Tox Report 67. Heat death of the Rooneyverse

The Sally Rooney critical consensus is starting to turn

The cover of Intermezzo.

A strange experience reading the reviews of the new Sally Rooney, Intermezzo. Critics keep referring to things that happened in the previous novel, Beautiful World Where Are You?, and — despite having both read and reviewed the book — I would have no memory of them whatsoever. According to Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times, Intermezzo contains “a richer and more convincing version of the on-off relationship Rooney tried to conjure up between the childhood friends Eileen and Simon in Beautiful World”. Between who and whom? No bells are ringing here.

Amy Weiss-Meyer in the Atlantic tells me that “Beautiful World, Where Are You has two primary romantic pairs, each complicated by divergent pasts and trajectories.” Oh great, so that’s another two whole further characters to have slid out of my brain. Lola Seaton, writing in the New Statesman, tells me that “Beautiful World, her weakest novel, contains the most sex, or the most graphic sex,” Seems unlikely Lola, because even if I’ve forgotten the characters having this filthy sex, I doubt very much that I would have forgotten the actual sex.

But when I reread the piece I wrote for UnHerd in 2021, there it all is. Apparently, “Beautiful World, Where Are You? is the story of two friends from Dublin: a successful novelist called Alice and an editor on a publicly funded literary magazine called Eileen, both approaching thirty. They fall in love with men, have enjoyably dirty sex which is described in enjoyably dirty detail, struggle to believe that they are worthy of love and write each other long emails about the decline of civilisation and (in Alice’s case) the horrors of having a public profile.”

Yet all I’ve remembered of this are the “long emails about the decline of civilisation”. These struck me as the dullest parts of Beautiful World at the time of reading, and yet the sorry fact is that they still had more vibrancy than the cardboardy characters engineered to convey them. Representative sample: “My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence,” writes Alice or Eileen to Eileen or Alice, it doesn’t matter which because they are not in any meaningful sense individuals.

And yet I called Beautiful World “not a good novel […] but always a readable one”. What was I thinking? Flicking back through, not only is the novel completely forgettable, it’s also relentlessly turgid. All I can offer is that, as I concede in the piece, I was writing as a fan of Rooney. I think her first two novels — Conversations With Friends and, most of all, Normal People — are fantastic novels of a type that I associate with the twentieth century and wish people still wrote more of. Three hundred-some pages, with a thematically tight plot and low-key realist observations in naturalistic prose: the kind of thing that feels like opening a narrow window onto someone else’s secret life.

Do you enjoy intense close readings of pop culture? Then you will love my book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties, which tells the stories of nine women who navigated celebrity in the 2000s: Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Aaliyah, Janet, Amy, Kim, Chyna, Jen.

Connell and Marianne of Normal People, in particular, feel “real” to me. The fraught intensity of their relationship is so beautifully played out, and the political hectoring is mercifully parceled off to Connell’s Marxist cleaner mum. As Rooney’s career has gone on, the criticism that she works a small and shallow patch of ground gains more traction: the Rooneyverse is populated almost exclusively by People Who Do Things, with academics and academia occupying a hallowed tier (and if you have to be a cleaner, at least be one with the right politics).

Even try-hard overachievers have inner lives, and Rooney got that part of it so right that I could forgive the hints of pretentiousness and the moments when the narrative threatened to break into a Momentum rally speech. I didn’t even mind that her novels are fundamentally humourless. Those tendencies, though, had become overwhelming in Beautiful World. Not that this affected it commercially: by the beginning of this year, it had sold 500,000 copies, as had Conversations With Friends, while Normal People had sold over a million.¹

Intermezzo seems likely to sell similar numbers. But the reviews suggest that the critical consensus at least is catching up to Rooney. There are a few raves for the new book, but even some of the more positive notices feel like things you wouldn’t want on a jacket. The New Statesman makes it sound like overdone steak: “if Intermezzo is not Rooney’s juiciest novel, it is her meatiest.” (My jaw feels tired just reading that.) Poppy Sowerby spends her review for UnHerd defending the novel from imaginary naysayers, and ends by telling us to “hate it for the right reasons”. Well OK then, I will try.

Rooney has had bad press before. But her previous bad press has been ideological, not aesthetic: Lauren Oyler sassed her for being not socialist enough, and the Sydney Morning Herald ran a weird op-ed calling her racist in 2021, which is so 2021 it belongs on a plinth.² This time, though, the charges are more serious because they are about the work. The sternest critique comes from James Marriott in the Times. “The reader is never quite able to shake the suspicion that Rooney’s characters have all been made to sign contracts holding them to high standards of personal conduct before they are permitted to appear on the page,” he writes. That stifling goodness is death to drama, as James explains:

If Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, can be said to have a villain — besides that looming, much-mentioned nemesis in all her books, global capitalism — it is probably a minor character named Darren. The half-brother of the protagonists Ivan and Peter, Darren “works for a corporate law firm, earning a massive salary and contributing zero, literally nothing at all to human civilisation”. He is encountered on a modern “housing development with [a] big engraved rock outside”. Here, residents enjoy such dubious pleasures as “synthetic fragrances” and “polished marble countertops”. Darren doesn’t look after his brothers’ dog well and, worst of all, makes a clueless appearance at a moment of emotional high drama “wearing a polo shirt with an embroidered brand logo on the front, and a pair of plastic flip-flops for some reason”. Come on, Darren, dress for the occasion.

This also gets at Rooney’s other worst quality: her snobbery. There is nothing lower in the Rooneyverse than being basic. for a Marxist, she has an awful lack of sympathy for the masses, who may in fact like living in newbuilds that don’t need constant repairs, and enjoy branded clothing.³ This attitude is more tolerable from the young, because superiority is a young person’s vice. But clinging to that worldview as the characters and their author become thirty-somethings is depressing, especially in a novel that is liable any moment to hector you about your inadequate commitment to redistribution.

I haven’t read Intermezzo yet,⁴ so weight what I have to say accordingly. But to me, Rooney’s problem is that she hasn’t had to grow up. Her enormous success (both artistic and commercial) as a chronicler of young lives has spared her from dealing with a lot of the things that make older lives interesting: disappointments, compromises, frustrations. Sally Rooney has been able to make a living doing what she values, so why can’t the Darrens of the world make a living doing what Sally Rooney values?

She is a strange creature now: a truly popular novelist in a time when the popular novel is, if not dead, then only kept alive by TV personalities and Colleen Hoover. And yet she seems to hold popularity in contempt. There are only a quarter of a million employees in higher education in the UK, so at least some of the many many copies of her books must have been bought by people who don’t live up to her exacting standards of existence. At some point, surely, the audience is going to figure out what she thinks of them.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• It is very hard to share the Mark Robinson story without sharing some material that no one in creation should ever have to see (he was running for governor while posting to a porn board under a totally identifiable handle; if you google the posts themselves, I cannot save you), but this is the best overview I’ve seen: Mark Robinson is a poster (the Atlantic, gift link).

• For UnHerd: can Chappell Roan tame her own fame? (Plus, some comments from me in this BBC News piece about artists rejecting toxic fans.)

• And I forgot to include this last week: why Taylor’s endorsement of Kamala is maybe American democracy’s last gasp.

• I caught a bit of this Archive on Four about nuclear apocalypse film Threads and plan to listen in full. The first thing I did, though, was rewatch Threads (BBC 4 will repeat it in October if you aren’t the kind of doom-nerd to own it on Blu-ray, and you should watch it because it’s an extraordinary film).

• Sad and angry stuff from Caroline on the terrible, and terribly predictable, human cost of abortion bans (assuming you think women are humans, which is clearly one of the points of contention here):

  Invisible Women: a high stakes conflict of interest

1. Rooney is enormously successful, and enormously uncomfortable with her success. Another thing I’d forgotten about Beautiful World is how much of it is preoccupied with the travails of being a lauded, adored novelist. Rooney has called literary celebrity a “hell”, but it is hard to sympathise. The nearest thing to Taylor Swift in literary fiction is still a long way from being actual Taylor Swift, and even Taylor Swift has the good grace to behave as though she enjoys her popularity.

2. Ah, the Great Awokening, when writing about white people was bad (erasure!), but being a white person writing about non-white people was also bad (appropriation!). Luckily for Rooney, she was too big by then for the charge to stick, and anyway she’s Irish, which has a certain power for dispelling accusations of colonialism.

3. In photoshoots, Rooney herself favours the kind of luxuriously subtle knitwear and heavyweight plaid skirts that definitely don’t come from Primark. Also, sometimes, an owl. But never smiling.

4. The reviews and my non-memories of Beautiful World mean I don’t really want to; my helpless commitment to the discourse means I probably will anyway.