Andrea Long Chu stands accused of not playing by the rules, of appraising works of fiction as if they were essays or confessions rather than aesthetic objects. “It is true that I tend to treat a novel like an argument”, she writes in the introduction to Authority, a collection of essays and reviews published between 2018 and 2023 in outlets such as N+1, Bookforum and New York Magazine. Long Chu – who won a Pulitzer prize for criticism in 2023 – believes “all novels refract the veiled subjectivity of their authors”, and to pretend otherwise is to indulge a “pernicious form of commodity fetishism”. In her reviews, books betray their authors, invariably revealing some kernel of inadequacy – be it immaturity, myopia or just terminal dullness.

This approach borders on the psychoanalytical, and makes for fun reading. Long Chu diagnoses a case of “Munchausen by proxy” in Hanya Yanagihara, whose bestselling novels A Little Life (2015) and To Paradise (2022) are powered by “the misery principle”: “horrible things happen to people for no reason”, and the author is “a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health”. She notes a troubling tendency towards “infantile” idealisation of mothers and girlfriends in Tao Lin’s autofiction, and finds “something deeply juvenile” about the scatological motifs in Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels. Moshfegh’s medieval gore-fest Lapovona (2022), fails to shock, because “You cannot épater le bourgeois without an actual bourgeoisie”; “the leading coprophile of American letters” is trying too hard to convince us she’s not a prude.

Reviewing Bret Easton Ellis’s “deeply needless” 2019 essay collection, White (“less a series of glorified, padded-out blog posts than a series of regular, normal-size blog posts”), Long Chu bemoans his descent into fogeyish paranoia, and suggests the author of American Psycho is starting to resemble his most famous creation. “At some point,” she quips, “one must ask if a man who sees Nineteen Eighty-Four all around him is really just stuck in the 80s.”

A takedown of Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2020 novel, Rodham, which imagines an alternative universe where Hillary Clinton never married Bill, is a withering indictment of hollow girl-boss feminism: this is “an unpolitical book by an unpolitical author about … an unpolitical person”; Sittenfeld’s complacency mirrors that of her protagonist, a woman whose “true talent lies in persuading college-educated people that her ambition, and by extension theirs, is a genuine expression of competence”. A recurring figure in these essays is the successful author with a gripe about oversensitive lefty youngsters and social media mobs. These include Ellis, Moshfegh, Maggie Nelson – whose complaints about art-world censoriousness in On Freedom are dismissed with a huffily italicised “boring” – and Zadie Smith, whose “habit of sympathizing with the least sympathetic party in any given situation frequently drives her to the political center”. Long Chu provocatively suggests this tendency is a bit of an act, compensating for Smith’s failure to produce a touchstone work of social realism: since Smith has “never actually excelled at constructing the kind of sympathetic, all-too-human characters she advocates for”, she makes up for it with a lofty bothsidesism she thinks becoming of a serious, above-the-fray liberal humanist.

Long Chu is similarly unsparing in her critique of the publishing industry’s patronising and counterproductive tendency to over-hype minority voices in order to atone for past wrongs. (“This is to respond to pigeonholing by overstating the value of being a pigeon.”) In a refreshingly clear-sighted essay on Asian American fiction, she questions whether the experiences depicted in a glut of diaspora novels have anything significant in common beyond their “diffident, aimless, frustrated” protagonists and a vague melancholy; the much-laboured theme of identity manifests as little more than “a sensation, a mild, chronic homesickness”, and “the acute experience of racial indeterminacy has diffused into something more banal”.

Alongside the literary essays, Authority features dissections of TV shows and video games, and a wryly funny meditation on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical shortcomings. (His winning strategy as a composer is “not to persuade but to overwhelm”.) There are also several personal pieces including an essay on vaginoplasty, a fictionalised account of undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation (a treatment for depression), and On Liking Women, a widely shared 2018 essay about the author’s gender transition that kickstarted her writing career. Here Long Chu draws a connecting line between the gender separatist ideology of 1970s political lesbianism and today’s anti-trans activists, whom she accuses of laundering “garden-variety moral disgust”.

In another era, such personal material would have sat uneasily in a volume of criticism, and it says something about our cultural moment that it doesn’t seem particularly out of place here. As Long Chu observes in the title essay, the subjectivity of the critic is an increasingly visible presence these days. Tracing the vexed debates around critical authority from the 18th century to the present day, she concludes that the concept has always been “an incoherent, inconsistent, and altogether empty thing”. The job of today’s critic is not so much to impart expertise but to become a storyteller in their own right: “The critic has become a witness, one whose job is to offer up an event within her own experience in such a way that the reader, if she is so inclined, may experience it too.”

This checks out. Though Long Chu’s writing style is not as overtly chummy as that of her fellow US critic Lauren Oyler, it has a similarly disarming first-person candour, offsetting stridency with spasms of self-effacing humility, and the sort of tentative qualifications more commonly encountered in spoken discourse than on the printed page. (“Perhaps I am being ungenerous”; “What I mean is that …”; “My point is that …”; “I do not mean …”; “If it sounds like I’m saying … I suppose I am.”) These tics can be a bit cloying, and the occasional adolescent turns of phrase feel jarringly regressive: Long Chu uses “boring” an awful lot; at one point, she introduces a particularly unimpressive quote with “The following is an actual sentence.”

In a postscript to one of the greener pieces in this volume, Long Chu, who is in her early 30s, winces at the prose style deployed by her younger self – “that kind of bloggy ‘voiceyness’ was dated even then”. Her anxiety on this score is symptomatic of a generational dilemma for a cohort of American writers who, having been raised to distrust authority – not just as a concept but perhaps especially as a register – and steeped in the highly self-conscious patter of online communities, must now work out how to be publicly clever in a non-overbearing way.

In an anti-intellectual media landscape, one way to make yourself legible is to make yourself small. This is the striking thing about Long Chu’s authorial tone: she combines the expert and the naif in a single voice, which chimes with a similar dualism in her reader. These essays are essentially journeys – knotty and meandering, with moments of pithy, clarifying insight. If you can hold someone’s interest while figuring things out for yourself in real time on the page, you’re doing something right. Perhaps the true source of authority is companionable intelligence, and what we think of as sound judgment is just a function of familiarity – comfort in another person’s psychic skin.