Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?
Truthful; Intense
Just by looking at the kind of writing Lauren does, we can say that her attitude could probably be described pretty well by two adjectives: truthful and intense. Let's take a look.
Truthful
Lauren actually analyzes her own attitude toward writing at one point in the novel: "Iʼm trying to speak—to write—the truth. Iʼm trying to be clear. Iʼm not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them" (11.51). Elsewhere, her writing matches this description.
How so?
Well, first, Lauren doesn't use a lot of big fancy words designed to baffle you with their supposed brilliance. You know Hemingway's famous dispute with Faulkner? Faulkner criticized Hemingway for being afraid to use words that might make a reader have to look into the dictionary, and Hemingway responded that Faulkner apparently thought big words meant big emotions, when really, according to Hemingway, simple plain words tell the truth more honestly.
Well, in this debate, Lauren would probably take Hemingway's side. She keeps her explanations of things pretty basic and at a fairly simple reading level. She sometimes teaches people to read and write, after all, and she wants to be understood.
Second, we don't catch Lauren in a lot of lies. Not any, really, that we can think of. That's unlike a lot of the "unreliable narrators" of modernist works, whose sanity we sometimes have to question. With Lauren, we're convinced that we've got a straight shooter, an honest person who will tell it like it is.
Intense
But Lauren's not just truthful—she's also very intense. Her intensity frequently comes through in her tone because she more or less constantly has a cut-the-crap attitude. "You answer too fast," she tells Joanne, for example. "Go home and look again" (5.126).
Lauren has no problem telling people how she sees things. Even her poetry is intense. Check it out: "All struggles / Are essentially / power struggles. / Who will rule, / Who will lead, / Who will define, / refine, / confine, / design, / Who will dominate. / All struggles / Are essentially / power struggles, / And most / are no more intellectual / than two rams / knocking their heads together" (9.Verse).
So, yeah, if you ask Lauren, life boils down to power struggles. That's an intense thing to say. It's like, hey, this argument I'm having with my roommate about which TV show is better is really about the rent payments and serious stuff that people try to dodge talking about—but Lauren wants to shove it in your face and make you recognize what's truly important so that you can make the world a better place along with her.