The literary takedown is enjoying a renaissance. Every time a new high-profile hitjob leaks, the terminally online literati stop working altogether and join the pile-on—dragging the overrated author or the overzealous critic, sometimes both. What’s the function of this ritual? Have we, as the New York Times’ Joe Bernstein has suggested, transitioned from an era of “tedious structural critique” to one of “petty hatred”? To get to the bottom of this new culture of hostility, Broadcast Contributing Editor Leon Dische Becker convened a showdown between two author-critics who have been on both sides of the violence: Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor. These two merry combatants have written and received tough reviews, and even sent a couple strays at each other over the years—one reason we invited a trained clinical therapist, fellow author and Broadcast contributor hannah baer, to moderate. The packed crowd at Press Play 2024 was expecting blood. Instead, they got a punchy, funny, and oddly sexy conversation about the sadomasochistic turn in contemporary criticism, writers who “top from the bottom,” and the murky line between a justified pan and a hysterical hit job.

Brandon Taylor, Lauren Oyler, and hannah baer at Press Play, 2024.

How would you explain an extremely negative book review to a child?

If you wanted to cultivate an appreciation of literature in a child, you would explain that if you become a writer when you grow up, part of your job will be to publish your work. That means people will get to read it and come up with their own opinion. In an ideal world, these people would publish their opinions in a respectful, collegial way. (You wouldn't say collegial to a child.) But sometimes people get really mad about books because they care a lot about them. It doesn't always mean that the book is bad, or that your mommy, the author, is bad.

I'd say that if you're asked to review a book, you're signing up to tell the truth about your experience. Sometimes you have a bad time and you have to tell the truth about that. I’ve never written a bad review out of some desire to file someone down a peg. It's like, "Do you want to review this?" "Yes." And then over the course of reading it, you find that, oh, you don't like it very much, but you've already signed the contract. So what do you do?

You could also use the bad review as a lesson in the importance of intellectual honesty and bravery, and not being afraid of how you'll be received. If you write a book that is negatively reviewed, you should be able to take it.

When I started writing reviews, people would say, "oh, you cannot write a takedown. You'll ruin your career. Everyone will hate you. Then when your book comes out, people will say bad things about it. You have to be nice." And I find that to be a shallow way of thinking about literary culture.

The first time I wrote a big flashy takedown, I was 24 years old, and I remember a few of the writers who said nasty things about me online were older than me, around the age I am now. Those people had children at the time. It is sort of uncouth, I think, to participate in the social media ecosystem past a certain age.

When you're writing a negative review, to what extent do you think about the feelings of the author? Do you think there's an element of sadism in extremely negative criticism?

I don’t think much about their feelings. When I’m reviewing a book, I'm more focused on understanding it for myself. I’m trying to put my own feelings on trial: what is my reaction, and why? I want the author to feel that I took their work very, very seriously, that I read it carefully, even if they feel harrowed by what I’ve written.

Sometimes when you're in the middle of writing a review that's going really badly, you become aware of moments where the rhetoric has gotten a little hot. In those moments, I ask if it’s necessary for the review itself, or if I should try to scale down, and that's true in any essay writing I do.

Why would you try and scale down a hot sentence in a normal essay?

Well, because I'm Protestant. Sometimes when I feel that I’m killing it, I try to put [myself] on trial, so I don’t get carried away.

Ah, so that’s the problem. Let's move away from BDSM and towards Protestantism. If I'm reviewing, I don't think about the author’s feelings. I don't want them to feel bad. I honestly would prefer it if they didn't read it, and I’d recommend that they don’t. But of course, everybody does. When I’m reading a bad book, I often feel like the author hasn't tried hard enough, that they don’t care enough.

So much of literary criticism is based on an overwhelming feeling of deep care for literature. I think it's really good that I care so much. I'm a hero.

You’re so brave.

It's often a question of purpose. Is literary criticism journalism? Is it meant to explain the books that exist, and what they’re about? Or is it a service, which is to say, a recommendation engine? As a critic, your allegiance is more to the literary public than to the individual author. If we're talking about sadism in a BDSM context, usually the object is getting something out of it. There are probably lots of public figures and authors who humiliate themselves in public on purpose. Maybe from that perspective, I'm cracking the whip in a sexy way, but it's not my goal.

Is there a masochism to appearing in public in general, and in a way where you might elicit a harsh negative reaction?

1000%. I call it the engagement plantation, where people post rage bait—intentionally annoying things—because they know they'll become a subject of discourse. There are people who get off on that. Some people genuinely think that’s what it means to be a public intellectual—a person who is constantly starting a conversation.

You don't tweet anymore, but I do think you have posted saucy things for that purpose. Is that incorrect?

I'm deactivated as of right now, but I have 30 days to change my mind. What happens is I take a lot of Benadryl.

I never really feel honest when I'm like, “Oh, it's good that people are talking about this. I've generated discussion.” I would prefer everybody to love me and agree with me. I don't say things just to say them. I'm not one of these free-speech warriors; I would just prefer that books be better.

It does feel tacky to be talking so much about social media, because there's supposed to be a division between it and literary publications. But actually so much of this takedown culture is about getting attention.

There's a slightly different feeling from someone writing a studied, thoughtful criticism of your work. I'm thinking about Sartre's five-volume diss track against Flaubert. It's hundreds and hundreds of pages of fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. And it's kind of amazing, versus a Twitter pile-on, which has an obviously different feeling. A thoughtful critique can be kind of loving, or devotional even.

You think LeninLuvr69 is doing something different from Sartre? Have you read that Believer essay from 2003 by Heidi Julavits, which inaugurated an anti-takedown culture in literature? She’s writing 20 years ago about exactly the problems we consider a result of social media: the kind of gleeful wagon, circling and identifying a common enemy out of thin air. And then the cycle moves on.

She was saying there's a vitriolic type of long-winded negative criticism that is fundamentally focused on the author's career and not on the book. And yet, sometimes you do have to justify the presence of a negative review by explaining why the person you're talking about is important or worthy of discussion. You have to say, "so-and-so is a New Yorker writer praised by the X and Z,” because otherwise it's like, why are you talking about this random woman in the LRB for 5,000 words? But on social media, people are projecting weird identities onto everyone all the time.

Yeah, there’s a lot of projection. You could have written a perfectly studied negative review and published it, and people would still act as though you've just walked into the author’s house and killed them and all their pets. I think there's this presupposition that if you write a negative review, you're doing it for a whole host of careerist or antisocial reasons and not because you just didn't like the book.

I recently wrote a negative review of Creation Lake, and I thought maybe five people would read it because it came out a bit late. But people cared quite a lot, and they had a lot of thoughts about why I had written it. They called it my "attempted takedown of Rachel Kushner." But I wasn’t trying to write a takedown of anybody or anything. I just didn't like the book. Had I gone into it with some desire to destroy one of my literary forebears, then it would've felt very cathartic to have written that review. But it was actually really miserable. I felt like I had Lyme disease for two weeks.

Because people were coming for you, for coming for her?

Writing the review was miserable, but what came after was really miserable, too. I'm curious if this happens to you, Lauren, but I had people sliding into my DMs being like, "That was a very brave thing to have written." And I was like, "Was it?"

I actually thought that review was quite sexist.

Oh, did you?

Yeah. Sometimes you refer to the works of women as “little”—you did this to me as well—and I thought it was quite offensive for you to say, about this well-published woman in her fifties, "Use your human mind!” I think that's why everybody got mad about it.

I think that's a fair read of the text. I can't disagree with your feelings about the review. I mean, the phrase “use your human mind” is a phrase that I use. There were parts of that book that felt deeply silly to me. I would've used that phrase with a dude, but I didn't review a dude. Weirdly enough, I very seldom get asked to review men.

They're not writing any books.

Well, this is related to a question I was kind of thinking about, which is about punching up or down. I'm curious how power dynamics in terms of fame, visibility, and identity play into the choices you make about who to critique.

It's all about perceptions of fame, which is connected to perceptions of wealth. You’re making these tedious market calculations in your mind about other reviews they’ve received. And there are some people who I choose not to review, because I don't think they can psychologically handle it.

Could you give us an example?

There’s a writer who may have a book coming out in the next 18 months or so, which I was asked to review. She’s in my range of career success but I don’t like her work. Every time I read something she’s written, every word indicates a profound paucity of imagination and a bitterness about the world. The worldview expressed in her stuff indicates that she’s not psychologically capable of receiving this review from me.

You worry it would injure her too much.

Yes, and I do think that is a strategy. It’s been quite trendy, I think, certainly during the Trump era, for authors to place themselves (or avatars of themselves) in their fiction as victims. It's a defensive shield so that you can't be criticized because so many bad things have happened to you. To return to BDSM, people are “topping from the bottom.” It creates a sense that you’re hurting them by writing a negative review, even though you write a book because you want it to be read.

I would've gone with “victim complex,” but “topping from the moral bottom” is so astute.

Do you guys have personal favorite takedowns written by other people?

I mean, mine's sort of boring, which is that Renata Adler piece about Pauline Kael. Someone once accused me of thinking I was the Renata Adler of looking at your phone. I was like, "What's bad about that? She's awesome."

Somebody implied that I thought I was Andrea Long Chu and said, "more like Andrea Short Nipple.” But my favorite takedown is that Patricia Lockwood review of Updike, Malfunctioning Sex Robot. It made me see Updike differently. Your reviews, Lauren, are really funny to read. They're often really scathing. But I also feel like I see books differently after I read your thoughts about them.

Thank you. I'm having a bit of a joker moment as of late. When I’ve written reviews, I’ve always held back from being too mean or cruel. But since my book came out, people have said such nasty things about me that I would’ve considered beyond the realm of serious literary criticism. I could have been nastier, but maybe it's just not in my nature. Maybe I'm actually really nice.

Things have gotten really nasty, and they've gotten really personal. When I'm writing a review, even if it's negative, I try to keep it quite textual rather than supposing what's going on in the author’s life. In some of the reviews I've read lately, there have been a lot of assumptions about the author's intention or their psychology.

I don't find it fun to read. I like gossip, but no one ever has real intel. They’re just like, "she thinks she's better than everyone else." There was better gossip in high school.

I will say that it's quite difficult to review essay collections or nonfiction that use personal elements without it becoming ad hominem, because those personal stories become the content of the text. It's not something you’ve assumed about the author—they've told you.

In the era of autofiction, this differentiation becomes more challenging, because people are jamming their subjectivities more closely into their writing. But it's interesting to hear that both of you are invested in holding that line to some extent.

Yeah, but where is the line? With autofiction, the tendency is often to slide into assuming all of it's true when it obviously isn’t. Memoirists will call it a cop out because you can hide behind non-truth claims. But I don't know why there's anything wrong with that. To quote David Shields, there is a general reality hunger, and it is a bit gossipy. People want the novel to be true so that they can learn the prurient details of the author’s sex life.

I refer to those moments in auto-fiction as “Google traps,” where the reader puts the book down to Google if something is real. I have no patience for them. But sometimes that feels like a work’s organizing force. It's meant to deceive more than it's meant to deepen.

There's also a dilemma around people writing because they care about writing, versus if they just want attention. It seems like part of that Google trapification is about maximizing that attention.

I think people have a real hunger for the big splashy negative reviews because there’s a feeling that mainstream book reviews have been too nice, or that they’ve been turned into extended PR operations. And whether or not that’s true, I think there's a feeling amongst the literary public that the reviews they're getting are compromised by the somewhat incestuous blending of PR and literary criticism.

Often people see the negative or harsh reviews as a corrective, even though they’re just as compromised as anything else. You see this a lot on Substack right now, which is constantly peddling this anti-institutional angle of criticism that’s fresher, more alive, and more willing to be honest. But the judgments there are just as compromised and bitter as what you’ll find in the mainstream outlets.

What characterizes a compromised negative review?

I think there's a paranoid obsession with career, which is hard to combat as an institutional writer. No offense to publicists, but they could not have a conspiracy against you if they tried. They are absolutely overworked and nobody knows what's going on. It's interesting to think about people who are personally compromised, who may be more willing to see things in a rosy light because they don't want to make someone angry. They're afraid they'll hurt their careers. But that's also paranoid because it assumes that if you insult me, I'll go to the president of HarperCollins and be like, “Never publish that random person.” I wish I had that power.

Within that framework, everybody is encouraged to think of themselves as a victim or as an underdog, oppressed by the cabal of the mainstream literary world, which relates to how people are thinking about the American government in general.

There’s this ahistorical, romantic view of how literary culture used to function: “Everyone used to be serious and now no one is,” or “We used to have negative reviews but now we don’t.” Of course that’s not all true. It all just comes in cycles, I assume.

Well, it happens to be a week where people are really excited about a public murder. Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson four days ago, and The New York Times was like, “It's chilling and macabre how happy people are about this,” and it was so out of tune. Is there a link between people's feelings about violence in politics, and these dynamics between writers?

I think people are hungry for the overthrow of old regimes. They want a violent new world, and see violence as the midwife to revolution. People feel that there's been an excess of politeness, of political correctness, and I think they believe that violence is always honest, and that it can usher in a new kind of communication. Americans really love violence.

And drama. We did learn from the woke era that we shouldn't be equating language with literal violence unless it's a threat. Though I will say, I've started getting threats. I've never had them before, and I've been on the internet for my whole adult life. I don't love it, but obviously I'm a literary critic and I'm going to get murdered.

Three years ago, I would've been like, “What we're doing is so low stakes. Who cares?” But the pandemic taught us that people are on edge, and will hyperfixate and internalize any number of grievances. Everyone is living in their own conspiracy worlds, and the veil feels very thin right now. I don't think it's quite so far-fetched that someone would commit physical violence against a literary critic. Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead.

But that's fine. That's cool.

He also shot a reviewer's book and sent it to her.

That's a bit scarier, yeah. But in Germany, there was that choreographer who smeared dog excrement on the reviewer. I can't tell if that's violent or if that's cool.

No, I think that's assault.

Do either of you have advice for young writers who are thinking about receiving negative reviews, or writing them?

It's fine to make enemies, but make sure they're the right ones. If the people you disagree with dislike your work, or you, as the case may be, that's probably good. It's not the only metric, but it can be an indication that you're on track. And have fun out there.

My number one piece of advice is to let people hate in peace. When I reviewed Creation Lake and that review went out, I was fine. If I can criticize a book, then others can criticize my criticism of the book.

Also, don't respond to it. Strategically speaking, it doesn't make you look good. Rise above.

Why doesn't it look good to respond?

Well, I think people hate writers, and writers hate themselves. There’s a sense that writers should be ashamed of themselves, and that they should cultivate a kind of hermit-type persona and avoid attention at all costs. But of course writers want attention. Otherwise, they’d just keep journals and get better-paying jobs. People will always say, “Oh, you are self-obsessed for reading your own reviews and trying to defend yourself.” I would love to fight back, but it would just take years off my life.

Yeah, yeah. Don't be beefing in the streets with your fans.

But it’s great at a party. Localize the beef. ♦

This conversation took place on December 8th, 2024, during Press Play.