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‘Sally Rooney can see it all coming, can sense the snark on the air.’ David Levenson/Getty Images
“Lying naked with her chin in her hand, reading poetry.” Jesus, here we go. I feel my hackles rise as I’m thrown into an arena where it’s me versus an imaginary other reader, who I needn’t bother describing, who likes this kind of thing. The spectators — men, male writers, all the dead noble poets we suffered through at university — are watching us in a fight to the death over what it means to be a woman writer, a woman reader. I find myself trying to prove to these crowds of imaginary men that I am not like my opponent, I am better, more serious, less cringe. This is the schizophrenic experience of being a young woman reading Sally Rooney.
We are all feminists until we read a book by another feminist, and then we’re bitchy schoolgirls, treading on each other’s necks. It does not escape me that this is an article by a woman about a book by a woman whose readership is famously female. With this fact comes a knot of pressures, a higher, colder standard to which Rooney is held: can she write from the perspective of men? Can she capture their feelings about sex? Does she only write about sex? Is this really a soap opera?
The few times I have rolled my eyes in the long and generally pleasurable experience of reading Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, have been in the moments of apparent pretentiousness. There’s a briefly mentioned character who is “always sneezing into a handkerchief and talking about Karl Marx”. A minor sin. But the moment that really flung me into orbit was when we met our Madonna, our nude poetry reader, our character embodying feminine academic seriousness, Sylvia, and she is described as a “Slender woman at the top of the room talking about eighteenth-century prose forms”. Resisting ridiculing this line — and I feel saintly for doing that — I want to ask instead why I find it so offensive. And I think it’s because I am assuming, quite wrongly, that Rooney is incapable of writing herself out of novels. I am assuming that, like the other waifish Trinity graduates of Rooney’s literary world, this is a model of herself, or of myself, or is something to do with us as female readers.
It is a suspicion Rooney has confronted, as in a recent interview with The Guardian. But this image, the one of Sylvia at the “top of the room”, of being thin, of being clever, has been damaging to Rooney’s early career because it crystallises the uncomfortable girliness, the languorous intensity, of her fans. I still remember a parodical tweet from four years ago which has followed Rooney around ever since: “Skinnily, I sadly and hotly forgot to eat for 7 days and I only realised when I fell over in front of trinity college and everyone was worried about me. Then a horrible man fed me something and we had sex. It felt good, and bad.” This tweeter is not like other girls, you understand; she has triumphantly determined that the novel those less discerning other girls like is, in fact, little more than wet-wipe fanfiction – the most hateful and superficial kind of contrarianism. But is this why I’m so quick to rag on it?
In other words, I find myself scoffing at the centre of a maze constructed of my own self-consciousness, my own snobberies and feelings of having to prove myself. This suggests an uncomfortable possibility: that Rooney is not in fact, as I have heard from my peers many times, a bad writer — I really think she’s quite good — but that the toxicity of the discourse around her means that some of us become bad readers. We fall more readily into the traps Rooney has laid out for us, particularly, in Intermezzo, by giving us two love objects — the superficial, OnlyFans-model student Naomi and the wounded, beatific intellectual Sylvia — both of whose thoughts are, unusually, concealed from us. Instead they are seen, primarily, through the gaze of the chaotic brute Peter, who is an alcoholic, suicidal human rights lawyer involved with them both. It is a conceit which deliberately draws us into arguments with ourselves about how we want to be represented, and traps us in a game of self-identification which means that the wider critical world, one which embraces relativism and pure textual pleasures, will always evade us.
But avoiding affront at how young women exist inside and outside this text, how they talk, speak, smell — is an excruciating task. At one point, our Gen Z wastrel Naomi, who is forever enveloped in sensory lusciousness, “fragrance of perfume, sweat and cannabis”, says of Peter: “Honestly, very dilf-coded.” I glance at the packet of paracetamol on my bedside table. Wouldn’t be enough. At the end of this same page, we get a string of impressive academic references, presumably to stop us from throwing the book across the room. “Toussaint Louverture. Bolívar, Garibaldi.” This perfectly sums up why Rooney is good, but also a bit cringe — it’s that combination of aggressive contemporariness and erudition, the archetypal English Student. If I’m uncomfortable with this, it’s because I was one.
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SubscribeI read one of her novels, Normal People, I think. It was readable, the style was engaging but that was about it. I thought it should be re-marketed as Young Adult fiction – 15 to mid twenties. It was very self-conscious; acutely concerned of how she, as an author, comes across. When she announced her anti-Israeli stunt, mentioned in the article, that confirmed my impressions. She clearly has talent but I’m not rushing to buy the book reviewed here. Maybe in ten years time, she might turn her gaze away from her navel, and write something of interest – the talent is there.
Am I the biggest misogynist I know?
Oh, go on, do it – women have been doing it for years.