Andrea Long Chu Owns the Libs
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,
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.
In 2023, Chu was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism “for book reviews that scrutinize authors as well as their works.” Another way to put this is that she is less interested in the formal intricacies of literature than in bullying those who create it. “Why shouldn’t a book review be personal?” she asks in “Authority.” “It is my understanding that persons are where books come from.” Her reviews are assured, pedantic, bawdy, bouncily propulsive, and so fun to read that you can lose track of how disproportionate their punishment is to the crime. As Chu puts it, “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.”
Since joining New York, Chu has sicked the dogs on what she has called the “far center,” a group in which she includes “disillusioned Democrats,” “anti-woke journalists,” and “toothless novelists,” among others. The far center does not lack for easy marks, and Chu might occasionally sharpen her pencil on a Pamela Paul or a Bret Easton Ellis. Generally, however, she chooses to write about intriguing and talented writers who have once or twice complained about campus radicals or deplatformings. Thus, Zadie Smith is accused of “sympathizing with the least sympathetic party in any given situation” and Maggie Nelson of crying censorship whenever, to use a definition Nelson borrows from the A.C.L.U., “some people succeed in imposing their personal, political, or moral values on others.” But, Chu writes, “surely the left should try to impose its political values on others; if I’m not mistaken, we call this winning.”
In two new meta-essays on criticism that appear in “Authority,” Chu blames the wishy-washy state of our discourse on liberalism, and in particular the misapplication of the liberal ideal of viewpoint neutrality, which asks the government not to take sides in political debates. As Chu sees it, intellectuals have confused the state’s real obligation to be neutral—to not arrest or deport people for their political speech—with a critic’s imaginary obligation to pretend art is politically neutral. This is impossible: there is no getting politics out of art because the desire to remove politics from art is itself a political position. Nevertheless, Chu claims, the far-centrist critics continue to believe that politics is what other, less enlightened people do, and to see their role as that of a neutral statesperson, whose job is simply “to weather a diversity of ideas.” As Chu recently wrote of Paul, “Her principal opinion is that everyone else’s opinions should be as weakly held as her own—the idea being that if all our opinions were weaker, society as a whole might be stronger.”
Chu argues that the liberal critic’s fear of being overtly political stems in part from professional insecurity. Critics, she observes, have long been viewed as parasites who disturb the lofty chambers of art with their personal and political gripes. How better to ascend to the frieze than to declare themselves the neutral defenders of art for art’s sake? Chu cites examples across four centuries of the scapegoating of “the Bad Critic,” who is imagined to pollute art with ideology and whose “badness must be constantly, hysterically reaffirmed in order to make the good critic look good.”
Not too long ago, Chu herself seemed worried about the polluting influence of politics. In an interview with the literary magazine The Point in 2018, she described work on an academic book that was to examine “the fantasy of critique as a political act” in the hope of finding “modes of valuing that are not necessarily political.” The book was never published, but some of its material seems to have been recycled into the new essays in “Authority,” which are more academic and less lucid than her typical stuff. Here, however, Chu has flipped her thesis; she has come to believe wholeheartedly in the fantasy she once hoped to burst. The “supreme task of the critic,” she writes in “Authority,” is not to avert her eyes modestly from the stains that politics leave on art but to draw the reader’s attention to them.
Chu now seems to believe that society would be stronger if more people dared to write her kind of criticism: personal, political, and decidedly not neutral. “The reading public has a right to judge [a critic] by her actual, sincerely held values,” she writes, “and not just by how politely she applies them in the company of strangers.” Certainly, more critics should write like Chu, if not for the sake of society, then at least for the sake of enlivening magazine writing. But this quote strikes me oddly. Chu cannot seriously believe that the reading public values polite critics: she must know that her own popularity is due in large part to her impoliteness. And while she certainly has strong opinions, the sincerely held values behind them are somewhat mysterious. Chu tends to use “liberal” to mean something between “lukewarm bore” and “root of all evil.” She defines her own leftist politics in explicit opposition to liberalism. Is this accurate?
Before Chu became the terror of the far center, she was a comparative-literature Ph.D. student at N.Y.U. with some idiosyncratic ideas about gender. In 2018, she published an essay called “On Liking Women,” which interspersed the story of Chu’s own transition to womanhood with a rollicking history of feminist attitudes toward trans women. The essay, which appeared in the literary magazine n+1, was the second most read piece in the publication’s history, and was widely discussed with both glee and horror. Part of the controversy was that Chu, discussing claims that trans women were, as she put it, “sick voyeurs conspiring to infiltrate women-only spaces,” had irreverently said that she herself would “happily consent to this description.” But where Chu really touched a nerve was with her argument that transness is “a matter not of who one is but of what one wants,” a matter not of identity but of desire.
The idea that someone might transition to womanhood for the fulfillment of a desire, especially a sexual one, is generally associated with trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or, TERFs. The remarkable thing about “On Liking Women” was just how much common ground Chu manages to find with this group. The TERF believes that a person who feels a desire to change one’s gender presentation is a victim of the patriarchy’s strict gender roles. To react to this desire by changing one’s body rather than one’s society is, for the TERF, to pick the wrong fight; bodily modification is not empowerment but submission. Chu agrees. “The TERF position that I would through transition be solidifying and reproducing normative gender roles”—she told The Point—“I find that argument completely convincing.” But, she continued, “everyone should be allowed to want things that are bad for them.” The TERF’s point is that we should fight against politically inconvenient desires; Chu’s point is that the freedom to pursue one’s desires is itself a politics. She’s right. We call it liberalism.
Chu is a polemicist, which is to say that it can be hard to separate what she really thinks from what she hopes will get a rise out of you. (This is a writer who once defined “ethics” as “commitment to a bit.”) In her first book, “Females,” a short and delightful work of gender theory from 2019 which takes the form of an extended close reading of Valerie Solanas’s play “Up Your Ass,” Chu writes that she and Solanas share “a preference for indefensible claims.” More recently, she has admitted to “a weakness for strongly worded and irresponsible sentences.” But her commitment to the traditional values of liberalism is not a provocation or an experiment—it is, I think, evidence of a sincerely held preference for choice over equality, for freedom over safety, for chaos over a state-regulated order.
