of the overly long essays. Her sentence level writing makes the book a slog to read at times and casts her more pretentious comments in even worse light. There's a certain standard one has to reach to have solid ground to complain from, and No Judgement is built on sand.
That's not to say I didn't eventually enjoy the book. There were parts of all the essays I found worth reading. I liked it more the second time I tried to pick it up, a few weeks after attempting the first essay. The concepts themselves–from Goodreads reviews to autofiction to general internet history and culture–are inherently interesting to me. I was primed to like them, whether I agreed on her stances or not. The issue is that Oyler can't write an argumentative essay. They all ramble on forever without a point. There's at least five, if not more, off-shoot topics in each essay that make it hard to remember what the original, central intention was. Essays need a through-line. The most successful essay, about anxiety, works because the topical evolutions feel more natural. They genuinely string together.
Unfortunately, the ideas worth considering here are obscured by the mechanical failures. From the lack of structure to the perplexing nature of the sentence level writing, it's hard to focus on the content and appreciate the drawing together of fiction, nonfiction, and other references. I've never seen so many semicolons in one place. Nearly every sentence is two lines worth of text connected to another three with a feeble semicolon. Even the sentences that don't have semicolons ramble on. And I'm a believer in a long sentence! I write a ton of them! I never thought I'd have a problem with a lengthy sentence. Sometimes, they just end up long. But this was exhausting, and much like the essays, each sentence contains multiple meandering points. Creative writing teachers will extol the virtues of varied sentence length to cultivate a rhythm in your writing. Now I can see why. The paragraphs are also chunky and take up full pages.
My other point of confusion with the essay collection is the inconsistencies in tone. One second, she's on a pretentious high horse throwing out obscure references and separating herself from the "masses." The next, she's making cheeky asides to the reader or a random, self conscious statement that completely shifts the tone to one used while talking to your best friend in your living room. Oyler wants to have it every way in these essays, but that's not how good criticism works.
Overall: 3.5
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