Reading Sally Rooney
A dozen or so years ago, when she and I still shared a home, I gave to my oldest stepdaughter what I think both of us would now agree was the greatest of Christmas gifts. She had just turned 13. I had wrapped, and put under the tree for her to find, the DVD box-set of the complete run of My So-Called Life. Those who were for whatever reason wrought-up in the earlyish 90s, tender and susceptible and weepy, will recognize this for the stroke of haphazard genius that it absolutely was.
In the drowsy quiet of the week between Christmas and New Year's, she sat glassy and transfixed, beset by TV-induced hypnagogia. For a handful of days, episode by episode by episode, she attended to the show in the posture of a person considering how best to plunge, as entirely as was possible, through the flickering surface of the screen.
Now and again, and as unobtrusively as I could manage, I'd take my place on the couch beside her and co-watch. Unobtrusiveness, I should say, does not come naturally to me. Did I therefore hold forth expansively about the great glory of Brian Krakow's wide-eyed stare and halo of ringlets? About the heartbreakingness of Angela Chase's recessed and depressive wordlessness? The unutterable perfection of her plaid-on-plaid ensembles? Did I waylay her about the unmatched delight of the Buffalo Tom episode, in which the band name "Buffalo Tom" is uttered something like 45 times in the span of an hour ("As you going to see BUFFALO TOM?," "Is BUFFALO TOM playing?," "I love BUFFALO TOM!" etc.)? Or about how genuinely saving it all had been for me — a little carved-out interlude for cleansing tearfulness — back in the trying early years of grad school? I promise you that I did not. Or, at least, I tried very hard not to.
There were other moments, though. Around the middle of the season, again as many of you may quite photorealistically recall, a series of vexations about sex — who has it, why, with whom, what it means, what not wanting to have it means — come vividly to the center of the plot. Virginity, shame and desire, the terrible intractability of boys: it's honestly quite beautifully done. This seemed as good a moment as any to hazard a remark or two.
"Hey, so!" I said, as we slouched shoulder-to-shoulder, taking in good-girl Sharon's disquisition on the whys and wherefores of high school sex. "This is really so good."
A long pulse of silence.
"And I mean...is there anything you feel like maybe talking about?"
I remember, with saturating clarity, what happened next. Without turning toward me, without the least flutter of her person, she exhaled a single unemphatic word.
"Nope."
I think about it a lot. And whenever I do, there it is: that same small-scale detonation of admiration, amazement, hilarity, love.
***
It was hard not to think about it when, about a decade later, at which point she was a recently-graduated young woman working and living on her own in Mexico, I gave her another gift. By then I had learned to navigate at least a little less clumsily this sort of transaction, with the kid and her sister. Giving aesthetic objects to young people (as I've said somewhere else) is delicate. If you're being prescriptive or insistent ("now this is cool") you are, allow me to suggest, doing it quite dramatically wrong. And anyway, the era in which I had any sort of advantaged cultural insight to bequeath unto them had long, long passed over into myth. I'd been stealing music from them for some time.
But I still passed along novels.
And so, because I'd read it and been captivated, because its swift lucidity and uncanny, unnerving emotional clinicism were not quite like anything I'd read in recent memory — and because it was a novel about the jolting turbulence of being a woman in her early 20s in the now-ish world — I sent on to her my copy of Conversations with Friends.
There is, let me say, an especially sweet pleasure in talking to your grown-up kids about books, and why they love the ones they love. And, sweet jesus, did this kid love Conversations with Friends — or, at least, did she find it surpassingly resonant, as well as suggestive, provoking, disquieting, limitlessly good to think with. She had so much to say! But as delightful to me as this taking-over — of which more in a minute — was what she told me she had done with all that agitated readerly responsiveness. In a gesture primed to induce in me frenzies of overidentification, she just...passed it on. She got herself another copy, mailed the other one to a friend, and set into motion a buzzing circuitry of what would soon prove to be 8 or so young women readers, gathered around their library copies or hand-me-down editions, each of whom found something in it to notice, to laugh over, to object to and be puzzled by and otherwise engage in intricate prolonged dispute about.
What I mean is: she enjoyed a book, and then convened a small brimming world around it. And then, through the crosscurrents of talk it generated and the disputes it animated, she and her friends looked to nurture and extend and substantialize that world, there in that first season of post-collegiate dispersion.
She told me all this, and there it was again: admiration, amazement, hilarity, etc.
***
And so, on a gray and blustery winter day in Philadelphia, we strolled around together talking, at voluble length, about Sally Rooney. What, I wanted to know, got her and her friends so into it? Some of it was what you'd expect: the verisimilitude of the portrait of a post-crash life out in a narrowing world of mostly desultory work; the offhand poise in respect to forms of intimacy — queerish, non-monagomish — not easily parsed in the familiar grids and taxonomies, but unexceptional in their milieus; the volatile crossings, so acutely rendered, of rivalry and desire, love and need, in the intensities of female friendship. Above all these things, she said, her friends thought Rooney just got something ineluctably right. And this something lived for them in her singular ways of relating to these matters — her style, I might at this point have blurted — which made the novel less a series of thesis-like propositions (about gender, about sex, about work) than a fantastically charged atmosphere, a scene of things known and half-known in the act of living through them.
I remember being struck by her vehemence on one point in particular. Frances, she said, was irresistible: so smart and so nervy and so cool. (It's possible, pace Jane Hu, she added "relatable" to this list, though I cannot in truth recall.) But she was also, this heroine, kind of terrible! "She gets so mean," she told me, as we wandered about in the settling afternoon. "And it's not always like it's by accident." That, she said, was fascinating to her and her friends, and something that they thought and thought about: how spiky with unkindness Frances could be; how that didn't make her fumbling married lover Nick any less exasperating, though it maybe made him a bit more sympathetic; how it deepened a kind of mysteriousness in Frances that made her hard to stop considering and reconsidering. A "pulsing possibility of ongoing doubt" is how Hu puts it, which is perfect.
If you've read Jane Hu and Claire Jarvis's excellent pieces, you know the strong claims they make for Rooney as one of our most agile inheritors of the vexed canon of nineteenth-century novelistic practice. Now, I have not quite been trying to suggest here that she is drafting artfully as well, if with an icier millennial comportment, upon the affective mechanics of the prestige-teen-TV favored by bookish Gen Xers. Or not exactly. (Although, as anybody who has seen it can attest, the recent TV adaptation of Normal People is nothing so much as an exercise in bringing exactly those by-gone stylizations of adolescent feeling — the high-intensity inwardness, the emo longing, the background of lonely indie-rock — to the scene of Rooney's fiction.) I'd put it, rather, like this: Famously, back in the '90s, Eve Sedgwick used to tell her graduate students that the Victorian novel, when stripped down to its essentials, told one story, and one story only: "Heterosexuality is a disaster." Angela Chase, god bless her flannel heart, knew this, or at least had powerful intimations. And that was at least some of what I heard in conversation with that worldly, open-hearted, so-much-beloved 23-year-old. Sally Rooney wrote novels about young women who with unclouded penetration saw into the confounding disasters of heterosexuality — but who were not, for all that disquieting clarity, much interested in foreswearing desire, or in pretending themselves unbeguiled by the duplicitous allurements of sex, no matter its fractiousness and fearsome capacity for brewing up sorrow. Rooney wrote books about — and also, clearly for — young women figuring out how to address themselves to these vivid irreconcilabilities.
There is much more I could say about that winter's-day conversation. And yet, with the memory of Christmases Past before me, I don't think I want to. I suppose I will add only that whatever I now have to think about Sally Rooney is shadowed, in an irrevocable way, by my sense that she is a writer at the vibrant vital center of a conversation in which I am very much not an essential participant, which I can enter into only partially, and whose parameters and terms and intensities of investment are oblique, necessarily, to most any of those my middle-aged companions and I might mobilize. This seems to me the case quite apart from the curiosity or the admiration or, as the case may be, the love with which we, the no-longer-so-young, might turn to those scenes. I don't mean to suggest that these young people are accordingly more right about Rooney, or more incisive, or that we must regard their readings as transpiring in some sort of black box of insider knowledge, incommunicable to us in its esoteric codes and idiolects. Young people, as Rooney reminds us, are as full of extravagant self-misapprehension as anybody. But those worlds, surely, have their separate clarities as well. Sometimes it's best to sit there, shoulder-to-shoulder, and keep your mouth shut.
Peter Coviello is the author of four books, including Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs (Penguin, 2018) - selected as one of ARTFORUM's Ten Best Books of 2018 - and Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago, 2019). He is Professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
