How Rooney surpassed all expectations and became a household name in literary fiction
Recognized for her unique prose and pretentious characters, Sally Rooney has quickly become one of the most distinguished names in the literary fiction world.
Rooney’s novels are characterized by a sense of philosophical intellectualism and a much disputed marxism. These aspects, paired with their equally stark affinity for love stories and power dynamics, make Rooney’s novels distinct among their contemporaries.
Rooney’s popularity was bolstered by the success of the TV adaptation of her second novel, “Normal People,” and the fact that reading her work has quickly become, as Vox put it, “a status symbol.”
Rooney’s characters are often intensely unlikable, juxtaposing a sense of philosophical righteousness with a complete lack of confidence that ultimately contribute to their abundant insecurities. Nonetheless, the characters are also widely regarded as relatable by millennial and gen z readers alike.
The protagonist in Rooney’s debut novel, “Conversations with Friends,” which is soon to become a series on Hulu, perfectly embodies this as she spends the book distancing herself from her words and her actions, focusing instead on abstract ideas.
“My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was,” Frances says in the novel.
This specific phenomenon doesn’t necessarily make Rooney’s characters relatable, but what does is the assertion that there is a separation between what humans believe and how they act – a chasm that grows between how people perceive themselves and are perceived.
This sense of detachment from real life continues throughout Rooney’s books and ultimately proves to be one of her most relatable tropes. As Rooney says in “Normal People,” “Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.”
“Normal People” has a more pointed focus on relationships, fixating on the power dynamic between Marianne, highly intelligent with insecurities stemming from bullying and familial abuse, and Connell, originally popular but shy and keenly attuned to what others think of him.
As Connell’s mental illness and Marianne’s tendency to submit in relationships come to affect their relationship to one another, the story doesn’t shy away from revealing the complexities of the relationship without allowing the reader full access.
There is a private intimacy between Marianne and Connell that Rooney echoes in her prose, giving the reader insights into their dynamic that feel both intensely personal and remarkably vague.
Rooney illustrates that readers are invading her characters’ privacy, but she welcomes them into the secret world of her characters’ thoughts. In developing this environment, Rooney leads readers to self exploration.
“Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example,” Rooney writes in “Normal People,” expressing another deeply personal but not uncommon thought.
In addition to these stark observations on the human condition, an almost sloppy marxism runs throughout Rooney’s books, for which she has been widely critiqued. Rooney is a self-titled marxist and prescribes this ideology to most, if not all, of her characters. However, while class consciousness features in all of Rooney’s novels, her work almost always ends up focusing more on people and the way they shape each others’ lives.
“Beautiful World, Where Are You?” Rooney’s latest novel, seems to address this critique as fluid prose is frequently interrupted by emails between Eileen and Alice, two of the protagonists. These sometimes read like stream-of-consciousness rants and other times as thoroughly researched essays in a way that once again emphasizes the divide between ideology and action.
As much as Alice and Eileen care about the issues they discuss in these intellectually fraught emails, they are first and foremost governed by their relationships to themselves and the people around them.
As Eileen writes in one of her emails to Alice:
“What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?”
This mixture of cynical intellectualism and self-conscious romanticism is what makes Rooney’s novels both easily consumed and thought provoking. This is also what makes her characters so relatable to younger generations. Rooney’s characters articulate their ideals and observations clearly over the internet, but they always end up paralysed and confused by face to face interaction – a relatable feeling for gen-z and millennial people.
Rooney writes at a distance that draws readers in as they see themselves reflected in the disconnected awkwardness and intellectualism characters inhabit.
Rooney’s success was, and still is, shocking for a young, Irish literary fiction author. As I see it, Rooney understands people in the same way many of us do – that we are complex and unlikely to ever truly be understood. However, she sees the way this impacts our relationships more clearly than most. This is what makes her books feel so personal, and explains why her readers want the world to know that they love her – that the world might know them better.