Writer for her generation? Perhaps
Rooney’s novels touted as ones drawing interest of millennials
The great millennial novelist has arrived.
Or maybe not. Or maybe it doesn’t even matter.
Sally Rooney, a 28-year-old Dubliner, whose second book, “Normal People,” was recently released in the United States, seems to have the inside track on being her generation’s spokesnovelist. Jane Hu writing at The Ringer says that Rooney has written “great Millennial novels.”
Buzzfeed says that Rooney has written “novels Millennials want to read.” Google Sally Rooney + millennial, and you get 300,000 hits.
This is a thing we do: decide that certain artists speak for their generation. Hemingway did for the Lost Generation, Kesey and Kerouac for the Beats. The chief candidate for my generation — Gen X — is probably the late David Foster Wallace, with his particular mixture of irony and sincerity matching the slacker self-loathing and discontent.
Lena Dunham, of HBO’s “Girls,” has been the avatar for millennials, but she’s been lying low, and even in the Netflix era a novelist has a certain highbrow legitimacy that a TV auteur lacks.
Rooney’s novels, “Normal People” and its predecessor, “Conversations with Friends,” do indeed concern the lives of young people. Not much action happens, but drama seems to attach to the seemingly smallest of moments. Rooney’s gift is to wring tension out of two young women sitting on a bed, not talking about the affair one character is having and both know is happening, as in “Conversations with Friends.”
Once you start reading a Sally Rooney novel, you don’t stop, even as it is difficult to pinpoint the action beyond the broadest strokes.
These are young people struggling with figuring out who they are, what sort of life will bring them meaning. They lack money, and the world seems unwelcoming. If there is solace, it’s in relationships — but those too are fraught with drama.
Writing at Lit Hub, Emily Temple cautions against “pigeonholing” Rooney as a millennial novelist, arguing Rooney’s Irishness is as defining a trait as her age. She wonders if the label is more a matter of marketing, though in a way this may make the novel more of a millennial artifact than less.
If Rooney is the great millennial novelist, we should see some progress in the title, as the great generational novelist has almost exclusively been previously reserved for men.
Jay McInerny was called “the voice of a generation” upon the 1984 release of “Bright Lights, Big City,” a tale of young Manhattan big shots partying their way through life. But the novel now lives as something of a curio, very much of a specific time and place but not saying much that endures beyond that moment.
On the other hand, The Beats predicated the ’60s hippie movement and took on additional and lasting reverence because of it. And Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” a world where years are named after consumer products and a single video is of such fascination it puts people in a catatonic state, seems to continue to speak to the present, even though it’s only two years shy of its 25th anniversary.
As to whether any of this matters, I tend to lean toward Temple’s view. If the label is to be substantive, we’re probably too close to recognize what the great millennial novel is or will be.
Just because Rooney is writing about young people struggling for meaning and security in a post-recession world doesn’t mean she’s defined a generation. This is what novelists have always done. McCann
Not quite a mystery or crime novel, but one that nontheless has crime and mystery at the center: Hannah Pittard’s