JUST DAZZLING. I know it's a cliché, almost a reflex, to invoke Joan Didion when praising an emerging female master of non-fiction prose, but the comparison is just too apt to pass up in this instance. Tolentino walks the tightrope between the reporter's self-effacement and the essayist's self-exposure more nimbly than anyone save Didion herself, and her cultural radar is as keenly attuned as that which took Joan to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love.
Tolentino's essays about the cultural landscape (social media, MDMA, self-improvement regimens, weddings, the "difficult woman") occasionally include glimpses of a background that makes her a bit of an outlier, so far as writers go. Writers were often the kid in the back of the class, a bit alienated, contemptuous and held in contempt, dying to get away to college and once in college dying to get away to New York...but Tolentino went to a Christian high school in Texas, where she was a cheerleader, then the University of Virginia, where she was a sorority member, having been a reality TV star in between. Her parents are from the Philippines, so she no doubt knows about being marginalized, but she has had an insider's perspective in worlds the insides of which are generally under-reported in American letters.
Her style has the high sheen of New Yorker prose ("Amazon is an octopus: nimble, fluid, tentacled, brilliant, poisonous, appealing, flexible enough to squeeze enormous bulk through tiny loopholes"), but with nubbly personal detail ("I'm a repulsively fast eater in most situations"). She does journalistically precise, she does witty, she does confessional, she does lyrical.
So, I'm wondering why Lauren Oyler did such a hatchet job on this book in LRB back in January. Oyler offers Tolentino as Exhibit A in a case against "the rise of a style that I've taken to calling hysterical criticism [...]."
These critics aren't hysterical because they have uncontrollable, misunderstood responses to social problems; they perform hysteria because they know their audience respects the existence of those problems and the chance that they may be sincere makes them difficult to criticise. Besides, what they're saying is important. If you don't believe that yourself, don't worry, they will tell you so, in terms so personal and heartfelt that you might not notice that they are doing fine.
Oyler leaves the impression that there is a lot of this sort of thing in circulation, but she does not name anyone else, leaving me not only wondering whom she had in mind--Leslie Jamison? Patricia Lockwood?--but also baffled as to what her objections were. I've decided that what she mainly objects to is that Tolentino is "doing fine." Tolentino is a little too canny, a little too on top of her game, a little too synchronized with the zeitgeist, and Oyler just has a bad feeling about the whole Jia Tolentino thing.
I don't.
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