"I read this book because my thesis is on autofiction, and I'm writing about critical moods around autofiction / the reasons people dislike it. (As such, I bounced around a bit, mainly focusing on the sections on autofiction/autotheory.)

Kornbluh's fervour is at times enjoyable but comes at the cost of substantial rigour; this book is incredibly reductive, at times insultingly so. For instance, she says autofiction and autotheory are basically the same thing (they aren't), conflates 'autofiction' with 'antifiction' (it isn't) and 'anti-mediation' (lmao), and continually makes breathless, anguished statements about autofiction's complete abandonment of Structures and Collectives and Imaginative Potential, that just don't ring remotely true as someone who has actually read a substantial body of autofiction. I don't like Olivia Laing's Crudo either, lol, but if you need to caricature a genre in order to fold it into your critical schema then your schema needs work.

There are places in which autofiction, for instance, is actually responding to the conditions she talks about; many autofictions are nowhere as naive about the idea of authorial intimacy and authorial project as Kornbluh believes them to be, but that would require engaging with the explicitly /fictional/ element of their formal enterprise, which she refuses to do. Also, at times the book is noticeably sloppy - e.g. referring to a comedian's creative Yelp reviews as a 'critically acclaimed work' because they got written about in a couple 300-word articles, or informing us that present tense is used in both literary fiction and The Hunger Games in a tone of Abject Doom.

There's also a lot of value and taste judgments in here, some of which I'm down with (I also like collective imagining and labour protections) and some of which I find more suspect (I work on autofiction as a genre for writing about abuse, and, accordingly, some of the comments about 'wallowing', obsession with domesticity, obsession with 'parental blame' and 'solicitation of empathy' read as reactionary to me).

But primarily, I think Kornbluh's identified a real and interesting thing - the popularity of immediacy effects, how the contemporary artistic landscape induces their usage, and their political and artistic limits - that she's determined to make both more extreme and more total than it actually is. (Literature has not been Entirely Captured by the books she's mad at; autofictions are popular, sure, but they're not generally winning the Booker or appearing in celebrity book club baskets.)

This would be a better book if Kornbluh was willing to interrogate her irritation in some ways; she's hardly taking on untouched darlings of the literary landscape here (some of the fruit here is less low-hanging than windfall). As it is, she's on a crusade that simplifies everything it touches. I'm not really a fan. "