The literary-critical marketplace now suffers social media as a necessary side street at the very least, if not a central forum. As a result, it has adopted some of the latter’s methods of preference and promotion, and a clear and quick route to notoriety has been established: The aspiring critic writes a long and negative review-essay, framed around a popular and fashionable writer. The essay should make the writer in question representative of broader cultural themes, gesturing in argument toward an ambitious social diagnosis. At the same time, it should be peppered with slashing close-reading, wounding invective, and acute personal jabs. If these ingredients are appropriately balanced, the essay might then go viral (meaning in this field that it achieves tens of thousands of readers, as opposed to several hundred).