Letters to the Editor
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Style over substance
The excerpt from Sloane Crosley bespeaks a way of writing that's long on style and short on substance. That would be fine for someone who aspires above all to be a prose stylist but that's not how she pitches herself — her vignette is supposed to be sweet, and deceptively moving. The reader is meant to be disarmed, to say "Awww" out loud as a cover for the inner humiliation of realizing the presence of innocent genius.
Unfortunately what Crosley produces falls flat, like a pop composer who can make you tap your toes at a comfortably familiar tune but never moves you to sigh, or a competent cartoonist whose carefully-emulated caricatures are technically adequate but lack the power to persuade. The climax of the story is a fine example:
We talked, he handed me headphones, and I listened to some of his rap. And then he kissed me. Which is pretty narcissistic, kissing someone while they're listening to your music. ...
Afterward he gave me a mix tape, which I wound up leaving in a Danish hostel two weeks later.
Her narrative becomes scattered, almost an inventory — not because it serves her purpose or helps us understand or takes us to the resolution of her conflict, but simply for the sake of being scattered, because she doesn't really want, or perhaps know how, to let us in.
If Crosley is truly writing what she knows, then she needs to learn more. But I doubt that's her problem — having read a few of her pieces on Salon or through links I can't help but feel like she's mostly writing what people around her know, or think they know, which in some ways is the opposite, and in the end the wise naif is merely sophomoric.