She sees him as someone who can help her “make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love.” He tells Frances he feels “like this very worthless, pathetic person.” As it turns out, they are perfect for each other. He is a depressive whose acting career never took off. Throughout the novel Frances incessantly belittles herself: “I figured my own body as an item of garbage” “I felt that I was a damaged person who deserved nothing.” Filled with self-loathing she claims she lacks a “real personality” and is incapable of enjoying “things like other people.”įrances’s love interest, Nick, is married. It’s hard to imagine a character who feels herself less worthy of love, and dislikes herself as intensely. The darkness at the heart of Rooney’s work is first encountered in Frances, the narrator of Conversations with Friends. And yet, particularly in Normal People - where she is most conspicuously engaged in castigating and indicting late capitalism, while invoking the conceptual thrust of some of the foremost thinkers on the topic - the sexual acts she writes about alongside late capitalism’s depredations are so insufficiently accounted for as to often appear gratuitous and erosive to the narrative itself. Normal People was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was recently awarded the Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, or Nibbies. Flat and precise, cool and controlled throughout, the relentless cascade of her unadorned sentences creates an austere beauty. Parse or cut apart any Rooney sentence and it will not bleed there is not a misplaced word or jarring adjective anywhere. Seductive from beginning to end, one can hardly put the books down after the first page. Her novels are narrated with verve, and an insouciant, knowing voice. Self-proclaimed Marxist, and author of Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), as well as several short stories, Rooney is an exemplary storyteller. Rooney’s talent and interests, however, may range outside her generation’s cohort. In any case, belonging to a generation is one of the lowest forms of solidarity.” The opinions of a generation never amount to more than fashion. In the vertiginous present of late capitalism in which we experience an unparalleled rate of change, as tomorrow’s news headlines obliterate today’s - during the lifespan of a tweet - what can it mean to be hailed as “the first great millennial novelist”? In thinking about that question and the hyperbole attached to Rooney’s work, I remembered what the critic Harold Rosenberg said about generational thinking: “Except as a primitive means of telling time, generations are not a serious category. SALLY ROONEY HAS BEEN hailed as “the first great millennial novelist for her stories of love and late capitalism” by The New Yorker, a “major talent” by the Guardian, and, according to Stig Abell, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, on her way to become “the major literary figure of our time, a generational talent.” Assuredly, assigning someone to a category is an empowering act for critics, insinuating as it does in this case, that they have identified the zeitgeist and know who exemplifies it and who doesn’t but it can be de-individualizing and detrimental for an artist since it marginalizes them by situating them in a cohort to which they may have only superficial, or at best tangential relevance.
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