There are writers who build imaginary worlds, and there are writers who discover that the world already inhabits us, like an uninvited tenant, rearranging the furniture of our desires. Sally Rooney belongs to the second category. Her novels take place in a recognisable Ireland of university corridors, rented rooms, cafés, country houses and kitchens where the tea goes cold while somebody fails to say the thing that might save them. Nothing much happens, one might suppose. Two people fall in love. They misunderstand each other. They fall in love again. And yet, beneath these modest catastrophes, history is grinding its enormous teeth.
Rooney, born in County Mayo, emerged into literary consciousness with Conversations with Friends (2017), followed by Normal People (2018), a novel whose title possesses the quiet audacity of a philosophical challenge. What, after all, constitutes normality? Is it a bank balance, a family background, a particular fluency in the rituals of belonging? Or is it merely the name we give to the arrangements that permit some people to feel at home in the world while others apologise for occupying space? Rooney’s characters understand these questions intellectually long before they can answer them emotionally. This discrepancy is her territory.
Marianne and Connell, the lovers of Normal People, are divided by class, though not by any dramatic social gulf that a Victorian novelist might have populated with dukes and starving orphans. Their distance is subtler, more insidious: the difference between knowing how to enter a room and wondering whether one has the right to be there. They possess the vocabulary of contemporary enlightenment, yet remain almost helpless before the ancient hieroglyphics of embarrassment, longing and shame. They can discuss power more readily than they can exercise it; they can diagnose their unhappiness with admirable precision while continuing to manufacture it.
This is Rooney’s peculiar comedy. Her characters are clever enough to recognise the machinery imprisoning them, but recognition does not open the door. Indeed, sometimes it furnishes the prison with better wallpaper.
Her prose, stripped of ornamental fuss, moves with the apparent innocence of conversation. The effect is deceptive. What remains unsaid acquires a pressure almost geological. A hesitation, a delayed reply, a sentence ending just short of confession: these become events of tremendous consequence. Rooney understands that modern intimacy is conducted partly through language and partly through the elaborate systems of evasion we construct around it. We speak, but we also send signals; we confess, but only to what can safely be denied.
In Beautiful World, Where Are You, her gaze widens towards art, capitalism, friendship and the approaching ecological catastrophe. Intermezzo, meanwhile, turns towards grief and brotherhood, asking whether love might survive the failure of our familiar emotional instruments. The private life, Rooney suggests, is never entirely private. The economy sits at the dinner table. History occupies the spare bedroom. Even desire has a class consciousness.
Her achievement is not to reconcile politics and tenderness but to reveal their uncomfortable proximity. People may believe in equality and behave selfishly; they may understand injustice and remain implicated in it. Rooney refuses the consolations of uncomplicated virtue.
Perhaps this is why her novels feel so intimately contemporary without being merely topical. They understand that the modern predicament is not an absence of feeling but an excess of interpretation: we know so much about ourselves, and remain, in the decisive moments, so magnificently unreadable to one another.
Rooney’s people keep trying. In that persistence, awkward, compromised and faintly absurd, there is something resembling hope.
(By Chat GPT)
