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First, let’s start with the most important thing: the scandal du jour. I’m talking about that Bookforum piece—my forthcoming piece in Bookforum on the inimitable yet woefully underappreciated German Romantic E.T.A Hoffmann (known to many, or at least to me, as “the Renata Adler of Proto-Freudian Tales of the Uncanny.") Alas, it’s not available online yet, but it’s in the print issue, and I’m sure that when it goes up it will spark a Fiery Discourse about how Kleist and Hoffmann are actually better than Goethe. Shots have been FIRED! Tweets will proliferate!

In all seriousness, please keep an eye out for it. I’m really excited for you all to read the piece: I adore Hoffmann’s dark, funny, and almost unbelievably modern and meta-textual stories and novellas, and I believe they deserve to be better known in the anglophone world. As much I enjoy writing a scathing review of a book I hate, I always work even harder when I write about books I love; I feel the weight of my obligation to them very keenly. Hoffmann’s singular genius obliges me to try to get his writing into everyone’s hands; it obliges me to do him justice. I hope I succeeded at least a little bit!

The second most important thing: someone named Emily came to my reading in Ann Arbor today and brought me rugelach from Zingerman’s because I once mentioned that I love Zingerman’s on this ‘stack! (Zingerman’s, if you don’t know, is a legendary deli in Ann Arbor. It is NOT to be missed.) The rugelach was the absolute HIGH POINT of my book tour, and I was speechless with gratitude and therefore inadequately eloquent about how thoughtful the gesture was. Emily, if you’re reading this, these rugelach are DIVINE, and it was so kind of you to bring them. You are the best.

And now for the unfortunately inevitable topic of “women.” The Discourse today involved women, as it all too frequently does. The women it involved were: Lauren Oyler and Ann Manov. As you may know if you are the sort of person who reads this Substack, the latter wrote an excellent take-no-prisoners review of the former’s book. You can read it here: https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/lauren-oyler-s-meditations-on-goodreads-anxiety-and-gossip-25333.

For the most part, the reception of the Manov’s piece—and of my somewhat similar Oyler piece, which you may recall from a few weeks ago and which you can read here if you are so inclined—has been warm. A few dissenters have protested that criticism has gotten too mean, but anyone who says such a thing is obviously suffering from the kind of amnesia it is best to ignore. Read Dwight MacDonald on James Burnham in the Partisan Review in 1945 if you want to witness a real act of violence (or, as a friend reminded me tonight, read A.E. Houseman’s early twentieth-century eviscerations of his peers!). Sometimes people claim that women are more often the subjects of critical ire than men, but I think men are the protagonists of just as many “take-downs” as anyone else. Martha Nussbaum on Harvey Mansfield is one of my favorite pans of all time: https://newrepublic.com/article/64199/man-overboard. Really, it’s a treat. I also love Michael Hofmann on Zweig: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n02/michael-hofmann/vermicular-dither. I write pans of men myself. In the last year alone, I wrote one of Josh Hawley’s book, one of Freddie DeBoer’s book, and one of Patrick Deneen’s book.

Anyway, whenever a negative review gets a lot of attention, people reliably creep out of the woodwork to complain that book critics are too mean. (An adjacent complaint that I think has more merit: we shouldn’t focus exclusively on negative book reviews. Why don’t celebrations of beloved authors go as viral as pans? I expect you all to correct this injustice by frantically Tweeting my E.T.A. Hoffmann piece when it drops.) Anyway, I wasn’t surprised to see the usual griping about negativity in book reviewing. But some of the other responses to Manov’s piece surprised and dismayed me.

It is my policy in cases like this to refrain from linking to the Tweets I’m going to criticize—not because I am trying to “subtweet” their authors, but because I don’t endorse pile-ons, and I don’t want anyone who dashed off a twenty character gripe on her way to the gym to have to take responsibility for it. (Maybe she didn’t even really mean it.) This strategy has moral benefits but epistemic costs: I won’t be providing evidence for my description of the situation—the evidence would be the Tweets that I don’t want to link to—so you’ll just have to trust me a little.

So trust me, or don’t and stop reading, when I report that some people have responded to the piece in the following ways: by claiming that the author of the piece was jealous of Oyler and/or had some kind of personal grudge or ulterior motive; that the piece was not really a considered work of criticism but a reflexive move in a discourse “cycle” in which female figures attack each other for clout and/or particular female figures are “woman’d” (that is, rendered unpopular) as they are surpassed by their successors; and, most ridiculously, that women should not write take-downs of other women.

Are these claims sexist? I try not to call things sexist when I can help it, but it’s certainly not the case that when a man writes a considered pan of another man’s book he’s accused of jealousy or cattiness (unless both men are gay, in which case the accusation smacks of homophobia). Of course, it’s possible that women write nasty reviews of each other’s books as a function of jealousy sometimes, but there’s no reason to assume that jealousy is at work in this case. The review in question is full of arguments, backed by textual evidence. It doesn’t seem like the work of a jealous person; the only reason someone would suspect that Manov is fueled by jealousy is if that someone believed that women write out of jealousy of other women almost all of the time—a belief that I hope we can all agree is sexist.

Moreover, I’ve certainly never seen anyone say that a thoughtful review of a buzzy book is just one whirl of the discourse cycle when the books is by a man. In that case, the pan is a “brave intervention.”" Why assume that Manov, a patently capable and intelligent person, is a pawn in the game of the Discourse? Frankly, it’s insulting to suggest that she is anything but a rational agent, deliberately making arguments that she amply substantiates. And what reason is there to suspect that she is anything else? It’s not as if the Oyler pan is the next stage of History’s progression towards Absolute Knowing. I wrote a pan of Oyler myself, and I know that it wasn’t inevitable. In fact, it was scary, so scary that I seriously considered backing out of it and reviewing something else. Manov chose to review Oyler’s book in the same way that Trilling chose to review Sherwood Anderson. She was no more a victim of discourse poisoning than Trilling was!

Finally, I’ve never seen anyone tell men to stop writing negative reviews of each other’s work. Why should women go any easier on each other? The very suggestion disgusts me. Isn’t it a bit condescending to imagine that we’re in need of special treatment or softer standards? Admittedly, it’s true that women are often the ones in the position of panning other women, because women tend to be assigned to review other women. The ecosystem is simply configured such that women end up writing about each other’s work a lot. Maybe this shouldn’t be the case, but given that it is the case, what exactly are women supposed to do? Lie about each other’s writing? Wouldn’t it ultimately be more productive to respect women enough to believe they deserve honest appraisal?

Sexism or not, what matters here is the stupidity (and what is sexism but moral stupidity?) and the condescension. Why is it so hard for people to accept that a critic who disagrees with them might nonetheless be rational? The paranoiac thinks: no one who dislikes what I like could be in her right mind, so she must have an ulterior motive or some kind of mental illness or bias! But what if someone can disagree with you without being stupid?

Of course, you can disagree with Manov’s review (or mine)! You can hate it and say it’s a terrible work of criticism, if that’s what you think. But you cannot lazily write it off as a jealous gesture, and you cannot discourage women from writing serious criticism about each other’s work. Men have been tearing each other to shreds in the likes of the Partisan Review for decades. It’s OUR turn now. Lean the fuck IN.