June 16, 2023 - 10:00am
This week, I came across two very different sets of stories about women’s lives. I had travelled to Greece for a conference with the organisation Black Elephant, part of which involved being told ancient stories from around the world by globally renowned mythologist Dr Martin Shaw.
One book, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, has been described as the “novel of the summer” and hailed as “the new Sally Rooney“. There now seem to be more new Sally Rooneys than claimants to be the lost Princess Anastasia, but the author Coco Mellors is the current front runner.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein is a clunky but oddly compelling debut novel about a young woman (Cleo) who marries a much older man (Frank) in contemporary New York. The nihilistic, drug-fuelled world of the city’s art and advertising industries are the backdrop to Cleo’s slow disintegration into despair.
Cleo is beautiful, creative and depressed. She sleeps with people she shouldn’t and eventually attempts suicide on a pile of soil that she has heaved into the pristine Manhattan apartment she shares with Frank. It reads as an accidental piece of performance art. She is the latest iteration of the Sad Girl, the sexually available, waifish heroine whose mental health problems are their whole personality. She is also crushingly familiar.
Sad Girl Lit has dominated the bestseller lists in recent years. It isn’t new, of course; Sylvia Plath and Jean Rhys were doing it decades ago, but it is now ubiquitous. Sorrow and Bliss, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Acts of Desperation, and of course everything by Sally Rooney. I’ve read them all, and even enjoyed some of them. But the relentlessness of this trope is beginning to feel suffocating. At least Fleabag was funny.
The contrast with the women in Martin Shaw’s old stories was stark. Queens, warriors, wise women. Tatterhood, a wild (and ugly) twin who rides a goat, loves her sister and travels the world, full of life and defiance. Vasilisa frees the firebird and wears a dress of 10,000 secrets woven by all her female ancestors. Even The Handless Maiden, the classic Grimm’s fairy tale, in which trauma is so visible, takes a potential victimised “sad girl” and turns her into a Queen who heals herself in a hut in the woods.
Stories matter. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue coined the term the “Storied Self”, and argued that we paste together a sense of identity from the narratives available to us. He said: “I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question: “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”
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SubscribeThis is the first time I’ve heard of Sally Rooney. Sounds boring.
Sally Rooney’s book Normal People was billed as an amazing book of feminist literature.
Intrigued, I read it and found the only thing remarkable about the book was how utterly boring it was. I guess the clue is in the name. Still, I wish the various book reviewers who hyped it had been more honest and not just looking for ideological group approval.
The reviews at my library’s website range from “loved it” to “yuck,” with a preponderance of “middling.”
It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I would enjoy.
I think it got a lot of mileage based on very sympathetic reviews and suspect many people spoke positively about it because “they were supposed to” and didn’t want to violate group consensus.
I think it got a lot of mileage based on very sympathetic reviews and suspect many people spoke positively about it because “they were supposed to” and didn’t want to violate group consensus.
Totally agree. I read it and thought it should be marketed as Young Adult fiction. Teen romance, heartache, sex. Would have more fun reading ‘Jackie’ the girl teen magazine of many years ago (whatever happened to it)? I’m not tempted to read any more of her stuff on literary merit – or for her grotesque virtue-signalling; refusing to have her work translated into Hebrew because Palestinian rights are so ‘right-on’.
The reviews at my library’s website range from “loved it” to “yuck,” with a preponderance of “middling.”
It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I would enjoy.
Totally agree. I read it and thought it should be marketed as Young Adult fiction. Teen romance, heartache, sex. Would have more fun reading ‘Jackie’ the girl teen magazine of many years ago (whatever happened to it)? I’m not tempted to read any more of her stuff on literary merit – or for her grotesque virtue-signalling; refusing to have her work translated into Hebrew because Palestinian rights are so ‘right-on’.
S
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This is why I so mourn the passing of Martin Amis. Couldn’t be doing with his novels, but his non-fiction was without parallel. He seriously raised the bar when it came to literary criticism… which has now fallen well below its previous level. He would have shredded Rooney’s well-meaning blether with his customary wit, elegance and insight. Alas a treat we’ll now not have.
This is why I so mourn the passing of Martin Amis. Couldn’t be doing with his novels, but his non-fiction was without parallel. He seriously raised the bar when it came to literary criticism in his prime. He would have shredded Rooney’s shallow emotional posturing with all his customary elegance, insight and wit. Alas, a treat we’ll now not have.
Sally Rooney’s book Normal People was billed as an amazing book of feminist literature.
Intrigued, I read it and found the only thing remarkable about the book was how utterly boring it was. I guess the clue is in the name. Still, I wish the various book reviewers who hyped it had been more honest and not just looking for ideological group approval.
S
.
This is why I so mourn the passing of Martin Amis. Couldn’t be doing with his novels, but his non-fiction was without parallel. He seriously raised the bar when it came to literary criticism… which has now fallen well below its previous level. He would have shredded Rooney’s well-meaning blether with his customary wit, elegance and insight. Alas a treat we’ll now not have.
This is why I so mourn the passing of Martin Amis. Couldn’t be doing with his novels, but his non-fiction was without parallel. He seriously raised the bar when it came to literary criticism in his prime. He would have shredded Rooney’s shallow emotional posturing with all his customary elegance, insight and wit. Alas, a treat we’ll now not have.
This is the first time I’ve heard of Sally Rooney. Sounds boring.
Two examples of the genre which I’ve read in the last few months have been Francois Mauriac’s Therese Desqeyroux and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I’ve got the latter’s L’Education Sentimentale queued up behind Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, which I’m about two thirds of the way through. I occasionally make somewhat heavy weather of James’s writing, but am very much taken with TPC.
I won’t be reading Sally Rooney, because of my policy of only reading novels by white men.
Two examples of the genre which I’ve read in the last few months have been Francois Mauriac’s Therese Desqeyroux and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I’ve got the latter’s L’Education Sentimentale queued up behind Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, which I’m about two thirds of the way through. I occasionally make somewhat heavy weather of James’s writing, but am very much taken with TPC.
I won’t be reading Sally Rooney, because of my policy of only reading novels by white men.
Ah, Jean Rhys! Just had a PTSD style flashback to my EngLit block on post colonialism. Help!
I read “Wide Sargasso Sea.” It was okay.
I thought it was OK too, nothing more. it was one we ran through the deconstruction process.
Oh, I just read it because my teacher mentioned that it was a Jane Eyre “adjacent” work and she had liked it. We didn’t study it.
Oh, I just read it because my teacher mentioned that it was a Jane Eyre “adjacent” work and she had liked it. We didn’t study it.
I thought it was OK too, nothing more. it was one we ran through the deconstruction process.
.
Clumping Jean Rhys and Sally Rooney together really is half witted. Rhys was a genius, plain and simple. What she – and of course Sylvia Plath – had, in spades, was originality. You really can’t accuse Sally Rooney of that.
Oh gawd. I can just imagine how critical theory, which was just getting its claws into english lit way back in in the late 70s, could wreck the experience of reading an utterly astonishing book. Rhys really was sui generis, and a genius.
I actually consider myself not just fortunate but blessed, in having spent 3 years studying both English and Classics before the theorists got a hold. It was a terrific and mind-expanding experience. It’s extraordinary how ideology just sucks the life and joy out of art. (Anyone remember the excruciating ‘explanations’ attached to the Hogarth exhibits recently?)
I actually consider myself not just fortunate but blessed, in having spent 3 years studying both English and Classics before the theorists got a hold. It was a terrific and mind-expanding experience. It’s extraordinary how ideology just sucks the life and joy out of art. (Anyone remember the excruciating ‘explanations’ attached to the Hogarth exhibits recently?)
I read “Wide Sargasso Sea.” It was okay.
.
Clumping Jean Rhys and Sally Rooney together really is half witted. Rhys was a genius, plain and simple. What she – and of course Sylvia Plath – had, in spades, was originality. You really can’t accuse Sally Rooney of that.
Oh gawd. I can just imagine how critical theory, which was just getting its claws into english lit way back in in the late 70s, could wreck the experience of reading an utterly astonishing book. Rhys really was sui generis, and a genius.
Ah, Jean Rhys! Just had a PTSD style flashback to my EngLit block on post colonialism. Help!
Check out the Black Elephant link in the first paragraph for some world class bullshit. “Black Elephant brings very different people together and forges genuine connection between them, through the sharing of vulnerability”
Indeed. Scroll further down and you’ll be faced with a gallery of the conspicuously virtuous – the kind of people who would happily reduce the world to one vast therapeutic community. Imagine a world where vulnerability is a measure of status.
A pack of pachyderms they call it. Well, it’s certainly a pack of something.
This is like curing tiredness with sleeping. Some times what you need to cure tiredness is exercise not more sleeping.
Are you sure you aren’t referring to apathy rather than tiredness?
Are you sure you aren’t referring to apathy rather than tiredness?
This is like curing tiredness with sleeping. Some times what you need to cure tiredness is exercise not more sleeping.
Indeed. Scroll further down and you’ll be faced with a gallery of the conspicuously virtuous – the kind of people who would happily reduce the world to one vast therapeutic community. Imagine a world where vulnerability is a measure of status.
A pack of pachyderms they call it. Well, it’s certainly a pack of something.
Check out the Black Elephant link in the first paragraph for some world class bullshit. “Black Elephant brings very different people together and forges genuine connection between them, through the sharing of vulnerability”