The Daily Telegraph - Features
The strange – and wrong-headed – cult of ‘Marxist Millennial’ Sally Rooney
Her books are full of Left-wing rhetoric but, argues Jessa Crispin, their characters are ultimately as conventional as they come
Maybe you’ve been wondering if you should try to get into Sally Rooney. You’ve seen the glowing reviews, the breathless blurbs, maybe you’ve seen a trailer for one of the TV shows based on her books. But you’re still on the fence. Well, let me help tip you one way or the other. There is an interaction in the first episode of the latest adaptation of a Rooney novel, Conversations with Friends, that feels representative of her whole vibe. Two young, leftist, professional, attractive, and privileged members of the creative class as an act of foreplay speak the following words:
“So are you a committed communist?”
“Not really. I don’t do anything about it at all.”
If the idea of watching two middle-class types discussing radical politics as a method of flirtation sets your teeth on edge, you might want to skip the oeuvre. Because this is kind of Rooney’s shtick, she writes conventional love stories about actors, writers and other creatives who announce their allegiance to extreme political ideologies but ultimately choose to live conventional lives of marriage, childbearing and heteronormativity while producing cultural commodities. In that sense, she is perhaps the voice of the Millennial generation, with its relatively high percentage of college-educated members participating in far-Left political groups while mostly living conventional lives.
And “voice of her generation” or “Millennial Jane Austen” are labels that have been bestowed upon Rooney since the 2017 publication of her debut novel Conversations with Friends, about a love quadrangle between two aspiring poets and a slightly older married couple, one a famous writer and the other an actor. But for as long as she has been praised as being a chronicler of her time, she’s also been known as our most prominent Marxist novelist, as an important part of her promotional campaign has been to frequently mention in interviews that she is a Marxist.
“I’m very sceptical of the way in which books are marketed as commodities, almost like accessories you can decorate your home with, beautiful items to fill your shelves with and thereby become a sort of ‘ book person’,” she said in a 2018 interview at the Louisiana Literature festival. Despite her scepticism, there was a massive swag promotion tied in with the publication of her latest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You. Her UK publisher Faber and Faber created a Sally Rooney themed pop-up shop in Shoreditch, with her books, Rooney-branded apparel (including the infamous yellow bucket hat, a garish accessory that set off weeks of debate on social media about who exactly still wears bucket hats and what this says about Faber’s targeted audience), and calligraphy and candle-making workshops.
The “commodification” of art is a running theme through her three novels. She only really writes about people tied into the creative economy, and each of them gets space within the book to hold forth on the way capital warps the artistic pursuit. This is most explicit in Beautiful World’s Alice, a young Irish novelist ambivalent about her fame, who complains about what is expected of her as a writer (press, touring, the production of successful written products that will then be sold), but doesn’t once seem to consider using her power as a bestselling novelist to say no to invitations to international galas. She explains the writer’s life thus: “They come home from their weekend in Berlin,” Alice complains, “after four newspaper interviews, three photoshoots, two sold-out events, three long leisurely dinners where everyone complained about bad reviews, and they open up the old MacBook to write a beautifully observed little novel about ‘real life’. I don’t say this lightly: it makes me want
to be sick.” Despite Rooney insisting in multiple interviews that Alice is not based on herself, she does share her fictional counterpart’s disdain for disclosure. She is remarkably cagey for a writer of her fame, in one particular instance getting paranoid when an interviewer asked about her husband. She demanded to know how the publication learned she was married, and the journalist gently pointed out Rooney had thanked him in the acknowledgments to her book.
That said, her reticence is refreshing in an age when other writers give house and garden video tours of their homes or smoke some weed and decide to harass their fans on Twitter. But as someone who was profited a great deal through her own process of commodification, a process she and her characters insist they detest, it’s almost absurd how frequently she opines in the press about the downside of the publicity process, her hatred for the fetish of commodities, the corrupting force of money when she is doing so well at all of it. And considering how many leftists are rejected by their following when they become rich and successful due to the perceived hypocrisy of someone spouting Marxist theory while building wealth in the marketplace, it would not be surprising if there was a backlash building.
That tension between that awareness of the corrosive effects of capitalism and the unwillingness to find alternative ways of operating because they are doing so well within capitalism is repeated throughout her novels. Rooney continued in the Louisiana interview, “The best I can do is to try and observe how class, as a very broad social structure, impacts our personal and intimate lives.” That makes her sound like a modern Emile Zola, but even Austen chronicled more astutely and wittily the difficulty romance faces in the presence (or absence) of capital.
Conversations’s narrator Frances, poet and university student, declares herself a communist at various moments in the novel, and describes a date with her married lover as, “Over dinner we exchanged some of the details of our lives. I explained that I wanted to destroy capitalism and I considered masculinity personally oppressive.” She might find masculinity personally oppressive, but she chooses to engage with this man sexually, because what else could she do? Just as Alice can’t help to be turned into a commodity by her publishing career, her friend Eileen can’t help but be turned into a stay-at-home mother supported by her older male partner, because his contribution to the world of work will always be valued more highly than hers because of patriarchal capitalism. She knows it’s not feminist, but feminism has also been co-opted by capitalism, so there are no alternatives, really.
At the end of the day, Rooney is writing conventional little love stories, complete with happy endings tied up in coupledom and childbearing, sprinkled with Marxist rhetoric to give them an edge.
This helps her fit in with her writer peers, like essayist Jia Tolentino, who talks about the structural misogyny involved beauty culture while justifying her decision to get veneers and take Pure Barre classes, or internet star Hasan Piker, who talks about income inequality while streaming video games on Twitch and making enough money to buy a giant house and a Porsche. None of their political beliefs seem insincere, exactly, but that doesn’t make it less of a grift. I, for one, am not buying what they’re selling.
‘Conversations with Friends’ is on iPlayer now