Perhaps it’s no coincidence that two of the strongest essays, the most sinuous and expansive, examine turf she has known intimately and returned to after an absence, as opposed to waters she still swims in. Tolentino has clearly made efforts to give her book thematic cohesion – though several of the essays recapitulate some previously published material, all were written or substantially revised in the wake of the 2016 election – but if the focus on Web 2.0, pop feminism and other familiar outcroppings of late capitalism appears a little claustrophobic, there is more to be discovered here. But even the essays on other topics usually contain at least a gesture toward such paralysing double binds, as when, in I Thee Dread, about the wedding industry, she remembers leaving her Peace Corps assignment in Kyrgyzstan depleted and confused “by the awful juxtaposition between my obscene power as an American and my obscene powerlessness as a woman”.
That’s from a particularly direct assault on the way we live now, The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams: the first scam is the one that caused the 2007/8 financial crisis, the last is Trump’s rise to power, and in between she also takes down an insidious breed of “market-friendly feminism” that she notes is hard to disentangle from her own career. After all, it only took about seven years of flogging my own selfhood on the internet to get to a place where I could comfortably afford to stop using Amazon to save fifteen minutes and five dollars at a time”. One of many forms of widely shared self-delusion she cops to in Trick Mirror is the “fantasy” of non-complicity in a ludicrously unjust global economy, the belief “that I can make it out of here. Supple and incisive, Tolentino has a gift for unexpected intuitive turns and juxtapositions
It would be easy to call this a context in which reflection, robbed of the requisite time and space, simply can’t exist, but Tolentino is one of several examples to the contrary she’s learned to reflect differently, and part of what her pieces reveal is that harsh, seductive, disorienting environment itself, as bleak and fragmented as it is glossy.
And her work is marked by that environment – in which you must be swift, bold and flexible, playful but persuasive, willing to perform yourself close-up and ready to be attacked for it, constantly aware of how you’re seen, competing for elusive attention, preparing for immediate counterargument. Supple and incisive, with a gift for unexpected intuitive turns and juxtapositions, she was formed online, in the years she spent as an editor and writer for the Hairpin and Jezebel before becoming a New Yorker staff writer.
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