Once more unto the breach: I have reviewed Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo. You can read it here in 4Columns.
For anyone who does not follow contemporary literature (and a few of you are here mostly for previous writing on banking crises, the end irony, the end of Europe, American electoral politics, etc.), I will quickly catch you up to speed about why the arrival of this novel is such an event.
Drama attends every good coronation. Sally Rooney, a 33-year old Irish wunderkind and the author of three previous books, has been crowned as the “Taylor Swift” of contemporary fiction, “Salinger for the Snapchat generation,”1 or, as I put it in my own review, the uncontested heir to the 19th-century marriage plot. No other recent author has been so frequently held up as a generational lens.
This is to say there’s always a lot of debate surrounding a Rooney release, and so always more to say than can reasonably fit into a single review, especially a review for 4Columns, which specializes in the pithy ~1000 word essay, a form I love.
Nevertheless, liberated from word count, I have two additional points I’d like to make, one on dramatic irony, and one on political attitudes towards consensus-building heading into the November nightmare. And actually I have a third point on the state of literary criticism—because I find it very depressing that for all the kerfuffle there has been almost no discussion at all of Intermezzo’s primary interest, which is language games.
Points one and two are in some ways extensions of my recent bit on the need for a revitalized irony of the left (which by the way was cited in The Washington Post here). I should probably split them across multiple posts, but outlining everything here at once feels less excessive.
1. The decline of dramatic irony
Earlier this year, after a stretch of book events and teaching and deadlines, I stayed up multiple nights in a row like a little kid, reading bestsellers. I had just reviewed the extraordinarily popular historical fiction of Amor Towles. It occured to me that popular fiction reflects, in some way, an underlying public mood. (Towles, for example, taps into a nostalgia for simpler American times.) To track shifts in that mood, I got the idea of comparing literary bestsellers from decades yore with the literary bestsellers of today—or the closest that literary fiction can get to bestseller status, a high-water mark currently set by Rooney.2
My methods were hardly scientific. But The Corrections (Sept 1, 2001) by Jonathan Franzen and Sally Rooney’s previous novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (Sept 7, 2021) presented a particularly interesting pair: they were published almost exactly twenty years apart, and their authors are more or less the most popular literary realists of their respective generations. And outside genre fiction, realism is the bread-and-butter of narratives that publishers advertise as “propulsive,” one of book-marketing’s most lucrative adjectives.
(For the record, I don’t find narrative propulsion to be a bad thing, in fact I invite it, and I am hardly hostile to plot. I ask “only” (!) that a novel operate on multiple levels simultaneously, in terms of plot and style, social critique, structural metaphor, etc., while building internal coherence between each of these elements. There are lots of ways to engage with a book, especially a good one.)
Many of you will already be familiar with how incredibly different The Corrections and Beautiful World are, but I would like to emphasize that the contrast is especially stark when you read them back-to-back, at 3 a.m. By late-night comparison, Beautiful World becomes even more cinematic than you remember, the characters all the more reactive to immediate in-scene stimuli (which is part of the reason Rooney is so extraordinarily skillful at generating the propulsive romantic momentum for which her books are famous). There is almost no backstory. Exceedingly rarely do characters descend into memory or backflash. As I wrote in my review, the pacing of will-they/won’t-they plot beats reminded of rubrics me for screenwriting, which recommend alternating scenes with positive and negative emotional charge.
This is plenty cinematic already. My jaw dropped, however, when I got to the following sex scene. Despite Rooney’s usual readiness to follow characters into bed, below, the omniscient narrator records, like a standing camera, the empty room left behind when the lovers walk off screen:
She followed him into his room and he shut the door behind them, saying something inaudible. She laughed, and through the door her laughter was softened and musical. In the darkness the main room of the apartment lay quiet again and still. Two empty bowls had been left in the sink, two spoons, an empty water glass with a faint print of clear lip balm on the rim. Through the door the sound of conversation murmured on, the words rounded out, indistinct, and by one in the morning silence had fallen. At half past five the sky began to lighten in the east-facing living room window, from black to blue and then to silvery white. Another day. The call of a crow from an overhead power line. The sound of buses in the street.
We have narrated the empty room overnight, in a time-lapse. The reader is left to make all inferences from close-ups of visual ephemera. These are camera techniques! It’s fascinating. The refusal to follow characters into their own interiority, let alone into the next room, is extreme in this novel—but also part of Rooney’s plan: Beautiful World is interpolated with first-person emails that comb back over scenes like this, filling in emotions and thoughts that might have occured to protagonists at the time, along with corresponding political analysis of those feelings.
At 3 a.m, however, this extremely cinematic scene struck me as highly formally significant!3 At the very least, Beautiful World was certainly doing something different than the paradigmatic rotating perspective novel of 2001, which I had only just finished. Although we spend time with character interiority (though far less so than usual in Beautiful World), Rooney resists delving deep into memory or characters’ predictions of what a lover, friend, or antagonist’s next move might be. (There are no antagonists, really.) Instead, if ruminating, characters tend to relive and analyze their own behavior—to ask if they behaved properly, or normally, or morally. All of this prevents the development of schemes. These characters are analysts, not schemers.
The absence of schemes struck me as unique for a classic realist novel of rotating perspective, the formal advantage of which is usually that it tips the reader off about what each character isn’t telling or else doesn’t know about the others. In other words, rotating perspectives typically facilitate dramatic irony. Rooney is all situational irony, or even fate: characters drop in on each other, or are thrown together into interactions that often take unexpected turns. (At the end of Conversations with Friends, for example, two lovers, Nick and Frances, have broken up. After months of not speaking, in the very final pages, Nick misdials Frances in the grocery store; on this chance call, each realizes they’ve misunderstood the others’ motives, and they end up back together.) Every romance needs a bit of good luck.
And then we have the Franzen model, which operates almost entirely on schemes and dramatic irony.
The dysfunctional Midwestern family at the heart of The Corrections, smash hit of the aughts, comprises an elderly mother, a father descending into dementia, and their three adult children. It proceeds as a series of framed novellas following the separate paths of each as they careen toward the collision point of a single date: Christmas. It’s a deeply psychological novel, prying open the insecurities, cruelties, resentments, betrayals, and other deeply unlikeable impulses these characters hold within them.
In the opening chapter, the youngest son, Chip, is dead broke: he’s been fired from his university job following an affair with a student and has tried and failed to sell his big screenplay. His family doesn’t know any of this. When said family arrives at his New York apartment for a visit and to discuss What To Do With Dad, he steps out to pick up some cash—and never returns. We know Chip is trapped in a producer’s office, having his screenwriting dreams ripped to shreds and getting roped into a shady investment scheme that will lead him on an absurd caper through Lithuania. His family, however, has no idea—they’re back in the apartment, where mother and daughter are bickering over Dad’s progressive Alzheimer’s and resenting Chip for jumping ship.
The entire novel proceeds like this, compiling the small-yet-actually-significant betrayals that each family member un/wittingly levels against the others while absorbed in his or her own private crisis. There is an incredible amount of backstory and memory; we relive many a fraught childhood memory that cast the other characters in a new and resentful light. The family members’ mutual betrayals become all the more devastating for the fact that no one actually knows the extent to which the others are in crisis, so they don’t quite understand the stakes of their collective neglect. Only the reader has privileged knowledge of the simultaneity of these crises. The narrative propulsion derives from our anticipating how the selfish characters, kept willfully in the dark due their lack of curiosity for others’ well-being, will let each other down. In short, dramatic irony is the very engine of the book.
Before Rooney, The Corrections was the paradigmatic 21st-century literary bestseller every American publisher wanted to reproduce. It garnered both critical acclaim and serious sales numbers, and was famed for its narrative propulsion. In the intervening decades, the success of Rooney’s narratives in the American market, and the subsequent decline of literary publishing in general, suggests that what American readers find “narratively propulsive” or “immersive” is also changing. Which leads us to another question…
2. Does it matter???
Novels do not channel or spark political debate in the way they used to, and even if they did, no novelist was ever going to change the outcome of the November elections. (Though Taylor Swift very well may.) But if you still believe in realism, then novels are a “a mirror carried along a roadway,” reflecting (and refracting) the social arrangements and attitudes of the present—that is, reflecting life—even if it’s a reflection we’d rather disavow.
That reflection often includes the political attitudes or mood of the times. So it is therefore interesting to consider the political psychology that might correspond to these Two Paths for the Widely Read Novel, without necessarily prescribing or foreclosing either. We can simply consider them diagnostic of the kinds of narrative promises that we are drawn to at different moments in time, and what those narrative promises…well, promise, politically speaking.
There’s an incredible gentleness to Rooney’s characters and her narrative technique; these characters are so careful with each other, and the narrator is gentle with them. With so much conflict played out though conversation and negotiation between characters in scene, and with such a commitment to keeping characters focused on the present rather than ruminating over the past or scheming for the future, her protagonists become hyper-communicative about their present emotions and desires when face-to-face with each other. This allows them to seek consensus and compromise in romantic (often polyamoric) relations. They hate causing pain. They often anticipate their own selfishness, and when they can’t, they tend to blame or hurt themselves, rather than others. They feel an enormous amount of guilt over global phenomena that are beyond their control. They are idealists, disappointed with the world, but determined to improve the environments they can control, i.e. their relationships with those immediately around them. Failing to find or erect utopia in the world at large, they can at least collectivize themselves.
This emphasis on consensus and localized utopia in Rooney’s previous novels reminds me that, in a recent interview, she reflected that there is “something Christian in my work, even if I would not describe myself as religious.” The fundamental ethic behind her realist romances is love. It transforms her characters. It conquers all.
As a political force in the real world, it is also slow.
The world as reflected in the The Corrections, by enormous contrast, is one governed by humanity’s limitless selfishness and self-delusion. It’s extremely funny, if also tragic, in the way it plumbs these depths. It is more a warning than a recommendation, reflecting our capacity not to seek consensus but to harm each other—and even then not out of explicit malice, but through sheer neglect. The Corrections suggests that were we to run the public sphere in the same way the average American family runs its private life, the nation would be bent on swift and total destruction. It is not a utopian novel, though also not an entirely cynical one. It is a democratic novel of zero-sum games between non-idealists who arrive, unwillingly, even belligerently, at imperfect compromise.
Consider the ending: The troubled father, whose descent into madness haunts his children and wife throughout the novel, is placed in a care home, where he endures terrible, dissociative nightmares. Yet his wife Edith, suddenly liberated from caring full-time for a dying man who can no longer bathe or feed himself, is much better off. She visits him, of course. The rest of the time, however, enjoying her newfound freedom out in the world, she shows signs of becoming less selfish, more open-minded. She finally accepts her daughter’s lesbianism, for example—and even censures her homophobic bridge club, something she never dared to do before. She is not converted into a better person through the love, understanding, and forgiveness of her family; she simply has more time. She is less overwhelmed by the claustrophobic and impossible effort of trying to care for a dying person all on her own, without help, all the while convinced that her children have abandoned her, and that the man she married never really loved her at all. The Corrections reflects how we act when we are frightened and in denial about an unfolding catastrophe we can only contain, not stop, and when we are prevented from seeing the situation with the clarity of a bird’s eye view. It is a novel that pulls up just short of nihilism, and just in time.
There is a place for utopian spirit. It was ascendent in the 2010s, and is arguably all the more important for the left-of-center to hold on to now that the scales of cultural power have tipped toward the reactionary right. After all, someone has to move the goalposts. Why must it be the reactionaries? Furthermore, novels are neither blueprints for life nor political manifestos. They are experimental spaces, which makes them laboratories just as suited to exploring utopia as to exploring the darkest channels of human psychology.
Yet however much I would like to believe otherwise, it seems to me that for the immediate future, the political landscape is one where the logic of dramatic irony reigns. If some omniscient narrator is up there, watching us careen toward the narrative collision point of November 5th, she is peeking between her fingers, already bracing for impact. It is sadly not the moment, in America (again, Rooney is Irish! we are just the people who buy her books in vast quantities and rabidly discuss them!), for careful consensus-building and compromise, for converting our enemies through love. The hate is on. It’s here to stay. The thing to protect is the most basic formal—re: institutional—brakes meant to save us from ourselves. I don’t blame you for not being particularly enthused. It’s not an inspiring prize.
3. Does literary criticism matter?
If you answered “no,” you can skip this part. But I actually have a third very quick point to make, which is that, in the reviews of Intermezzo published so far, I’ve been quite surprised by the almost complete absence of any discussion of ‘the problem of language,’ which is what the book is primarily about, especially as it bears on our attempts to develop intimacy. Certainly no American paper has brought it up.4 (Across the Atlantic, there was at least one review on language and Wittgenstein in the FT.)
Whatever interesting questions Rooney’s previous three novels, including Beautiful World, might raise about the potential of love as a political or utopian force, or about alternatives to capitalist logic, her latest is mostly interested in language games. This is simply a statement of fact. And the difficulty of representing the world and our experiences of intimacy in language is a fresh theme for Rooney. Intermezzo is far more interior—far less cinematic—than Beautiful World, and her characters’ interior dialogues are heavily influenced by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his later Philosophical Investigations, which supplies the book’s epigraph, and whose influence on the novel is incredibly clearly marked. Alone and in conversation, everyone is questioning the split between the abstract versus the tangible: “intellect versus appetite,” mind versus body, language versus sex as a basis for intimacy—and the problem of communicating embodied desire in words. These concerns harken back to Wittgenstein, who snipped the umbilical cord between language and the underlying, tangible world it is meant to represent. Like many novelists before her, Rooney is interested in the literary and social implications of this consequence for us, as language-based beings, and for her own books. How can people in love—how can Rooney, an author so interested in erotics, or her characters, consumed by lust and desire—try to describe and ethically negotiate embodiment and sexual intimacy when the language they must use to do so has proved such a broken tool? Can we come up with a new language? Again, this is new territory for her.
However, you would not know this from any of the dozens of reviews of Rooney’s latest novel that have appeared so far. It is more than valid and possible to vigorously critique how Intermezzo treats these themes, but most reviews, especially the negative ones, still seem to be reviewing her previous books. It is depressing to see a recycling of old questions about whether Rooney is Marxist or not; whether these books are critiques of capitalism, and whether those critiques hold up; whether her politics are authentic, or good, or bad, or boring; and on top of this never to mention the book’s clearly broadcasted and primary thematic interest of language (or its Wittgensteinian influences) at all.
There are plenty of reasons to feel depressed as an author, if you’re looking for one. But the idea that a novelist can do something new, and mark it so incredibly explicitly (and critics have previously docked Rooney for being too ‘obvious’ in her engagement with theory or ideas…), and no one will notice? That certainly counts.
In other news…
Ghost Pains is selected as one of Bookshop.org’s Best Books of 2024.
My last post on the EU parliamentary elections cropped up in this essay in The Washington Post on progressivism and irony by Becca Rothfeld.
My review of Rooney’s Intermezzo is here in 4Columns. I admired the novel and consider it Rooney’s best, even if there are points on which my own tastes depart. As I mentioned, it is also heavily influenced by Wittgenstein, for whom I have a weakness.
(I’m not entirely sure where this one comes from, though everyone is citing it—I don’t remember middle-of-the-road millennials really ever being that into Snapchat. Then again, I do not exist at the forefront of internet culture.)
Or maybe Elena Ferrante.
(Of course, Virginia Woolf also famously narrated empty rooms in To the Lighthouse, though there the house itself becomes a character, with a kind of houselike interiority diffused across furniture, mice, objects, and all the other components of a house by the sea, and which is what makes the centerpiece chapter narrated from this house-ish perspective so stunning.)
Apologies if I missed something.