Book Notes:
Introducing Irish Novelist, Sally Rooney
Since 2016, Sally Rooney, has gained both critical attention and international readership. Born in Ireland in 1991 and still only 33 years old, she was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people in the world in 2022, Barak Obama and Taylor Swift have called her as one of their favorite writers. Rooney published her first novel, Conversations with Friends in 2017. Since then, she has written three more: Normal People (2018), Beautiful World, Where are You? (2021), and Intermezzo (2024). Both Normal People and Conversations with Friends have already been adapted into 12-episode miniseries for television.
Rooney has been called the “voice of her generation,” the same designation J. D. Salinger received as the author of The Catcher in the Rye in 1954. She creates characters, like herself, born after 1990. They try to adapt to a changing world, one dominated by loss of religious faith, changing morality, violence, and technology. Rooney herself has objected to the title: “I certainly never intended to speak for anyone other than myself. Even myself I find it difficult to speak for.”
Rooney’s birthplace is Castlebar, County Mayo, Ireland, where she still lives with her husband. She grew up in a family of five; her father worked for Telecom Eireann while her mother operated an arts center. Rooney attended a Roman Catholic private high school where she wrote her first novel (unpublished) when she was fifteen. She went on to Trinity College Dublin, studying English as a undergraduate and earning an MA degree in American Literature in 2013. In college, after becoming a university debater, Rooney was named the top debater in the European Universities Debating Championship in 2013. In 2015, an essay on her experience as a debater caught the attention of a literary agent, Tracy Bohan who helped launch Rooney’s career as a novelist. In manuscript, Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, received bids from seven publishers, and was eventually sold in 12 countries after publication by Faber and Faber in 2018. It was nominated for several literary prizes.
Rooney’s first three novels all seem deeply personal, not in the sense of autobiography, but in her ability to recreate what it feels like to be a young woman in the modern world, a world that features new opportunities for women, but also holds, to some degree, at least, traditional values, particularly the need for a loving sexual relationship. Dwight Garner writes that Rooney’s “primary Subject is love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in an out of it. She writes as well about this topic as anyone alive.”
Conversations with Friends features two young women just out of college. Frances and Bobbi met at Trinity College and became lovers: Bobbi is admittedly gay but Frances, who narrates the novel, defines herself Marxist and seems uncertain about her own sexuality. The two meet an older, bohemian couple, Melissa, a poet, and Nick, an actor. Serious complications arise when Frances and Nick fall madly in love. One reviewer declared the novel “a dry-humoured portrait of the power play in romantic relationships.” The novel is a study of the often shocking move toward adulthood.
A year later, Rooney published Normal People, another study of failed love. The two main characters, Connell and Marianne, come from different social classes. Marianne’s family is wealthy while Connell is the son of their housekeeper. They attend the same Catholic high school where Marianne, despite her moneyed background, is a social outcast; Connell is a top student and a popular athlete. The two fall into a secret sexual relationship that ends when they go off to college, but their “love” is later re-ignited, but without permanence. One reviewer describes their relationship as “warped.” The novel was nominated for numerous awards, including being long-listed for the Booker Prize and winning the AN Post Irish novel of the year award. The television adaptation, too, received many nominations with Rooney herself winning an Irish Film and Television Award for best script.
Rooney introduces older characters in Beautiful World, Where Are You, published in 2021. In it, she follows four main characters, life-long friends Alice and Eileen whose mature lives have become complicated through Alice’s success as a popular novelist and Eileen’s unhappy love life. Unable to deal with her meteoric success, Alice has a breakdown and moves out of Dublin to a rural town where she meets Felix, a factory worker. The fourth character is Silas, a long-time friend of both women. Much of their history evolves through the emails the women exchange, some of them gossipy and personal, others dealing with existential questions. The title of the novel seems emblematic of the troubled searches of all four characters.
Rooney’s most recent novel, Intermezzo (2024) marks another major change in her fiction: male characters (two unhappy brothers, Peter and Ivan) are central to the story. Growing up as children of divorce, the brothers are basically estranged by their considerable age difference, their mutual hurt over the recent death of their father, and their different sensibilities. Peter, a barrister, lives with the stress of his failed relationship with Sylvia, his college girlfriend, who lives in constant physical pain, the result of an automobile accident. Ivan, only 22 years old is a chess whiz who remains emotionally immature. He falls into a satisfying relationship with a woman 14 years his senior. Reviewers have mixed feeling about the novel; some complain that the plot is slow-moving and the relationships, too sentimental; however, Rooney’s ability to move away from female protagonists to create believable male characters shows growth. who It will be interesting to see what comes next from this young writer who has achieved so much early fame.
