This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.” —Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and…
Archive for June, 2020
Exodus: Mishpatim: Sarah, June 23
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Mishpatim Exodus 21 – 24 Brooklyn, NY Dear fellow subjects of the law, As I confessed in the introduction to this series,…
Conversations with Friends about Normal People
I read Conversations with Friends alone and loved it; reading Normal People with friends was an unrelieved frustration. I’d picked it for a book club soon after finishing Sally Rooney’s…
Race and Romantic Realism
Midway through Sally Rooney’s Normal People, we encounter this conversation among friends: At the table they’re talking about their day trip to Venice…. Marianne tells Connell he would like the…
Wet Newspaper
Getting punched went with the territory. Between adolescence and adulthood, I got hit hard a couple of times a year. One day, I walked through the doors of my school…
What Are Feelings For?
If you read Sally Rooney, I wish you would read her as I did: bent into the seat of an airplane, flying from the city where I live as a…
Victoria Falls
Near the end of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, our twenty-one-year-old narrator, Frances, reads George Eliot in a gynecologist’s waiting room: “I sat there tapping my pen against the front…
Sally Rooney’s Couple Form
The publishing industry has for some time now been heavily publicizing a few figures whose success is keeping the whole thing afloat. Sally Rooney is one of those figures. Her…
So-Called Normal People
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 Sweet Stuff
Straight sex is not a disaster. That’s the plot of Sally Rooney’s novels. This is perhaps hard to take. After all, as Peter Coviello notes, Eve Sedgwick taught us that…