AUTHORITY - ANDRE LONG CHU

I really liked her last book, Females. I thought it was one of the more provocative books around trans issues I’ve read, and I occasionally read an article of hers that comes up, so I was pleased to see the library here had this latest one. Unlike Females, this one is a collection of short pieces that have appeared in magazines before, mostly reviews of books and shows, but also personal essays and a longer piece about critical authority. That titular piece, about authority, is so clearly a labor of love, she quotes from all over (Kant, Coleridge, etc.) and has so clearly thought deeply about the question of where critical authority comes from. Sadly, she cares about this much more than I. I would answer that question with, who cares if they have any “authority” here, how is their writing? I would read something from an expert if I wanted authority. I'm reading a critic because I want their take on something, and for that take to be provocative and interesting, authority be damned. Luckily, her’s is razor sharp. Almost all of the reviews are negative, I only remember the one about the TV show Yellowjackets being positive, but man, can she write a takedown. Doesn’t matter if I like the thing she’s reviewing (like Tao Lin) or dislike it (like Bret Easton Ellis) or even if it’s something I’m not really familiar with at all, like Zadie Smith, Chu is really fun to read taking something apart. On a sentence to sentence level, she’s an amazing writer. I hope we get more book length stuff from her. Several of the essays, most notably her essay about Asian-American identity (something that I’m pretty interested in, for whatever reason), were insightful and felt like they could have gone on much longer and developed nicely. She recently reviewed Ocean Vuong, in a piece that is too recent to be in this book, and touched on some of these same issues in a way that made me really hope she tackles this subject at length at some point. Anyway, great writer, very excited to have her around for a while