Is it Possible to Read Sally Rooney in a Burning Room?
Books hurtle through the world these days in craze-fuelled rushes. There are, for a given time, only one or two books that are allowed to dominate conversations, be talked of, or featured in Instagram posts. Quite a few publications have noted this phenomenon of ‘Just One Book’. It’s the big arrival – epithets shroud it, as do sales. You are allowed to review that book and take its characters apart endlessly, but only until the next One Book arrives.
For the past few years, this One Book has been whatever book Sally Rooney has written most recently. In September, Rooney’s latest novel Intermezzo arrived and was talked about only two zillion times. Yet, Rooney is universally read but not universally accepted. When Han Kang’s literature Nobel was announced shortly after the publication of Intermezzo, more than one essay lauded the purer poet in Kang, and her this-is-how-it-should be literature. Rooney’s novel was allowed to prickle as a hallmark of inferior – but gobsmackingly popular – prose. But then the world moved on – aided by Kang’s visible disdain at making much of her prize and the lack of one-line quotes that can be taken out of her books – and has eventually abandoned Intermezzo, hovering near Asako Yuzuki’s Butter and Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and its sequels.
If we consider a book a cultural artefact – and not a treatise to be read and commented upon on the week of its release alone – then the time is ripe to consider Intermezzo and the question of why we read some authors, and why some others endure.
What makes this day and this age so perfect for an Irish author to flourish like Rooney has? And has Rooney truly flourished if her readers find it difficult to grasp why they like her books so?
Chennai, Palestine and a global author
She has four novels in total. Her earlier ones are Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You. Two of these are television shows. In all, the protagonists are set in the West. They live Western lives, speak of Western concerns. The government’s gnaw is present – in Intermezzo one of the main characters is evicted from her student housing – but not despair-inducing. Men and women, some very irritatingly young and beautiful, swish about their lives, causing each other pain. Why do we read her in faraway India – a place that is only ever mentioned in the beginning of her breakout Dublin Review essay ‘Even if you beat me,’ in which she notes (correctly) that ‘Chennai is not a wealthy city’ and then has the most Indian experience ever, a bus breakdown at dawn? What contributes to her allure in this craven corner of the world which is but an anecdote to one of the world’s most popular writers? We are clearly not finding much of our surroundings in her novels – so what do we find?