Sally Rooney’s therapy trap She's the portraitist of our narcissistic age

It’s not, then, all that new. But there is the injection of something, which marks a real divergence from her other novels: an attempt at self-conscious prose style. Rooney has never been much of a stylist, confessing to relative indifference to the language itself. When writing about Ivan or Margaret, Rooney works in her traditional third-person present-tense narration — a partial return to the mode of Normal People. But when writing about Peter, Rooney adopts an internal monologue generally broken up into terse, subjectless fragments.

This monologue will probably get Intermezzo called Rooney’s most Joycean novel. Though other than her essential Irishness, the charge doesn’t properly stick. There’s nothing like Stephen Dedalus or the toddering Leopold Bloom, ordering the whole cosmos in his head, as if he were both God and Falstaff. Not even if the conspicuously educated Peter Koubeck is constantly referring to Hamlet, or the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, the most interesting writing in the book is often here, in the certain wandering monologues of Peter Koubek:

Says she’s staying with Max for the month, good old Max.
See him sometimes at Sylvia’s still. Useless he was too in
competition. Too nice, not ruthless enough, always seeing both
sides. Funny though. All her friends are. Lightly she has to hold
the world, lovingly but lightly…

It’s the first time I’ve read Rooney and felt the excitement of the writer at work with words. After reading those lines, it’s hard to say that Rooney is a writer uninterested in language. Even if it’s sometimes laboured, the freer syntax is a welcome change — it made me realise just how bare and overly-crafted her writing could be before. And as her former embarrassment with the artier side of the equation evaporates from many of the novel’s best pages, Rooney can now write something like that last sentence: “Lightly she has to hold the world, lovingly but lightly.” It’s among the most musical, most balanced phrases in her oeuvre.

Unfortunately, she cannot really sustain such a musical construction. Perhaps this isn’t entirely fair on Rooney: chess, logic, and debate are more clearly the organising themes of the book. And they’re especially good metaphors for all of her books, which have featured tight units of desperate people, engaged in romance as if it were a game they somehow had to win. Intermezzo is much the same, reading like nothing so much as Rooney’s account of a chess match. The way characters manoeuvre to get what they want, while poring over their own motives. These character dyads are very much opponents, and Rooney writes them as though forced to chronicle every last rhetorical move.

This makes the novel absolutely infuriating. And it brings me to the crux of Rooney’s wild success: that Rooney is indeed the perfect writer for our times, but that this may be a very sad thing for our times. For as good a writer as she often is, Rooney’s novels are stubbornly, even obsessively, about constructing ultra-realistic accounts of social behaviour between individuals in the 21st century. Rooney is consumed with psychology. So are her characters. Margaret, Sylvia, Naomi, and Ivan and Peter Koubeck are only the most recent in a long line of Rooney characters who are constantly musing about their own psychology, constantly searching for breakthroughs and finding that their insights don’t always bring them the peace and confidence they’re looking for.

This is wisdom on the part of Rooney, I must admit. She’s too smart and fine a writer to allow a character to have a revelation and then wrap it up, pat, in a nice truthy ribbon. She’s too cunning a psychological portraitist to let her characters off the hook. All are to blame, all are selfish, yet all need grace and compassion. One of the reasons people adore her books is, I imagine, because they would very much like to reach out and cradle these characters the way they, too, wish they could be cradled. I feel it when reading her books: an immense tenderness for these poor lonely people, the desire to help them because they remind me so much of me.

In this way Rooney is the great portraitist of the age — and that is precisely what depresses me. Because ours is an age so dreadfully and myopically concerned with its own psychology, often at the expense of everything else. What else but a self-obsessed culture would be so consumed with therapy as a substitute for life? The trouble with Intermezzo is just how little there ends up being in it besides this exhaustive play-by-play of human behaviour. In the narcissistic jail of contemporary life, Rooney is hardly a Prison Warden, yet neither is she a true accomplice in the escape. More like a priest on the eve of execution, there to dispense forgiveness but incapable of intervening in our ultimate doom. This is not to say she must intervene: there’s nothing Rooney ought to be doing, if we’re to regard literature as free in any meaningful way.

But there is, I think, a failure to interrogate the deeper myths which her books have all come up against, and skated over. This isn’t unique to Rooney — she’s merely in the position of most exemplifying it, because she’s become so adept at realising the minutiae of our contemporary psyches. The first of these myths is the most contemporary one. Our culture is fundamentally still reeling from the introduction of the idea of the Blank Slate, somewhere during the Enlightenment, after aeons of belief in essential nature. It’s there in contemporary gender theory, just as much as it is in the Silicon Valley techno-utopians transforming themselves into efficiency-machines. It’s the myth that at bottom we are infinitely changeable — that there is no bottom, really. Only the infinite input of senses, into an empty box.

Early in Intermezzo this rears its head in Peter’s monologue, as he muses about “classical conditioning”. It haunts the rest of the book. Isn’t it all just conditioning? Isn’t it all just bodies cajoling, persuading, conforming to other bodies, atoms colliding blindly in the dark? Yet in our world, this myth has become inseparable from another: that of the passing away of Nature. Just as we are watching a planet slowly dying because of our technological progress, so we’re trying to choke ourselves of any sense that there is a similar Human Nature — any set of instincts, beauties, or talents which are mysteriously inherent, or inheritable. We’re not sure which to hate more: the idea that there is something inherent in us, or the idea that there is not.

However, what lingers at the edge of Rooney’s fictions, and of all our contemporary fictions, is something deeper and stranger. Something we can’t quite seem to give ourselves up to. In Rooney’s work, it’s generally there in her allusions to the Catholicism of her native Ireland, and it buzzes around the boundaries of her work. In Beautiful World, Where are You, it was Alice and Eleanor’s conversations about Jesus, their wonderment at their perfect and pious friend Simon. In Intermezzo it resurfaces: Ivan or Margaret or Peter will think briefly about Jesus, about God, about bigger plans. But they will, like Rooney does, come just shy of admitting that there’s some more transcendent thing at play. This is the predicament of so much mundane fiction today: it insists that we must be concerned with the real world of practical socio-political problems, yet largely exiles the imagination, the capacity of fiction to open up the world for play.

There’s a logical paradox to the Blank Slate, which I’m sure Rooney herself would appreciate. If all we are is what our senses take in, then where does the capacity to compare things come from? How do we choose what to focus on? There must be something innate that can tell one sense from another. But this is a hard thing to accept. Rooney’s best quality is that she wants to take the confusing questions of nature vs. nurture head on. The issue is that she has chosen a very predictable form of fiction, all about the question of whether characters can change or not. Her project is to map out the webs of motives and reasons that drive her characters’ psychologies, but this only ends up reproducing the worst patterns of our contemporary self-absorption.

As in real life, her characters’ psychological revelations are Russian nesting dolls: self-discovery is ultimately as good as repression for continuing to lie to oneself, which is what her characters are continually doing, even as they confess their sins to one another. As a portraitist of our age, Rooney is at least wise enough not to say that this is the end of the story. Her books always wrap up at the moment her characters finally collapse and admit their problems. And this is a fine and ancient project for a book, to take characters from alienation to reconciliation. But in Rooney’s language, in the language of behaviour alone, it ends up looking conspicuously like therapy. And to paraphrase something the great prophet of modern narcissism, Christopher Lasch, once said: a narcissist is someone who can survive infinite therapy.

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Sam Jennings is an American writer and musician living in London. More of his writing can be found at his Substack, Vita Contemplativa.

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