OF THE PEOPLE
The story of literary phenomenon, author Sally Rooney.
IT’S HARD TO KEEP TRACK OF ALL THE ACCOLADES NORMAL PEOPLE – THE NOVEL THAT’S BEEN A TALKING POINT OF ALMOST EVERY BOOK CLUB THIS YEAR – AUTHOR SALLY ROONEY HAS RACKED UP IN RECENT MONTHS. WRITER AND CRITIC A. N. DEVERS DISCOVERS THAT THE IRISH LITERARY PHENOM IS NOT QUITE SURE WHAT TO MAKE OF THEM HERSELF
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR INTO OUR CONVERSATION, Sally Rooney and I begin talking about the end of the world as we know it. But maybe it’s best to rewind a bit. When I arrive at the Library Bar, in Rooney’s adopted hometown of Dublin, the 28-year-old author is waiting for me in a low-slung reading chair, politely having chosen a spot next to a window and facing the entryway to avoid any possibility of us missing each other. The bar is unassuming, the kind of place Dubliners know about and tourists miss entirely.
It feels appropriate to offer congratulations, since just two days prior, Rooney became the youngest recipient ever of the Costa Novel Award (formerly the Whitbread) for Best Novel for her second book, Normal People. The coming-of-age story had already received recognition, such as Waterstones’ Book of the Year, and had been nominated for the Man Booker Prize (which went to Anna Burns’ Milkman). What’s more, Rooney has been dubbed “Salinger for the Snapchat generation” and the “voice of the millennials”, which is a lot of labels. Hype over Normal People has hit such a fever pitch in the literary community that an American friend recently admitted to having been so desperate to read it, she turned to “the black market” to acquire the book.
Rooney nods, says thank you and mildly acknowledges that the praise is nice to hear, but that she’s also a bit wary of all the attention. “How am I any more interesting than any other random person on the street?” she asks. “I just don’t get it.”
She might find the attention baffling, but there’s no question that Normal People and her debut novel, Conversations With Friends, struck booming chords with readers, and those readers are hungry to know more about the person who wrote them. And so Rooney has become something of a literary It-girl. But applying the title in 2019 feels uninspired and wrong, or at the very least, diminutive. And anyway, describing the author doesn’t say much about the work itself.
So let’s try that instead. Rooney has a skill many established writers still don’t, which is the ability to seamlessly weave in our phones, our social media use, our connectivity — and an accompanying awareness of their effects on image, identity, relationships and our brains — into her plots and conversations without making it feel forced or gimmicky. It may be a millennial awareness, but she conveys it with 19th-century literary muscle, which makes complete sense, considering she read loads of Jane Austen and George Eliot while writing both novels. Now she’s on a Henry James tear — and also working on a Normal People screenplay for BBC. Set partly in Dublin, about five minutes from where we’re sitting, Normal People is about two Trinity College students (Rooney is an alumna) from the same hometown who have a close, complicated and secretive high-school history. It’s also about attraction and depression and sex and ennui and youth and social/class structure and feelings and love and the difficulty of sharing and expressing emotions in an era when there are too many means of getting in contact with one another. Conversations With Friends is also about these things, and yet they are very different books.
Author Sheila Heti, Rooney’s friend, says of the young writer’s work, “There is something delicious about her writing. Even the first scene in Normal People, with the woman in her stockings — that detail is so good. It brings you in.” Heti also
appreciates Rooney’s pared-down style: “The way she writes feels radically confident, and yet there is a quality of abasement to what her characters go through, so the confidence is tempered by that.” Heti agrees that “there’s something of the 19th-century novelist about Rooney”, but stresses that her work is ultra contemporary.
Rooney admits to being a fan of the era, “but in a very conflicted way, because it’s so structurally bourgeois, and there’s so much that it can’t accommodate, even about gender. And so often the female protagonist who subverts the confines of the 19th-century bourgeois novel just dies at the end because she’s too dangerous. It’s like the author can’t handle her, so she just dies,” she says. “Henry James does that, Dostoyevsky does that; so even though I feel this deep connection to the 19th-century novel, and spend a lot of time reading them and about them, I also feel this kind of repulsion or anger or frustration about the limits of this form — and also how there still are limits.”
The form she loves is defined by the strictures of capitalism, which Rooney also finds problematic. (“The system is broken,” she says.) She believes in socialism’s ability to effect positive change, but she worries there isn’t enough time left. “It’s the speed at which the planet is dying that makes me think a full-on civilisational collapse is a possibility,” she says. “I mean, if we just completely halt the whole thing — the fossil fuels, etcetera — maybe the earth will, in time, return to being liveable. Human beings can continue, just without all the accoutrements, like electricity and so forth.”
But until then, what does a writer do? If you’re Rooney, you keep writing. For the first time in recent memory, the latest young literary superstar being billed a genius is not male. Seated across from her, I’m actually slightly scared of her intelligence — it’s easy to see how she became a champion debater in college, and the millennial generation would no doubt be happy to accept her as its spokesperson, were she so inclined. If we’re lucky, she’ll write until the end. And we will read, if only to help us understand what is happening around us and to us.
“HOW AM I any MORE INTERESTING THAN any other RANDOM PERSON in the STREET? I DON’T GET IT”