David J Black

Literary criticism will not be the purpose of this exercise, so those anticipating a promotional puff for Intermezzo or anything else by the much celebrated Sally Rooney may be disappointed. It’s usually a requirement to read the book one intends to review, yet the authoress in question here has never found her way onto your scrivener’s reading list. True, in November 2022 one of her novels, Beautiful World, Where Are You, was adapted for a BBC Radio 4 series of what seemed like an interminable length (two weeks). For some unfathomable reason this listener decided, in a moment of folly, to give it precious brain time.

The BBC’s advance blurb should have been trigger warning enough: “Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon worry about sex and friendship and the world they live in. Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?” This passed most of us by however, as we were drawn into the self-referential me-me trivia-scape of a post-grad yuppie class obsessed with its own feelings and yearnings for personal gratification and shallow fulfilment.

So far, so bad. It gets worse. Writing as a means of personal therapy is a perfectly valid literary form. De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater is still a rattling good read after more than two centuries. In Beautiful World’s case however the therapy is a vapid and self obsessed indulgence so solipsistic and self engaged that the reader is dragged – or should that be drugged? – into her privileged universe of self-pitying angst among academia’s tangled bedsheets.

A Guardian review by one of her Stockholm syndrome stricken admirers, Anne Enright, offered a headline clue. “The problem of success; how do you follow two brilliantly acclaimed novels?” Ms Rooney, who self describes as a ‘Marxist-Feminist’ (Karl, rather than Groucho, one guesses) was having a conscience-driven dark night of the soul as she struggled to reconcile her proletarian sensitivities with her newly found celebrity status as a capitalist writing phenomenon signing lucrative movie and TV tie-ins with, by recent calculations, around $10 million in the bank. Should we be feeling sorry for this conflicted and self-revelatory troubled soul? Err, maybe not so much.

Some fail to appreciate the beguiling facts. After all, Ms Rooney spins a good lapidary sentence, though the tone may be a bit on the flat side, and she plays the socio-political card with as deft a skill as any faux-demotic poker champion. Unfortunately she habitually seasons up her prose with much creepy erotica, as in the opening of her second novel, Normal People, which she herself has described as a ‘Marxist love story’ though, textually speaking, the pillow talk fails to tackle the finer points of dialectical materialism or the seizing of the means of production by the proletariat.

“Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell. She’s still wearing her school uniform, but she’s taken off the sweater, so it’s just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights.”

Apparently for TV commissioning editors this is the stuff of dreams, guaranteed to produce hot camera shots, high ratings and drooling reviews, all duly and predictably delivered. There are many oeuvres in the post-war modernist literary canon, the Rooney category being roughly in an area which could be described as soft-porn for nice progressive types who enjoy a bit of avocado and seared polenta on the artisan sourdough all washed down with a chai latte while discussing the state of the climate and other troubling issues with their old uni chums over Sunday brunch. One doesn’t say that unkindly. Some of them are your scrivener’s friends, and he knows they mean well, really.

The fact that the soft-porn is psychologically perverse and certainly not about love, as, say, Abelard and Heloise might have known it, gives her style of writing a certain cool edginess in which orthodoxies like punctuation marks are studiously eschewed. All very E.E.Cummings, don’t you see? He, of course, died around 30 years before Ms Rooney arrived, but lets not fuss.

The chronologies are of some relevance here. Rooney soft-porn, which would bring a blush to the cheeks of Constance Chatterley, never mind the wives and servants, seems to involve much casual betrayal and self-absorbed, if at times self-abasing, introspection. It’s the downright selfish moral deficiencies, rather than any graphic depiction of bodily pleasure, which should shock us. It isn’t so much that love and romance cannot be a great subject for a novelist – witness, for example, William Boyd’s elegantly crafted Any Human Heart, or the books of Edna O’Brien. It’s more the cheesiness.

Miss Rooney could fit into any one of a number of middlebrow erotic niches. A literary evaluation not being in the remit of this little odyssey, it can be left to the likes of slavishly fawning Anthony Cummins of The Observer, who adjudges her ‘a peerless creator of flesh and blood characters with a keen eye for the thrill and complication of sex and desire’ while Intermezzo is “perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements.”

In calling the “electrically compelling” Ms Rooney a “born farceur” he was presumably uttering a compliment, though perhaps someone should have pointed out that ‘farceuse’ is the feminine form of that particular word. Being spellbound does some strange things to literary craftfolk, it seems.

Let’s not be pernickety. If not quite Fifty Shades of Grey, Ms Rooney’s Intermezzo is but a variation of what older readers may remember as the bonkbuster, the first acknowledged example for those who’d missed out on Fanny Hill (published 1748) being US writer Kathleen Winsor’s rollicking 1944 restoration romp, Forever Amber - a big hit with the lonesome wives of GIs out at the front.

Ms Winsor’s bodice-ripper so outraged the authorities of Boston that it was banned and publicly burned, all of which fuss enabled her to achieve 100,000 sales in the first week. One assumes the lady cried all the way to the bank. That was perhaps the point at which the publishing industry sniffed a golden opportunity, especially with the TV mini-series spin-off industry becoming a prospect. Nor was it the exclusive preserve of female litteratrices. Harold Robbins’ crudely erotic airport stackers sold an impressive 750 million copies, outpacing J.K Rowling by 150 million.

A quintessentially English subgenre of the bonkbuster was the 1990s Aga Saga, described by some as middle class rural rumpy-pumpy with wellies, dogs, and Laura Ashley frocks. Its main exponent, Joanna Trollope, loathed the term, much as Jilly Cooper scorned the bonkbuster label.

I suspect, but of course can’t be sure, that if I were to sit down to read the latest Rooney romance I might find a vague simulacrum of those earlier forays into fumbling hot passion, but with a mellifluous Trinity brogue replacing the cut-crystal dulcets of the proto-Sloanes, and no sign of caddish Rupert Campbell-Black (no relation, by the way). Perdita MacLeod, or the Rutshire Polo Club, for which Ms Rooney substitutes a superficial concern with the pressing issues of our present day and a light helping of bandwagon Bolshevism to spice up the palate, like the merest hint of drizzled Tabasco.

Radical chic being deployed as a lightweight literary accessory? Surely not!

In part two: the Rooney cult and its dark back story.