Across The Rooneyverse
Midnight launch parties. Times 100 profiles written by Lena Dunham. Reluctant first great millennial novelist. Over the past decade, commercial success and critical acclaim have come in equal measure for Irish novelist Sally Rooney. As Valerie Stivers notes, Rooney “has collapsed the Wells/Gide distinction between popular and literary fiction.” In this essay, I hope to analyze how Rooney has bridged this generic chasm by exploring why her latest novel, Intermezzo, is so popular and artistically compelling. Although Rooney recently declared that she is uninterested in career growth, her latest novel proves that she has matured greatly as an artist. Indeed, Rooney has only gotten better over the years from 2017’s Conversation with Friends and 2018’s Normal People to 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.
Rooney’s so popular because she is, like all great realists, actually a fantasy writer in disguise. Let me explain (shout out to the New Yorker for their funny but insightful conversation about how Rooney fandom compares to Harry Potter). Just as Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke had the wealth to spend her time redesigning cottages, so too do Intermezzo’s characters have the financial freedom to wax poetically about Marxism, environmentalism, and xenophobia while being insulated from the deleterious forces of late capitalism. Rooney’s comforting response to the evicted? Don’t worry – your ravishing older Irish boyfriend will offer his childhood home to you. Unlike real life, there is always a deus ex machina for the precariat in the Rooneyverse. However, unlike so many of her critics, I don’t believe this makes her writing any less compelling or sophisticated. In fact, her ability to elevate the quotidian life in her prose to the level of high drama is what makes her, in my eyes, part of a lineage stretching from Austen to Zadie Smith.
Now, Rooney’s work is so artistically compelling for a different but related reason. Just as Rooney traverses the ground between the realist and fantasy genres, she also unites content and form in a way not seen in Irish literature since Joyce and Beckett. Simply put, Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness, hyper-intellectualization, and anxious rumination all reflected the negative headspace of protagonist Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. Similarly, Beckett’s repetitive syntax, simplistic diction, and, again, anxious rumination, all reflected the frustrated, tormented mind of the narrator in The Unnamable. In Intermezzo, Rooney uses an urgent stream-of-consciousness style for Peter which reflects his relentless self-flagellation. Meanwhile, she uses a hyper-logical, composed style for Ivan which reflects his cerebral disposition.
Having accounted for Rooney’s popularity and acclaim, I will now turn to examining a more urgent question: Will her work endure? I, for one, believe it will. Again, as Stivers notes in her review of Intermezzo: “Rooney’s enormous popularity, I suspect, is due to the fact that she allows modern liberal audiences to enjoy the enduring appeal of old-fashioned, Christian, and specifically Catholic romantic forms without realizing that is what they are doing.” Yes, Rooney compels us to believe in love again. Is there a greater artistic gift than that?
