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Sally Rooney: Is she really all that and a bag of chips?
By
Published: May 16, 2022
Category:
Fiction
“Normal People,” from Sally Rooney’s novel, was the BBC’s most streamed series of 2020, with 63 million views.
Last week a friend recommended the 12-episode series on Hulu.
A few days ago, the next Sally Rooney series, “Conversations with Friends,” launched on Hulu.
I felt surrounded by Rooneyworld.
All I knew of her work was a story in The New Yorker that I didn’t like. But she’s ridiculously popular, and like any honest writer, I want to be popular, so I spent the weekend going to school on Sally Rooney.
I never binge, and I wasn’t tempted to when I watched the trailer for “Normal People.” But I did something out of character — I took a one-month trial of Hulu — and plunged in. After I watched all 12 30-minute episodes, I skimmed the book, which is very much like the series, only better: there are no endless shots of the characters climbing stairs, walking, drinking water, having conversations in monosyllables, or — I almost forgot — having sex that, on occasion, looks like love. [To read an excerpt of “Normal People” on Amazon and/or buy the paperback, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
I watched the trailer for “Conversations with Friends” and struggled through the first episode. It was more than enough. The story, such as it is, is largely about a young woman’s romance with the husband (played by Taylor Swift’s boyfriend) of a popular novelist. Sample dialogue: “I can’t remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily.” The Guardian reviewer didn’t hold back: “Sally Rooney’s second TV adaptation is an aggressively uneventful affair stuffed with meaningful looks and strained silences. Why doesn’t anyone speak? Why can’t anything happen?”
I’m taking a pass as well on Rooney’s most recent novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You: A Novel.” (To order the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.)
I’ve read enough and seen enough now to know what Rooneyworld looks like. It’s often set in respected schools, in well-appointed apartments, luxurious mansions, and elite vacation retreats. Young people sit with books they don’t seem to read. They have opinions that have little connection to their lives, or anyone’s. There are parties, endless beer, and so much wine drinking I hope the characters buy it by the case. And, more than anything, there is dialogue – “Fine” and “Okay” — that stands for all that the characters cannot say.
In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman took the 30,000 feet view of Rooney’s “disaffected millennial longing.” Her novels, she says, “follow brainy, alienated young people as they seek intimacy and —like Jane Austen’s heroines, but less subtly — refract their obsessions with interpersonal power through a sociopolitical lens.
Is that it? Millennials — humans a few years older than my daughter — love these books because they see themselves in them? That baffles me; the millennials I know are sharp and articulate. These characters, even the privileged and accomplished ones, feel unsophisticated and empty.
Again, in The New Yorker:
The critic Becca Rothfeld has usefully compared Rooney’s novels, for instance, to “Twilight” and “Fifty Shades of Grey,” books that waft seemingly ordinary women into fairy-tale lives. “If you are a writer in a Rooney novel,” Rothfeld observes, “you are sure to be discovered without going to any great lengths to promote yourself… And if you are a woman in a Rooney novel, you will only ever become disheveled in a glamorous way.” One can fairly connect Rooney to the young-adult (YA) genre, whose business is less often growth than the slow-motion coronation of a reader surrogate. Even the yearnings that shape how these books measure success are adolescent. Characters say that they care about love or justice; what they really seem to care about is external validation.
Reading that, I thought of the ending of “Normal People.” The lovers have broken up and made up for four or five years. They’re well-matched. What used to be called a couple. If they stayed together and supported one another… but he’s going to New York and she’s staying in Dublin. The cynic in me says: In a few years, we’ll see the sequel. The adult in me — the realist in me — says: Dude, you are just too old for Rooneyworld.
Am I missing Sally Rooney’s genius? Write me at HeadButlerNYC@AOL.com and set me straight.
