The New Yorker:

The writer is known for her acerbic criticism of liberals. Is she one herself?

By S. C. Cornell

In “Authority: Essays,” a new collection of criticism from the past five years, Andrea Long Chu explains that her goal is to make a reader feel “as if I am reading aloud what is already written on the inside of her own skull.” This approach strikes me as both overambitious and defeatist—why not instead attempt to introduce the reader to thoughts she’s never had?—but it’s not a bad description of what it feels like to read Chu, who has been a staff critic for New York magazine since 2021. Whether she’s taking dictation from the etchings on my skull or simply chiselling over them, I often find that after going under Chu’s knife, I cannot remember what I previously thought about the subject at hand.

Her review of Rachel Cusk’s novel “Parade,” from 2024, is a skull-carver par excellence. Chu lists the many appearances in Cusk’s fiction of women who want to be men and who hate themselves for this secret desire, noting that Cusk once described herself, apparently metaphorically, as a “self-hating transvestite.” Chu sees this self-hatred as a symptom of what she diagnoses as Cusk’s “flatly essentialist views about gender”: a solemn, mystical, and—in Chu’s hands—abundantly documented belief that women must be women and men must be men. As a result, Cusk seems to believe that women artists can only make art about motherhood. “If they refuse to do this,” Chu explains, now really cooking with gas,

they are effectively neutering themselves, disavowing their “female biological destiny” in the doomed pursuit of “male freedom.” The latter appears to be identical with regular freedom in every way except that, when exposed in a woman, it is proof of a grotesque and self-defeating identification with men. One cannot, I think, have a high opinion of women if one is to believe this. It is like defining the air as male and bravely refusing to breathe.

In a thread on Reddit—Chu writes the kind of literary criticism that starts fights on Reddit—one poster complained that the review felt like “the senior in high school picking on the freshman in P.E.” Someone else responded that, actually, Cusk is a big fish herself. They’re both right. Chu tends to write about very famous writers, but her style is so magisterial that she seems always to be punching down.

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