Reading Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney is the harbinger of a literary world yet to come! Or she is evidence of that world in its crumbling decline. It depends who you ask.
Upon her entry to a global stage, she is hailed with fanfare by critics who recognize her as:
— The literary voice of her Millennial generation;
— Our Jane Austen + J. D. Salinger + Karl Marx as he is read by the light of Instagram;
— Another pretty white lady novelist, self-styled as a revolutionary; and
— The author of novels that look exceptionally good on TV.
This cluster isn't here to debate the worthiness of Sally Rooney to all of this — the hype, the money, the critical acclaim. She has it, that's a fact.
We're here to witness it and wonder what it means. We think it means something that this young Irish writer speaks so well to so many readers — Millennial and not; Irish and not; white-cis-het-woman and not — about matters of importance to the writers in this cluster, too: capitalism, class, sex, gender, violence, feminism, power, love.
In these terms and others, we wish for the world to be so much better than it is, and we filter our wishes somewhat inevitably through our expertise in literary study.
We worry about the sufficiency of this whole enterprise to the demands of our year of 2020.
Sally Rooney gives us an occasion to worry together. Reading her small oeuvre as an indicator and an arbiter of forces that swirl powerfully around us, we've found occasions to think about the politics that attend the intimacies we make in and around books.
After that, we diverge.
