Anne Rice’s success was deserved, Stephen King’s deserved, Tom Clancey’s, whoever wrote the Fifty Shades, and so on. They worked for it, tapped into the reader’s psyche, and, like all good romance writers from Jane Austen to James Hilton, she delivered the goods.
And there is nothing wrong with being a romance writer, it pays the bill and allows you to do what you love best. But, let’s be under no illusion about it. She isn’t pushing the boundaries of fiction, the novel, or frankly anything else. She is serving up lifestyle dreams. (And does it with the most hackneyed method; the novelist as character.) She is certainly no Dorthy Parker or Flannery O’Conner, let alone a Mitford.
And Marxism at this point is just a talking point, a way to either differentiate yourself or even more sadly, to fit it, to push the right levers to get past the hall of editors. Of course, she is hawking candles in that most millennial of marketing ideas, the pop-up. As she is a pop-up, only to be replaced at the next literary faire.

Who? Really if she walked down the street who would know or care? Ok I’m not the demographic and I gave up on current fiction years ago, but please I don’t care what some well off Marxist pseudo whines about;

“Oh whoa is me, I’ve got all this money and half a dozen Hackney millennials recognise me, how will my Marxist principles cope”.

Really, why is this article indulging this? For goodness sake even her bloody photo looks self pitying.

So why doesn’t Rooney follow the example of Thomas Pynchon and embrace the mystique of life as a literary recluse?

At a guess because anyone who identifies with a murderous ideology like Marxism is necessarily a vacuous, hypocritical poseur. No genuinely thoughtful person could ever profess to be a Marxist. You have to be a misanthropic hatemonger.
She’s Anders Breivik but with a laptop rather than a gun. As a writer she’s Andy McNab: read only by her own sex.
Why isn’t her chicklit sold by weight?

There seem to be a lot of self-proclaimed Marxists around these days. I wonder how many of them have read Marx. But then again, maybe one doesn’t need to.

The novel was originally a genre for over sensitive women with time to wring their hands within the 18th century vogue for The Sentimental. The first ‘sensation’ was the risible Pamela ( satirised by Fielding in his parody ‘Shamela’). Today the novel, despite the pompous claims of the literary world and academia, has largely returned to its roots.

“A pop-up shop in Shoreditch” sounds like the makings of an interesting novel. Or song. Or poem.

Rooney strikes me as typical of the self loathing and loathsome generation of women who have much more than their predecessors but lack the nuances and life experiences. A writer writing a book about writers is so dull. She’s a Marxist because she’s thick. Is she related to Wayne Rooney? He’s more interesting. Innit.

Thank you Sarah Ditum for this great review. I might just read the earlier works, as your extract illustrating Ms Rooney’s capacity for distillation of a socio-economic moment was indeed impressive, something the undeniably amusing comments posted below seem to have overlooked.