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I write the days in green

2026-01-14T00:00:00Z

Weirdness suffuses the fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett. Her debut, Pond, was a collection of interconnected passages on subjects like the proper time to eat porridge. In Bennett’s follow-up, a free-associative Künstlerroman titled Checkout 19, the narrator thinks of the First World War while bleeding through her knickers in a pristine school bathroom. In her latest novel, Bennett has ventured inward and outward, examining self-discovery and human connection in a time of upheaval.

Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye takes the form of undated journal entries by a woman who recounts her past while living in a woodshed. The novel avoids particulars; we never learn the name, age, or location of our narrator (where, exactly, are those “acres and acres of dubious green”?). Instead, the past comes to us as disjointed recollections. Bennett intersperses the narrator’s ruminations on her life after moving to the country with her thoughts about her ex, the elderly and affluent Xavier. Moments from that relationship, occasionally tender but usually unsatisfying or aggravating, are braided with the narrator’s drafts for an email exchange with her former A-levels teacher Terence Stone. These musings appear alongside surreal dreams, abstract third-person reminiscences, and even a conference presentation analyzing Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. Passages reinforce and juxtapose each other: a dream affects her retelling of a scene with Xavier, or a quarrel with him spills over into her thoughts while writing an email to Terence.

The haphazard journal reflects the narrator’s self-conception: she refuses to view her life as a coherent and meaningful story. It’s not for lack of trying; after the narrator describes how she was “mad about” her A-levels philosophy teacher Robert Turner, she says that “We read all the stories and listened to all the songs and thus our madness was given dimension. Dimension and tangibility and direction and new words.” And read all the stories she has. In Bennett’s novel, we are never very far from books: a poem by Andrew Marvell, a battered copy of Wide Sargasso Sea, Hildegard of Bingen, J.K. Huysmans, Eric Stenbock. There’s a little riff on Mrs. Dalloway: when Xavier’s bouquets begin to annoy her, the narrator decides to “choose the flowers myself.” An even smaller nod to Joyce; after all, can the word “commodious” ever be used without recalling his presence? While these stories provide the narrator’s emotions with expression and a vocabulary, narratives do not structure her self-understanding. She characterizes the phrase “a chapter of my life is coming to an end” as “trite” and “vapid drivel” and questions Xavier’s attempt to spin his high-society past into a “bio” for a movie. The novel evades progression by constantly flashing backwards and forwards, with the first sentence announcing this view: “Two weeks from now I won’t be living here anymore. I’ll be in the woodshed in L-.” The prepositional phrase lacks a comma; through the elision, an anticipation slides into the existing reality unimpeded. Past, present, and future merge into a breathless simultaneity. Musing on her journals, the narrator asks “Are they the past? No, not entirely. I am made of what they contain and I am living now. I am here. I am still here.” With these meditations, the self becomes a collection of events that transcend time.

The narrator’s metaphysical stance resembles Galen Strawson’s idea of “The Unstoried Life.” In the essay, Strawson draws on Marcel Proust, Fernando Pessoa, and Virginia Woolf and philosophers like Emerson and Nietzsche to contradict the dominant philosophical and psychological view that we should frame our lives as stories. For “nonnarratives” like Strawson, the past is a series of fragments that do not come together into an ordered whole. In the following essay “Two Years’ Time,” Strawson zig-zags through his youth during the 60s: dabbling in Sufism, trying out as a bassist for Henry Cow, and naturally, crossing the Iran-Turkey border in a rickety Bulgarian truck shortly after the Apollo-11 launch. The essay’s episodic structure would be praised by Bennett, who has called narrative a “ghastly, bedevilling, rudder.” The novel’s narrator also jettisons interpretation. While swimming with a friend, she retells a dream about crossing between two rooms and encountering a scorpion. She decides to “eliminate” the immobile creature, crushing it with a book. Only pages after Bennett dangles the dream in front of the reader (it’s too easy: the scorpion equals Xavier, the book the author's writings), the narrator nonchalantly defuses the analysis by saying that it had already occurred to her and that maybe there is nothing to it, since she often uses her copy of A Very Short Introduction to Freud to swat flies. A cigar is just a cigar.

Language displaces narrative as the means of self-knowledge. While reminiscing on a childhood fascination with idioms, the narrator recalls how some words sparked “little flares going off inside of you, briefly illuminating that dark innermost space, plethoric and phantasmal.” In this novel, words can be held onto, like possessions; after the narrator uses the phrase “some dealings” to describe her philosophy teacher Robert Turner’s improper relationship with her, the word recurs, echoing within her consciousness. Or they can be carefully staged, like dioramas, such as when the narrator evokes how she feels on her period, stating that “My capacity for convention, limited in any case, is fairly etiolated at such times. I am impulsive. I am acute. I see things aslant.” Here we see free indirect discourse running in reverse, as the first-person voice of the journal rehearses an impersonal, writerly register. At times, this verges on parody. When the narrator lies about not having a title for her book after Xavier recommends one, she declares, “I certainly wasn’t going to proffer my idea while he was so proudly brandishing his own superlative suggestion.” Here, the goblet of Bennett’s language fills to the brim, the meniscus coyly wobbling with diction. But occasionally, it spills over. In an agitated email to Terence Stone, the narrator’s language collapses into a linguistic anarchy by equation: “Green is life is poison is sickness is peace is envy is fast is angelica is innocence is delirium is money is grass is chlorine…” She recovers towards the end, stating that green “... is the colour of my ink yes, the colour of my ink, change, yes, instability, yes, life, life, yes, death, yes. Death. And the days, I write the days in green, and the things I need, the things I need – I write those in green too.” But the cup has run over; the illusion of control has dissolved.

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf defines the most important part of prose style as “the natural run of the voice,” a quality “born of the air” that “breaks like a wave on the furniture.” In this novel, there’s certainly a lot less furniture. But like a wave it is: Bennett’s idiosyncratic and multifarious prose doubles back on itself through repetitions, gathering force until it surges paratactically with a glorious weirdness. While riding the train, the narrator reflects on her email exchange with Terence Stone. After lengthy digressions on the sinister plot of J.K. Huysman’s The Damned and the recurring theme of green in their emails, the narrator launches into excursus:

Terence Stone upped the ante in his next email by referring to Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’, the sixth stanza of which concludes with the line ‘Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade,’ a line I remembered well, and which, seeing it again, sent me into a pastoral reverie, there in the woodshed, and at the bosky heart of this veritable oasis thrummed ‘the greening power of God’, viriditas itself, an enlivening yet concurrently soothing notion that I fortuitously came across in the writings of Hildegard von Bingen during the early days of the pandemic and which I did consider referring to in my follow up email to Terence Stone.

Bennett’s assortment of techniques is on display: colloquialism (“upped the ante”), literary reference, memory, free association, obscure vocabulary, rhythmic modulation, affectation (“an enlivening yet concurrently soothing notion”), and clarification (“which I did consider referring to”). The sentence ends in the mundane by cycling back to its beginning. Bennett chains together passages like these, forming unbroken swaths of prose, black rectangles of ink that resemble pages from Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. However, the narrator’s free-flowing monologue belies an anxiety to be heard. Phrases like “perhaps,” “of course,” and “in fact” perforate the narration, with Bennett citing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “dialogism” as an influence in interviews. In these minute acts of extension, the self is established through an address to the other.

And yet, the narrator rarely connects with the men in her life. Stilted conversations, unsatisfying bouquets, and fitful email exchanges never soothe her yearning for the presence of others. In a particularly striking conversation with Xavier, the narrator tells him about when an ex-boyfriend broke into her home. He offers patronizing support and advice as she details the incident, and after she describes escaping the house in her dressing gown, he says, “I bet you looked cute.” Through exchanges like these, Bennett shows how men often fundamentally misunderstand women. These gender dynamics, however, are part of something metaphysical. Bennett signals this in the epigraph, a quote from The Damned in which Mademoiselle Chantelouve declares, “No, you cannot hear the thousand conversations with which my soul pesters you.” The desire for communion runs up against a fundamental solipsism and becomes a frenetic one-sided dialogue. This is hinted at early in the novel, when Xavier suggests that the narrator’s book should be titled A Singular Woman. His title begins to seem unintentionally apt; she is only one person and feels intensely aware of that oneness.

Against this solitude, however, runs a current coursing through the novel: a mysticism that hovers around the erotic. In a bravura passage recounting a sexual encounter with Robert Turner, the narrator is astonished by his lust, describing it as “the shrouded depths of that hunger and the variegated history of that hunger and the chthonic force of that hunger.” Later, when she commands Xavier to kiss her, she describes his tongue as an “ancient cold thing” and her back as “incalescent and primordial.” Here, Bennett attempts to get beyond mere appearances, to “sink down a bit” under the “surface of things” as the narrator says. If only for a brief moment, these physical encounters dissolve misunderstanding and time itself. In the final pages of the novel, she steps outside of herself, using the third-person to retell a moment between herself and Xavier. Succumbing to the overwhelming nature of human touch and connection before their first kiss, she says “There is so much drama in the room suddenly. She is not her, she is the situation, and the situation pulls things from her that exceed her direct experience and personally gained understanding. She is immaterial. She is all the ages.” As Xavier approaches, Bennett’s prose refuses the specific, only insisting that "Something is going on. Something is really going on and it is not what she foresaw…” The passage ends by nestling into the epiphanic, with the narrator repeating how “We are in the dark. We are together in the dark. He is very strong in this place. I want it to go on and on. I want to stay here. The dark, the dark.”

In her essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf declared that “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” At times, Bennett’s luminous halo threatens to blind us. It’s difficult to interpret Big Kiss, Bye-Bye; the novel actively resists the shaping of its events into a tidy narrative. Any common reader of the novel, however, is struck by the desire to connect with others despite everything, by the beauty and variation of the language, by the immediacy of the physical world and the possibility that something lies underneath it. Something that, perhaps, can be glimpsed in the collection of moments that is this unstoried life.

Cathedrals of discourse

2026-02-17T00:00:00Z

Graded on the rubric established by Gustave Flaubert—that loyal partisan of observation, quiet detail, and literary form—Samuel Johnson's 1759 novel Rasselas is an unmitigated failure. Of course, such an expectation is anachronistic, with Johnson's book having been published almost 100 years before Madame Bovary. Rasselas unsettles our expectations for what a novel should be. The plot develops not through causation but from a combination of tropes and whim: the title Prince escapes the confinement of the Happy Valley to see the world, accompanied by the princess Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah, and the sage Imlac. Seeking to understand the "choice of life," they discourse with learned men, explore the Pyramids of Egypt, and lose and then recover Pekuah from her captivity among Arab bandits. Johnson's novel eschews interiority and subtle psychological development; instead, characters stage philosophical disputations in chapters like "The Danger of Prosperity" and "Disquisition Upon Greatness." There is a parodic descriptive quality to many of these titles, such as "The Princess Pursues Her Inquiry with More Diligence Than Success." Others bristle with irony, as in "A Dissertation on the Art of Flying", with the Engineer's experiment ending rather poorly.

What Rasselas lacks in novelism, it provides in essayism. The voices of Johnson's characters are in fact a single voice: balanced, Latinate, antithetical. When Imlac, having described the delusions of an Astronomer, expatiates more generally on "The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination," he does so in stately paragraphs:

To indulge the power of fiction and send imagination out upon the wing is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation. When we are alone we are not always busy; the labour of excogitation is too violent to last long; the ardour of inquiry will sometimes give way to idleness or satiety. He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is? He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire, amuses his desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion. The mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combinations, and riots in delights which Nature and fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.

This is the voice of Johnson's essays, and this passage echoes a section of The Rambler, No. 2 published 9 years earlier:

That the mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity; and that we forget the proper use of the time, now in our power, to provide for the enjoyment of that which, perhaps, may never be granted us, has been frequently remarked; and as this practice is a commodious subject of raillery to the gay, and of declamation to the serious, it has been ridiculed with all the pleasantry of wit, and exaggerated with all the amplifications of rhetorick. Every instance, by which its absurdity might appear most flagrant, has been studiously collected; it has been marked with every epithet of contempt, and all the tropes and figures have been called forth against it.

Yet among these cathedrals of discourse runs a melancholy, a pessimism. Johnson wrote the novel in one week to pay for his mother's funeral, and that submerged longing surfaces in many scenes. It is there in the "Wise and Happy Man" that Rasselas finds reduced to tears after his only daughter dies, in the Princess's lamentation after the kidnapping of Pekuah, and in the conclusion, in which the characters resolve to return to the Happy Valley with the knowledge that their great plans for "the choice of life" are simply the vanity of human wishes. For readers convinced that the realist novel is how fiction must bear emotional weight, I recommend Samuel Johnson's Rasselas.

A tension is all you need

2026-04-13T00:00:00Z

The book begins with a litany, a litany about itself. “On essays and essayists. On the death of a moth, humiliation, the Hoover Dam and how to write; an inventory of objects on the author’s desk, and an account of wearing spectacles, which he does not; what another learned about himself the day he fell unconscious from his horse; of noses, of cannibals, of method…” There is a music to these descriptions, a gentle rubato in how they expand and contract, a droll humor in the way many of the clauses turn. Holding it together is the ground note, the persistent and incantatory “on” that recalls Montaigne. Underneath this spell and music, a canon forms. In Essayism, Dillon explores many of his favorite authors—Roland Barthes, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, but also lesser known writers like Cyril Connolly and Maeve Brennan—to meditate on the capabilities contained within the essay form.

From the outset, Dillon refuses the conventional. Received histories of the essay, according to him, “hide a good deal both about essays and the nature of effort and experience.” Rather than a “stable entity or established class,” the essay becomes a site of potential, with Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (from which the book gets one of its epigraphs) neatly articulating the paradox of this posture: “Let us talk about it as though it existed.” Dillon’s war on genealogical cliche raises the question: just what is essayism? The suffix lodges itself in the mind. Dillon takes his title from a chapter from Robert Musil’s gargantuan novel of ideas, The Man Without Qualities. The chapter’s title sets the tone (“The earth too, but Ulrich in particular, pays homage to the Utopian idea of Essayism”) and describes how “the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis.” This optimistic vision of intellectual adventure is shaded by an ironical awareness (“the earth too, but Ulrich in particular”) of its own ambition, its utopianism. Dillon then narrows his ambit; the essays that fascinate him give the “sense of a genre suspended between its impulses to hazard and adventure and to achieved form, aesthetic integrity.” This suspension governs the structural logic of Essayism, with Dillon’s lapidary prose filling the book’s twenty-six chapters, which glint with insight like tiny shards of crystal and bear faux-classical titles such as “On style” and “On melancholy.” These fragments do not, they need not, form an ordered whole.

These self-contained sections show Dillon closely attending to many of his favorite authors. No writer appears more tailored to Dillon’s taste than the subject of his section “On melancholy”: Cyril Connolly. What draws him to the languorous mid-century man of letters is the “word cycle” The Unquiet Grave, a beguiling collection of aphorisms and quotations. After describing Connolly’s eccentric and decadent lifestyle, Dillon punctures the “inflated” grandeur of Connolly’s book (“But you can hear that his pensées are already on the turn; his taste is for the overripe”) and indulges in some armchair psychology: “Approaching forty, heaving his well-lunched frame into a new decade, moving already with the anonymous waddle of mid-life, Connolly is convinced that if he can just lose half a stone the rest – his masterpiece – will follow.” But ultimately, Connolly’s complex sensibility captivates Dillon. After an astute comparison to the aphorisms of Emil Cioran, he concludes with praise: “The Unquiet Grave is a lesson, seventy-three years old this year, in the potential still of an elegant, unruly form. It is a masterpiece despite all, and Palinurus our essayistic contemporary.” Dillon ranges in scale, however, and obsesses over sentences as readily as personalities. In the sections titled “On taste” and “On sentences,” he fixates on two essays by Elizabeth Hardwick. After praising the “fractured rhythms and peculiar phrases” of her prose, he singles out one on the death of Dylan Thomas, quoting a passage which begins with the line: “He died, grotesquely like Valentino, with mysterious weeping women at his bedside.” With an attention rivaling that of writers like Garielle Lutz, Dillon anatomizes the sentence’s sonics (the mirroring and progression of vowels, how it slows down as it draws to a close) before detailing how the sentence prompts him to speculate about the scene of Thomas’s death. But then, Dillon doubles back:

But isn’t there something peculiar about the placing of that first comma? When I read the essay for the first time – and reading it now I must remind myself that this is not what it says – I thought Dylan Thomas had died grotesquely, like Valentino. But that is not it, or not quite: the grotesquerie belongs not to the death itself, or not only, but to the resemblance – in death, Thomas was grotesquely like Valentino. The distinction may seem subtle, hardly worth making; except I suspect Hardwick of pausing over the comma’s placement, suddenly aware that the mere parallel of the two deaths – poet and silent star, both loved by many women, though the poet a little more bafflingly – was not enough: what truly appalled was the fact one could, in fact must, set these men alongside one another in the first place.

Dillon continues: “Hardwick knows, must know, that reeling the comma back a notch does not rid us of the expected sense – the one I mistakenly settled for at first. She gets to have the seamlessness and its subversion.” Dillon’s eye for prose is only matched by his comfort with paradox. He latches on to the tiniest detail and after a brief moment of performed self-doubt (“the distinction may seem subtle, hardly worth making”) ends with the provocative claim that by placing her comma there, Hardwick courted a kind of productive misreading.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then block-quoting Dillon is the highest of praise, for he uses them freely. The section “On diverging” almost resembles color field painting in the way two large block-quotes from Woolf’s “On Being Ill” are chained in between three large paragraphs that gloss the essay. This visual quality is also implicit in Dillon’s shorter quotations. In a section on how Susan Sontag’s diaries show the insecurity behind her notoriously aloof persona, Dillon writes that “Sex and writing arrived at more or less the same time. Aged fifteen she wrote: 'I feel that I have lesbian tendencies'; the following year she had her first relationship with a woman, and noted: 'Everything begins from now.'" The punctuation here is typical; Dillon’s prose is glutted with semicolons and colons. What do they mean? Colons for Dillon often set up quotations. James Wood (and many other critics) are masters of the deft inline quotation, their writing merging into the voice of their quoted author in the same way that Wood describes free indirect style allowing narration to bend towards a character's consciousness. Not Dillon. For him, quotes are meant to be exhibited, to be staged. There is a residual Arnoldianism in the "touchstone" quality of how he distances himself from the quotations he chooses. Likewise, his frequent use of the semicolon allows him to evade subordination between clauses. The connection between passages is up to the reader; we paratactically stroll through a gallery of staged quotes.

Through punctuation, Dillon allows for uncertainty to structure his prose. Take this line: "I always imagined–not always, though I have been here before: I imagined for some time–that after the disaster would come a type of stricture, tightening, shrinkage.” The peculiar punctuation and syntax (the two em-dashes, which set off a comma and colon on either side) give the sentence a hesitant feel of stopping and starting multiple times. We begin with the definitive ("always imagined"), are immediately contradicted ("not always"), before a brief recorrection ("though I have been here before"), which sets off a clearing of the throat, a redo ("I imagined for some time"), before the sentence closes with finality: a trinity of constricting nouns, albeit after a little distancing ("a type of"). Here is Dillon's writing in a nutshell: a dance between finality and uncertainty, classical cadences often undone through idiosyncratic presentation. More frequent are Dillon’s parentheticals, little flickers of self-consciousness that swerve away from his contention. “Imagine what [the essay] might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at ‘therefore’) at the level of thought.” But there is no regularity to Dillon’s method; in a memorable parenthetical spanning a whole page, he digresses about Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Musing on Cioran’s judgement of the book as “indigestible,” the passage itself remains typographically undigested in the section, recalling Samuel Johnson’s definition of the essay (“a loose sally of the mind, an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition”).

The aesthetic world of Dillon’s book is held together by a constant unraveling. Nothing survives his quest for instability: not the essay and not the self. In a section on the essay’s origins, Dillon glosses an essay by Montaigne in which he is knocked off his horse and wakes up, dazed and bloodied. And yet Montaigne finds a “kind of pleasure” in the experience, which allows his sense of self to hazily dissipate. This “dispersal,” as Dillon terms it, underlies the philosophy of self-hood that Montaigne develops in his many essays, and its lack of stability attracts Dillon and informs his prose. Interpreting Virginia Woolf’s essay “Thunder at Wembley,” in which lightning breaks out during a stately exhibition of the British Empire, he writes how “Woolf’s prose mimics the action of the storm, exploding delicately into flurries of image, sound, and metaphor.” “Exploding delicately”: Dillon’s descriptions often contain these oxymorons, such as when he praises the “wavering precision” with which Maeve Brennan describes the broccoli and sauceboat of a meal on Fifty-ninth street, or how Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” “swerves weakly” from its opening argument into a febrile jumble of language. Phrases like these draw the reader in, with Dillon’s oxymorons straining under their torqued precision.

Despite this hunger for tension, another current runs through the book: earnestness. Dillon’s sensibilities are often postmodern, but he is a postmodern Romantic. Five chapters titled “On consolation” appear throughout the book, forming an emotional backbone. In these passages, Dillon describes the depression that has dogged him for much of his life, the death of both of his parents before he finished college, and periods of crippling writer’s block. On his time in Margate, a time when he could “connect nothing with nothing,” Dillon says: “There were nights when I did walk down to the front and cling to the cliffs to light a cigarette, then stare out at the lights of container ships in the North Sea, paused before they rounded the coast and approached the port of Dover in the morning. Sometimes a late-night dog walker would pass by in the dark, and roused from my panic reverie I would know that tonight was not the night to drown myself.” While Dillon describes the “writing ‘I’” as contained, provisional, and dispersed, these passages show a suffering yet stable self, around which the psychic weight of the book gathers. For relief from this affliction, for consolation, Dillon turned to literature, to essays and criticism. The stylish, “antic” reviews by Ian Penman and Paul Morley in NME introduce him to the “extravagance” of Roland Barthes, his reading of William Styron’s Darkness Visible brings him to a canon of theory about depression and melancholia: Julia Kristeva, Emil Cioran, Robert Burton. For Dillon, consolation is found in how a certain kind of essayistic writing mirrors the inner turmoil of the self. In one section, he describes looking for guidance: “Hardwick’s ‘Billie Holiday’ was the first – discovered at a moment when suddenly, after years of feeling that I had at last a solid self that might survive, I sensed that I might disperse on the merest breeze, float away on currents of abstracted unease. Hardwick’s coolly composed sentences gave me something to hang on to, but there was enough about them of intentional disarray that I felt as though in her essayism she understood extremes – the Dylan Thomas essay confirmed it.” And so a taste for style, an aestheticism, becomes a method of self preservation.

The tension of Essayism never resolves. In the final section, titled “On starting again,” Dillon ends by quoting from William Carlos Williams’ “Essay on Virginia,” with Williams comparing “the essence of all essays” to “a branching tree of crystal hung with glass baskets that would be filled with jelly” that Thomas Jefferson brought back from Paris for his daughter. Dillon declines to elaborate upon this enigmatic image, the quote getting the last word. In the end, we have a book divided against itself. Dillon’s taste for tension, for fracture, is informed by a lingering melancholia, but through the earnest depiction of his struggles, he exemplifies a more personal mode of writing. Against his own aesthetic criteria, Dillon makes a case for the earnest, searching exploration of the self.

Criticism as dispossession

2026-06-17T00:00:00Z

Andrea Long Chu, who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, is best known for her acerbic takedowns and politically committed reviews. Her evisceration of Hanya Yanagihara, titled “Hanya’s Boys,” is one of the highlights here. Just look at this line about the protagonist of A Little Life: “In truth, Jude is a terribly unlovable character, always lying and breaking promises, with the inner monologue of an incorrigible child. The first time he cuts himself, you are horrified; the fiftieth, you wish he would aim.” It’s a brutal line, and one that could only come from Chu. Could you imagine James Wood writing anything remotely like that? Bro went to Eton.

So I’m all for a good takedown (Wood on White Teeth, anyone? Or how about Martin Amis on Hannibal?), but the criticism I enjoy usually pays attention to both form and content. The reviews of Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson, and (to a lesser extent) Ottessa Moshfegh had me nearly grinding my teeth. Chu is at her least compelling when her disagreements with the ideas of a book develop out of her disagreements with an author’s views, and the Yanagihara review succeeds in spite of this. Also, the reviews of Joey Soloway and Bret Easton Ellis were abysmal. What, exactly, is the point of lobbing teddy bears to a pitbull? But I’m sure they did numbers on Twitter.

This highlights another issue with Chu’s views of criticism: an aloofness to her own role in the attention economy. Chu has said that of criticism that “It may be beautiful; it must be functional.” In interviews, she’s even said that her criticism should be as informative as a vacuum cleaner’s manual. But manuals are never known for their cruelty, and at most accidentally notable for their prose (I’m reminded of Lydia Davis excerpting the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary entry on the Beaufort scale as an example of crystalline prose). It’s okay to write to be read. I think that when Chu describes how Mailer ended his essay “The Prisoner of Sex” with a “smug parenthetical,” and then cheekily ends her essay with one too, she knows this. At times, however, her stylish exuberance spills over into corniness. She describes Yellowstone as a “horse-eat-horse world” and her puns seem to want to plumb the depths of the English language’s store of idioms: of criticism, she says that “the lion’s share is a dog’s breakfast,” and we get two separate meditations on the phrase “train wreck.”

Along with the takedowns, this collection mercifully includes pieces that are more positive, or more ambivalent, and use that temperament to open up onto broader questions. The review on Yellowjackets extends and complicates Parul Sehgal’s piece on the trauma plot, the piece on Octavia Butler does not let reverence stymie interrogation, and her review of the Asian-American novel makes an interesting, and to me, persuasive claim: that the category of Asian-American is incoherent, and should be understood as a category of desire. This view flows out of Chu’s interventions on gender identity and questions of identity more broadly, which is often subsumed by desire. The reframing of questions of who one is to what one wants (or as I tend to prefer, what one hopes for) is attractive to me, as a pragmatist, as someone who’s always been sympathetic to anti-foundationalism, as someone who squirms at the thought of being considered racially Asian. I found the essays “On Liking Women,” “Pink,” and “China Brain” to be compelling for this reason.

So Art, Desire, and Politics would've been a more accurate title, as the two reflexive pieces about criticism feel tacked on and slight (one of them being described as a piece of “intellectual history” that forgoes footnotes). But there’s a tension here: desire and politics are strange bedfellows. How can individual desires be reconciled with the social world of politics? Along with the vacuum cleaner manual, Chu has also compared the persuasive act of criticism to flirting, and of seeing new books by authors she’s reviewed as seeing an ex from across the street. The contrast of these romantic metaphors with Chu's functional goals displays an inherent tension.

In the first essay of this collection, “Criticism in a Crisis,” Chu concludes by saying “This is the supreme task of the critic: to restore the work of art to its original worldliness. The artist creates by removing something from the world; the critic’s job is to put it back.” I paused when I read this line. It is the natural conclusion of the argument Chu lays out in the essay, and yet it is diametrically opposed to a view that I had been mulling over for some time: the idea of criticism as possession. When I read the best works of practical criticism, such as James Wood’s review of White Teeth or Virginia Woolf on Chaucer or Euripides, I’ll admit that despite the immense pleasure, I feel a loss. Through rhetoric, through a knowledge of craft and literary history, through quotation, so persuasive is their characterization of a book that I feel that they have reached into the literary commons and taken it for themselves. Woolf now possesses Chaucer in some way, and my view of him is now bound up with her. An understanding of criticism as possession accounts for why some people, including a friend I recently talked to, avoid reading literary criticism: after reading a critic’s account of a work, they cannot encounter the text on their own terms. It is there in the title of Judith Butler’s Winter Lecture, “Who Owns Kafka?”, and in the late Harold Bloom’s fulminations against “The School of Resentment,” who successfully laid claim to the literature he used to have Possessed by Memory. You can see it in the often-misinterpreted Juilliard lecture scene in Tár, where the domineering facade of Cate Blanchett’s character comes down in a vulnerable moment when she tries to share Bach’s Prelude in C with a student, and then lashes out when she feels that (in his own way) he has taken it for himself.

Private ownership is not exactly in vogue these days. In the essay on Yellowstone, Chu describes how “John Dutton III refuses to be called rich, and he barely regards his land as a financial asset. Ownership is a legal fiction: He wants to possess.” Decolonization may not be a metaphor, but criticism by possession is. And in moments of dispossession, we must remember that the literary commons can never truly be plundered, that its works remain there for the taking. The best essays in this collection dramatize and enact that possession. So choose desire over politics, and if you want it, take it.