my take on the new sally rooney
welcome back
It’s been one year since I posted last, that’s crazy! I’m glad some subscribers stuck around despite my paltry output. Did you know that Substack is now describing itself as “A new economic engine for culture?” Wow! And there is still a little red line when I type Substack into the text box, doesn’t the spellcheck know it’s dealing with the premiere culture engine of our time?
Let me preface this by saying that I deliberately did not read any of the discourse around Intermezzo because I wanted to insulate my opinions like a virgin moth encased in its cocoon. A friend of mine joked that he is refraining from reading the book because he didn’t want it to spoil the discourse. I am publishing this, foolhardily, before reading any other reviews that may change my mind. Maybe afterwards I will publish a follow-up about said reviews, a ranking(? I’m not sure what exactly I’m envisioning), discourse about the discourse, if anyone can stand that.
Let me also say that I tremendously admire Sally Rooney as a person, for her steadfast and unwavering Marxism in the face of/despite mainstream commercial success, and how she has used her platform to speak about the genocide in Gaza and the housing crisis in Dublin. I enjoyed her last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, and I will even admit that it made me weep. So I did what I almost never do, and bought a copy of Intermezzo new from Barnes and Noble instead of waiting for it to hit the secondhand market. Bizarrely, Barnes and Noble had its own exclusive edition with “bonus content,” which made me leery; the first time I saw a (different) book for sale with a sticker that said “contains Target exclusive chapter” my mind touched the void. To purchase the same book anywhere except Barnes and Noble, Target, etc. is to have only part of the text, to own an incomplete and substandard book.
But the weird Barnes and Noble marketing strategy can hardly be ascribed to Rooney. Let’s look at the text.
The book was full of this thin YA phrasing that feel like cliched platitudes while also making no fucking sense, e.g. “mute animal warmth” and “cool tactility of the phone screen.” How can animal warmth be anything other than mute? Is it the tactility of the phone screen that is cool, or the screen itself? Little annoyances, I know, but it felt like so much of the text was essentially weak padding around a weaker narrative.
I wished all the characters were slightly more evil, not that they aren’t complicated, but their complicating features are all so virtuous, they are all so sensitive and intelligent and transparent with one another about their feelings. Even when the characters fight, even when they physically assault one another, it’s introspectively analyzed and rationalized ad nauseum and a tidy justification (the grief!) jumps into place. My issue with this is not that it is unrealistic, which it is; it isn’t a bad thing for literature to represent worlds or characters or situations that can’t take place in real life, it just made for a sort of tepid reading. It was the literary equivalent of a reduced-calorie cookie: good for you, maybe, but doesn’t satisfy.
Is polyamory truly the way to save the modern career man? Are age gaps no big deal? Is this a bad-faith interpretation? I genuinely want to know, because it certainly seems that the whole message of the book is that unspoken societal prohibitions are hampering individual freedom. Don’t kill yourself, you can have two girlfriends!
What I loved about Beautiful World is that it really felt like a romantic novel of ideas, a “novel of values,” if such a term exists. The ideas/values therein were digestible and not too controversial maybe, but interesting all the same. Two years later and I still think of the passage about the amount of resources needed to manufacture and transport different flavors of sodas, and all for essentially fungible experience, no one’s life will be ruined if one flavor of soda disappears. And there were fragments of these insights in Intermezzo, but exclusively in conversation, and mostly had to do with rehashing the “liar who says all his hats are green” logic problem, which became tedious after the first two mentions. The eviction that drives a good portion of the plot is allowed to remain a plot device, with little discussion about the political or economic climate that made this event happen; the only impacts the book seems to be concerned with are the personal. The discussions about religion, the love of Jesus versus the love of God, those were interesting, but only vaguely sketched out, not left with enough room to ask truly interesting questions. Unlike Beautiful World, I felt left with a really faint impression of the author’s values, alluded to in the fact that Ivan (like me!) refuses to travel by airplane because of the climate, the dutiful union meeting attendance of avowedly white-collar characters (another thing I won’t get into here), and other traces so unremarkable as to be ignorable.
There is a lengthy postscript citing all the texts Rooney quotes from, alludes to, and paraphrases in Intermezzo, ranging from Sontag to Joyce to James; I understand she included it to be transparent, doubtless always a good thing, but it also seems to rub in your face how erudite and well-read and reference-laden this book is, screaming look how worthy of literary merit I am. In this and so many other parts of the book, I have this sneaking inarticulate feeling of disappointment. If you are so erudite and well-read, is this all you do with it? What does Rooney think of the Sontag she paraphrased, the Wittgenstein she translated?
And this is why I think Sally Rooney should pivot to nonfiction. I think her strengths are in making the abstract and complicated tangible; the ethical, historical, and philosophical arguments all become clear as water with her words. She has already proven herself to be a deft nonfiction writer—her essay “Even If You Beat Me” arguably launcher her literary career, and she wrote a blistering op-ed in the Irish Times about evictions in 2023. Her writing seems almost tensile—I don’t know if this word has ever been used in literary criticism before but it is the one that springs to mind. The romance, the interpersonal dynamics, while they are what commercial audiences want, are not interesting to me, even with the strange spicing of age gaps and/or polyamory.
Am I way off the mark? Does this book feel that way to anyone else, or am I crazy? Is it unfair of me to want Rooney to be anything other than what she is? Send me your thoughts, your links to Rooney discourse!