Basic

What's your problem with Sally Rooney's popularity?

Hello and welcome back to Writing About Reading, after a longer-than-intended hiatus. This is Issue 11.

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I’m currently reading Deacon King Kong by James McBride (after loving The Good Lord Bird—the book and the show); The Circuit by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, an elegant account of the 2017 men’s pro tennis season; and I’ve just finished Kings of Crypto, a well-timed look at the origins of the soon-to-go-public crypto company Coinbase by my friend and colleague Jeff John Roberts (no relation!).

And now: Let’s talk normalcy.

I started this newsletter last September to write about and recommend books, old or new, that you might have missed. Apartment by Teddy Wayne, for example, was reviewed in most of the prestige places, but I felt it went overlooked by many readers; The Natural by Bernard Malamud is known nowadays mostly as a movie, not widely read anymore; The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan is one of the best contemporary sports novels I’ve read, but it hasn’t had the long-tail of, say, The Art of Fielding; Hunter S. Thompson is first associated with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, while fewer people have read his book on the 1972 presidential campaign.

Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) is not like those examples. It did not go unnoticed. Everyone read Normal People. It has sold more than a million copies in America.

The book enjoyed that rare combo, a writer’s dream: critical and commercial success. Raves and sales.

But the smash-hit Irish novel also became a lightning rod for sneering debate over whether it truly deserved all that success. The New York Times, in particular, raised the hackles of jealous writers everywhere when it hailed Rooney, then 27, as the “First Great Millennial Author.” (And the Google search results for “Sally Rooney voice of a generation” go on and on—sorry, Hannah Horvath.)

Then came the backlash.

Will Self, one of my favorite writers, was asked about Rooney in a 2019 interview with The Sunday Times. “It’s very simple stuff with no literary ambition that I can see,” he said. “What’s now regarded as serious literature would, 10 or 20 years ago, have been regarded as young-adult fiction.”

That is a deeply disappointing take.

Self is certainly a writer associated with ambition: his trilogy of novels Umbrella, Shark, and Phone runs 1,520 pages; The Book of Dave, my favorite novel of his, is written in a Cockney-inspired, completely original language Self created. Good for him. But here he’s dismissing an author’s work simply because she’s a young person, writing about young people, without using experimental language.

Self’s comments also remind me of Garth Greenwell’s essay in Harper’s last year (which I mentioned in my newsletter issue about Apartment) that rejected dismissal of art based purely on whether its subject matter is “relevant”: “It is always ethically suspect to speak of any human experience as irrelevant to our common human experience.”

Then Lorrie Moore, the celebrated short story writer, penned a piece last year in the New York Review of Books that opened with an acidly funny laundry list of millennial personality traits that was celebrated on Twitter…

To generalize sweepingly, and in a way that is not contradicted by Rooney’s work, some of the mutterings—I am only reporting—include the following: millennials seem wedded to ideas of status and conventional success, but they want to “infiltrate” plutocratic institutions as “Marxists” and prized guests; they will deride yet exploit all privilege; raised to be competitive, they find envy is not a form of hate but a legitimate aspect of success-culture and an expression of congratulations […]

Millennial virtues, to an older eye, include a non-specific gentleness and a deep, unfeigned, and generationally unprecedented acceptance of gender and sexual diversity. They are intolerant of bullying and have a broad definition of its related infractions. They give priority to vulnerability over courage and demand safe spaces. They are the Occupy Wall Street people, but once they occupied it, they appeared, rather endearingly, a little unclear on what to do next. Planning for the future is not a millennial strength. (How could it be? The college of their choice was the future they aimed for; the dull, work-saturated steps from here now to there later are often invisible to them; born to older parents, they did not witness their parents’ laborious professional beginnings.) They say, “No problem,” instead of “You’re welcome”—they are not good liars. They seem like nice people. But not normal. They often seem like nice people who privately are doing terrible things to themselves.

…only to end up pushing the entire list onto Rooney and her characters, and concluding that the Hulu show based on the book is better than the book. “The series portrays states of mind much better than the novel does. Rooney is not likely to hear from viewers that ‘your book was better,’ at least not very often or accurately, but she also may not care a whit.”

I disagree. The show eventually became exhausting for me and the characters grew annoying, something I never felt with the book. Beyond saying that, I’m not super interested in talking about the show here.

Here’s where I come in. I saw the abundance of breathless praise, and what felt like a year of fawning profiles of Rooney, and skipped the book at first. When you see the same snide take in enough places, you get influenced by it.

I finally read it in the fall, and loved it.

The word I keep coming back to when I talk about the novel is “relatable.” That may sound like damning with faint praise; a Twitter meme can be relatable, that doesn’t mean it’s fine art. But Rooney paints her picture of two people continually making the same mistakes in such a relatable and often sad way that it ends up being indelible.

The plot is extremely simple: two kids in a small coastal town in Ireland, one a popular jock (Connell), the other a geeky introvert (Marianne); they hook up, but Connell is socially embarrassed of her, and demands she keep it a secret; later, they both end up at Trinity College Dublin, where their social standing has reversed. (Plus one socioeconomic wrinkle: Marianne is rich; Connell is not, and his single mother works as a maid in Marianne’s mansion.)

That’s about it. They continually break apart and come back together, and emotionally hurt each other and themselves through their misunderstandings and assumptions. It’s their dialogue with each other, as well as their own private thoughts, where Rooney’s writing shines.

When Connell tells Marianne early on that she acts differently outside of school (when they secretly hang out) than she does in school, she thinks to herself, “He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This surprised her, because she usually felt confined inside one single personality… She had tried to be different in the past, as a kind of experiment, but it had never worked.”

That one passage is basically a preview of the entire book. Both characters keep trying to become someone else, but in the end they can’t escape themselves. And what’s more high school than trying to put on a more appealing personality? (Later, when they’re at Trinity, Connell reflects that back home, in high school, “His personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced.”)

It’s artful how Rooney shifts our allegiances back and forth between her two protagonists. Connell is popular, but crippled by his desire to maintain his popularity.

He’s aware of that shortcoming: “Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him.”

But that awareness of his problem does nothing to help him overcome it. After sleeping with and adoring Marianne for months in private, he nonetheless asks a different (popular) girl, whom he actually hates, to the Debs, a Prom-like formal ball. The moment he does it, “He felt as if he had just jumped off a high precipice and fallen to his death, and he was glad he was dead, he never wanted to be alive again.” He knows he’s done something cruel and completely unnecessary, but he’s so weak that he still has to do it, in some effort to upkeep his social status.

It’s a crippling moment in the book, but even more quietly devastating is Marianne’s response. She’s heartbroken, but also expected this kind of treatment. “It obviously was kind of funny,” she reflects, “just how savagely he had humiliated her, and his inability to apologise or even admit he had done it.”

When Connell’s mother finds out what he did, she tells him, “I’m ashamed of you,” and the reader is deeply relieved to finally hear a character say that to Connell explicitly. The reader’s relief is echoed by Marianne herself, when Connell’s mother says to her, “He doesn’t deserve you.” From hearing that, Rooney writes, “Marianne felt a relief so high and sudden that it was almost like panic.”

Marianne skips the Debs ball, and basically skips school for the rest of the year in embarrassment. At the ball, one of Connell’s friends mentions so nonchalantly that they all knew he’d been seeing Marianne (and don’t much care), that Connell finally realizes “the secret for which he had sacrificed his own happiness and the happiness of another person had been trivial all along, and worthless.” (I remember all too well the things you would resist doing out of some misplaced fear of what your friends would think about it—at that age, you lack the foresight to know that in just a few short years, you’ll understand that nothing from high school mattered.)

We still don’t get Connell’s full acknowledgment of his shame until later, when he’s now at Trinity and, looking back on the school year prior, Rooney writes that he “felt a debilitating shame about the kind of person he’d turned out to be.” By then, their social statuses have flipped: Marianne, with her brains and self-assuredness, makes friends right away; Connell, shy and hung up about his socioeconomic background, finds himself without many friends, and soon clinging to Marianne’s group.

Their ever-shifting balance of power drives the story. In high school, Connell has sex with Marianne but demands she not tell a soul, and Marianne complies. She “would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted.” (Self-harm, both physical and emotional, is a recurring specter for Marianne.) But in college, she’s the one surrounded by adoring friends, and Connell is at first the ‘friend from home,’ a hanger-on of sorts.

Almost all of the fights or splits the two of them have in college are caused by brainless misunderstandings that drive the reader mildly insane, while also feeling extremely familiar.

One of the finest-wrought of these moments is when, toward the end of their first year at Trinity, Connell goes to tell Marianne (they’re now dating again) that due to money being tight, he has to move out of his apartment for the summer. He intends to ask her if he can live with her for the summer—the reader knows that would have received a resounding “yes”—but loses his nerve. They know each other so intimately, and yet they’re each terrified, for most of the novel, of saying what they actually want out loud.

“He couldn’t understand how this had happened, how he had let the discussion slip away like this. It was too late to say he wanted to stay with her, that was clear, but when had it become too late? It seemed to have happened immediately.”

Then, the self-sabotage: Connell, bizarrely, tells her, “I guess you’ll want to see other people, then, will you?” leaving Marianne with no option but to say, “Sure.”

Yes, it’s maddening. And it strikes me as a bullseye-accurate portrayal of the stupid, rash things young people do and say to themselves and others.

If there’s anything annoying about the book, it’s the intensity of every little interaction. Occasionally you do want to roll your eyes and ask, Does it all have to be so fucking serious? But then you remember that’s how high school and college often felt; every romantic relationship had the equal potential to be blissful or catastrophic.

So, does all that make Normal People unambitious? Hardly.

And, to state the obvious, might there be a reason for why the lion’s share of the negativity toward Rooney comes from other writers?

In January, I saw a friend of mine, who is a very smart published novelist herself, post an Instagram Story photo of a copy of Normal People with a GIF that said: “Basic!”

It didn’t sit well with me. When I think of “basic,” at least in the context my generation (which is Rooney’s generation) uses it, my first associations are with Ugg boots, North Face vests, Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes, avocado toast.

I DM’d my friend and asked her: “Why basic? I don’t understand the Sally Rooney hate.” She replied: “Isn’t the definition of basic anything that’s super popular and kind of middlebrow? I don’t think the hate is really about her, it’s about the phenomenon.”

But see, there’s Garth Greenwell’s point again in that Harper’s essay. We must not dismiss entire genres of literature based on a loose theme—millennial malaise, in this case, but plug in whatever you wish: boarding school novels; workplace comedies; novels about slavery; bildungsromans about aspiring writers. And we must not penalize popular novels out of hand due to their popularity.

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