Why feminists love to hate Sally Rooney Her readers are reduced to bitchy schoolgirls

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.

Her prose, though, is so determinedly austere as to be at times inelegant. It is almost confrontationally simple — and at other times, frustratingly jumbled, primarily because of her allergy to punctuation. At one point, during a phone call, it is not clear who is speaking, nor is there much of a distinction between what is in the characters’ heads and what is said. Artful, I’m sure — but annoying.

To read Intermezzo is to read characters’ thoughts about romance, about possible romance, and then about birds or rain. God, there is so much rain. We resist, because of the relentlessly internal style of this novel, taking people at face value: Peter’s brother, Ivan, is a probably autistic chess nerd, his lover, Margaret, is a near-middle-aged woman in crisis — these things are externally true, but really much more complex. And the prose itself does sometimes slip into a jarring conventionality. I wince every time someone’s brows become “knitted”, or their breath “catches in their throat”. It happens a surprising amount.

But, then, I’m doing exactly what I shouldn’t be doing in sniggering at it. Rooney can see it all coming, can sense the snark on the air. In one scene, characters exchange uncharitable remarks about a new novel which everyone says is good. “Relish of mutual mean-spiritedness and high discernment.” She’s screening the backlash to her own hype, and in my head, I become sheepish. Sorry, Sally!

And I find myself feeling a little defensive of Rooney, while remaining hugely resentful of the cartoonish Rooney reader, the lover of “sad girl lit”, posing with a hardback and one of those stupidly big gingham scrunchies. Am I the biggest misogynist I know? Rooney’s male critics, though, can certainly piss off. After all, does difficulty, complexity, making the reader work their arse off to get it, make a novel good? Rooney’s plain-speaking, the way you can pleasurably whip through her novels, is value-neutral; and it is, perhaps, also a rebuke.

This plain-speaking provides a good basis for Rooney’s many, and extended, sex scenes. She captures the awkwardness incredibly well. I find myself laughing out loud at points, identifying men I’ve known with the painfully ridiculous Ivan, the way they sweetly fumble around. The way we model desire: Margaret tries “to embody the kind of woman he believed he couldn’t have — to incorporate that woman into herself”. When he first kisses her, it is “of course, a desperately embarrassing situation — a situation which seems to render her entire life meaningless”. I think I gasped upon reading this, at the intense truth of how that feels, to be extinguished by the banality of male desire.

At other times, we see feminism through men’s eyes. We see their flashing thoughts of “Stupid bitch. No, I’m sorry”, and discussing sexual politics between themselves (the extent to which this is wishful thinking is something Rooney or I will never know). Whether Rooney herself is indeed a Marxist (often touted as such) or political (she has withheld translation rights from Israeli firms, and writes in this and other novels about the rental crisis and climate change) is less interesting than whether her writing is good. Interviews tend to focus on her biography — something she resists — and what she stands for, but I resent that because I’m not sure men would be subjected to that. I don’t really mind if we share similar views on landlords, I’m reading a bloody novel. Saying that, I did spill some of the sauce from a packet of Waitrose moules marinières on the keyboard as I was writing this, so it probably doesn’t matter what I think.

But this is all to say that the criticism that Rooney is not a good writer, or writes only about love, is not fair. Granted, there are times when you wonder whether the working title for Intermezzo might in fact have been The Thwarting, and want to shout through the text — as I remember doing at the screen when suffering through the BBC’s version of Normal People — just get over yourselves and get back together! And eat some fucking food! But it is at times very good, and at times very sweet, and that is okay. Go out and buy this, read it, and if you hate it, that’s alright — but hate it for the right reasons, and more than anything, try to get over yourself. I’m working on that.

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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