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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
July 2022 45
T
HERE IS nothing wrong with a simple love
story. Every one of us may guiltily covet a
favourite, whether it lingers in the sphere of
literature or film or song. Or perhaps for the
lucky among us the perfect love story
happens not to be found in text, or on screen, but is in
fact, our very own.
Love, like money, like power, is a global interest.
Love sells. It does not matter where you are from,
Loveless:
Sally
Rooney’s
latest
television
outing and
novel
The role of girls, responsibility
and love in the tactless
Rooney canon
Has anybody noticed how Irish-born Alison
Oliver, our central protagonist Frances, is
reminiscent of Daisy Edgar-Jones’s rendition
of Rooney’s Marianne Sheridan in the 2020
production of ‘Normal People’?
everyone can understand Adele, Elvis Presley, Dusty
Springfield, Emily Bronte. And now – maybe — Sally
Rooney.
15 May saw the latest addition to the Sally Rooney
franchise. The BBC’s serial adaptation of Rooney’s
debut novel ‘Conversations with Friends’ may come as
a surprise to sincere Rooney loyalists.
Though I am not a member of that party, I could not
help but be struck by the script’s concerted divergence
from the narrative of the novel. Central characters have
also changed in nationality, race, even personality.
However, the most excruciating variant is in fact the
unmistakable likenesses. Has anybody noticed how
Irish-born Alison Oliver, our central protagonist
Frances, is reminiscent of Daisy Edgar-Jones’s rendition
of Rooney’s Marianne in the 2020 production of
‘Normal People’?
I do not believe it could be argued that Oliver has
modelled her performance entirely on that of
CULTURE
By Nadia Whiston
46 July 2022
Edgar-Jones, which not only caused me to
wonder whether she had read the novel she had
been cast in, but also to consider that maybe it’s
not her fault. For when was the last time love
looked that awkward, ah yes, I remember.
I read the complete works of Sally Rooney,
fastidiously, one after the other into the dead of
night over the course of one long weekend. For
those who came upon me during this period, or
for those who unwittingly rang me, I espoused
many thoughts, both remorseful and
remorseless. Few writers have left me more
sour, more recalcitrant than this one.
When asked why, my first instinct was to claw
at the names that came before Rooney, canonical
writers, specifically those of our country.
Perhaps, I admit, I have not read enough, my
vision is limited; spoiled by a University
education or maybe spoiled by the Irish
themselves. We are a country of writers after all,
we clog and infiltrate the tributaries of really any
literary genre. Our writers are brave,
frighteningly progressive, raw and wrathful -
and more often than not share a deep
inward-facing fascination with their own country
without being self- involved.
I had to remind myself that it is possible to
read an Irish writer and not place them within
the canon. I had to remind myself that the world
Rooney is concerned with has nothing to do
with Edna O’Brien, Donal Ryan, Kevin Barry,
John Banville. And nor should she be compared
with it. Indeed, I have come to accept that
Rooney represents something else entirely. But
what is it?
Rooney is writing in a globalised world: for a
globalised readership. Her stories could really
be set anywhere. Trinity, to someone who hasn’t
attended it, but who has attended two other
universities, seems very familiar. But these
considerations did not much temper my
grievances, because those elements are not the
problem, or not the problem I am bothered by.
What I accept Rooney represents is our new
idea of a young woman or indeed our new idea
of writing about young women - and what that
creature is encouraged and portrayed to be: a
filterless, imperfect, brave, independent and
tender thing. But, is that what we meet in
Rooney’s books?
What angered me, as a young woman myself,
as a person both older and younger than
Rooney’s creations, was not only how self-
centred they all are, but that they lack nuance,
they lack depth and they lack agency. What
bewildered me further was Rooney’s alliance
with elitism: everyone she creates is troubled by
a vast and unconquerable intelligence, or so we
are told, yet I never felt these exceptional traits
to be on display for me.
I am not shown the inner workings of the mind
of young Frances the poet in her ‘Conversations
with Friends’, and it is interesting to reflect on
how the current television representation of
Rooney’s first novel would not function as it
does on screen without the addition into the
script of these poetic interludes (though that is
not to say what we hear in them has poetic
value).
It is important to note that, due to the absence
of these in the novel itself, the character of
Frances is that of a young woman we only ever
meet in her relation with the married man she
spends the book chasing, although she also
does not chase after him does she? — because
young Frances is a communist and she does not
believe in love.
When speaking of my experience with an
older friend of mine, I was assured that Rooney
was undoubtedly a very clever young woman.
When I asked this friend to elaborate, he said
simply: “She has uncovered a formula, she has
figured it out”. I insisted that he clarify what
formula this was.
He said: “She writes about what young
women are like”.
So perhaps now my thoughts on Rooney can
begin to take their shape. For in reading her
writing I find myself perturbed by a two-pronged
quandary. One being that no, I do not think
young women are like this; and two, I do not find
‘love’, that messy funny touching uncomfortable
thing to be present among or inside of Rooney’s
characters.
Perhaps it is that Rooney’s fetishising of
coldness and emotional incoherence simply
does not seduce me. I am aware that I may stand
very much alone in my hinterland. I have on more
than one occasion been labeled a ‘hopeless
romantic’, and perhaps good heavens, I am, and
long may I remain so. So on the basis that you
are reading an article by someone inherently,
though maybe comfortingly, old fashioned, let
us proceed…
In her latest novel Rooney returned in some
ways to familiar haunts, and though her
characters are older, University still lingers as a
defining presence however distantly. Trinity in
‘Beautiful World Where Are You?’ is where Alice
and Eileen met. Our two central females occupy
polarities. While Eileen has remained Dublin-
bound, over-qualified, under-paid and as yet out
of touch with her intellectual potential, Alice
(undoubtedly Rooney’s alter ego) wrote her first
book during the early hours of university life and
has since become a best-selling worldwide
superstar.
Again, we are never ushered into her creative
space, instead we meet her on Ireland’s west
coast and also on Tinder. She is renting a country
pile on her own, and secluded with her laptop
authors entreating emails to Eileen, who at first
eludes her.
Few writers have left
me more sour, more
recalcitrant, than this one
Converstions with Friends
July 2022 47
Loneliness, and the loneliness of the late-
twenty-something in the big bad world is a
phenomenon in ‘Beautiful World Where Are You’.
Though success is the active agent of it for Alice,
a failed relationship and the expense of Dublin
are catalysts for Eileen. This novel is the most
bulgy of Rooney’s oeuvre. There is no denying
that she is directly confronting contemporary
existence, its losses and limitations, but the
novel is mannered and made awkward by the
ubiquitous use of emails to drive its narrative
along.
This is not helped by the subject of the emails
either. Rooney, quite desperate to display the
wealth and variety of her geopolitical concerns,
has Alice say things like this:
“I have been thinking a lot lately about right
wing politics (haven’t we all), and how that
conservatism (the social force) came to be
associated with rapacious market capitalism.
The connection is not obvious, at least to me,
since markets preserve nothing, but ingest all
aspects of an existing social landscape and
excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as
transactions”.
Rooney has spoken openly in interviews
about her belief that human relationships are
transactional, and I don’t know if the above was
supposed to act as some sort of metaphorical
allusion to the concerns of her latest novel.
Perhaps Ireland’s wealthiest communist does
have a point, and perhaps in the world of
immediate gratification we are living in, I, the
romantic, should accept this as standard
philosophy. However, I insist on the fact that if
you are in the business of writing romantic
fiction, pursuing such beliefs may hamper the
value, certainly the eectiveness of the story
you have to tell.
In the case of ‘Beautiful World Where Are
You?’, what I found to be most powerfully ironic
was that contriving to inscribe her radical, what
some may call nihilistic, beliefs into a work of
fiction, rather than one of social reportage, only
underlines the conventionality of the tale.
Here are our young women, both when we
meet them eluded and discouraged by love. We
accompany Eileen on her long walks home to her
bedroom in a shared apartment where she
stalks her ex on Facebook and masturbates until
she falls asleep. Her soul comfort, it seems, is
Simon. He is wealthy, intelligent, fluent in
French, extremely handsome; they have known
each other since adolescence, and he loves her.
Eileen finds in him a loving recipient in whom
she can deposit her loneliness and
dissatisfaction (how convenient, how safe).
Initially Alice and Felix from Tinder seem highly
unlikely. Felix works in a factory warehouse
driving a forklift, he is unimpressed by the
country pile.
Their conversations are abrupt, irregular and
volatile — mostly down to Felix. In an intimate
sex scene between them in which Alice tells him
that she loves him for this first time, Felix
responds by stating that people do not often fall
in love with her - before adding that she does not
seem to have any friends either; then follows a
paragraph like this:
“’I was thinking about it over in Italy, he said.
Watching you do your reading and your
autographs and all that. I wouldn’t go so far as
to say you work hard, because your job’s a laugh
compared to mine. But you have a lot of people
wanting things o you. And I just think for all the
fuss they make over you, none of them actually
care about you one bit. I don’t know if anyone
does’.
‘You must really hate me’, she said coolly.
‘No, I don’t’, he replied. ‘But I don’t love you
either’”.
The relationship between these characters
perplexed me. Though the voices of Alice and
Eileen could be virtually interchangeable for
most of the novel, a pervasive tendency in
Rooney characters, Alice strikes me as a
pleasant, inoensive sort of person (while
Eileen is at times overwhelmingly narcissistic).
I am not quite sure what the purpose is of Alice
being spoken to the way she is by Felix. Although
he is by far the most memorable of Rooney’s
characters, specifically though not entirely
because of his nastiness, I remain uncertain as
to his function in the love set-to. And though I
say he is the least monochrome of Rooney’s
creations, putting young women in situations
which undermine them without giving the reader
a reason as to why Rooney is doing it really
baes me.
As I said before, I thought Rooney was here to
represent young women. Perhaps I was mistaken
in assuming that therefore she would also
empower them, lead them, inspire them. To be
very fair Rooney has expressly disavowedany
ambition to be the voice of her generation but
that is the role she has been given, and it is her
obligation to deal with it.
I say this about an author who was named one
of 2021’s most influential women by the
Financial Times. What I struggled with in
‘Beautiful World Where Are You?’ is that once
you scrape past the political and ecological
wae (Madeleine Schwartz in the New York
Review of Books says the politics in Rooney’s
books are “mostly gestural”) you get two young
women entirely dependent on men.
Perhaps the ecological historical religious
stu is supposed to distract us from that, but
what I see is that for both women there is a male
Rooney represents our new
idea of a young woman
or indeed our new idea of
writing about young women
Ordinry People
48 July 2022
character who will make their decisions for them; and
that in the novel’s conclusion it is by and through these
relationships both women will attain a sense of
completion.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with that
trajectory, aside of course from it being tinged o-
white by inverted misogyny.
Of Alice the great writer we learn very little, other
than, like every other child star ever, she had a mental
breakdown and spent time in an institution.
Aside from that, what we learn of her is embodied in
Felix, an unevenly sketched and malevolent creation,
through whom it seems Alice has acquired a greater
sense of inner peace…Am I missing something here?
Not for the first time with Rooney’s writing I feel
uncomfortable. Throughout my Rooney experience I
was far more aware of the words anxiety, ego and
power and coldness than I ever was of love. Perhaps
we can assume we are going through a phase.
Among those shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young
Writer of the Year award was thirty-two year-old Megan
Nolan’s debut, ‘Acts of Desperation’. Described as ”a
hugely powerful tale”, her narrative of pathological
self-hatred and obsession was a dicult and upsetting
experience.
It made me worry about our new ways of writing
about young women. I worry about an essential
negativity, I worry that these chronicles of abuse and
attacks upon the self are being given far too much
power, and that how the media responds to them
should be tempered accordingly.
In ‘Conversations with Friends’ twenty-one year-old
Frances pursues a relationship with a thirty-five year-
old married man, Dan. An aair ensues, initiated by
Frances, with what could be discerned as Rooney’s
intention: an eschewing of gender dynamics and
convention.
But really what we see is twenty-one-year-old
Frances making nightly visits to the bedroom of
married Dan over the course of their stay in a villa in
France – on a holiday to which she was invited by Dan’s
wife, Melissa.
The aair ends because Dan starts to sleep with his
wife again… only for it to be continued, maybe, it is
hard or unrewarding to say, when Dan mistakenly rings
his former mistress instead of his wife while doing their
grocery shopping (yes, really).
The tone of this conversation I could only interpret
as inherently misogynistic. What other way can we
read the ending of this novel in which the man will
succeed in being granted the opportunity of sexual
dedication from both his older greatly successful wife
(her interest in him reinstated by his extramatarital
endeavours) and his much younger, also highly
talented – though totally intellectually unexplored
– mistress.
What actually took place within those two hundred
and forty odd pages? But oh well, at least Dan feels
better.
What it says to me is that Rooney understands
women to be disposable, so what I am talking about
here for Rooney the writer is, in fact, responsibility. For
it seems odd does it not, for a writer so young, so
modern, writing books wedded utterly to the current,
divorced utterly from the romantic, for one seen to be
so influential, to merely reinscribe old tales of anxiety
and rejection once again into society and then to be
celebrated for them? Let us consider Eileen, a character
who seemed very clearly rejected, depressed by the
failure of her domesticity, and on the rebound – yet
who was so easily made content by her marriage to a
very wealthy man she has known all her life and the
birth of her first child.
What could be more comfortingly bland and also so
patriarchal?
Though I want it to be clear it is not the lack of
imagination which has left me spinning. In ‘Normal
People’ — certainly her strongest work — Marianne,
another waifish insecure intellectual is embossed with
not only a mainstream eating disorder but also, and
just as seriously, a background as a victim of domestic
violence.
Marianne has her nose broken by her brother and is
unable to defend herself, nor does she verbally protest.
His physical violence towards her, too, is left
unexplained as is the bizarrely abusive behaviour of
her mother.
Rooney renders her female characters lacking in
distinction or agency.
Worse, it seems rather like Marianne’s sexual
sadomasochism is used merely as a motif, and one
which never allows the young woman any chance at
self-clarification. Rooney never gets to the heart of this
instinct, one which generates great harm for Marianne,
exposes her to humiliation, degradation and malice
from former friends and ensuing abandonment:
essentially abuse. Though Rooney too abandons and
abuses her, Rooney too takes the damaged and
victimised girl and turns her into an attractive image
which sells.
Does it not seem odd for the author to choose to
exhibit such a personal tendency though never to
attempt to resolve it? I ask this with no feminist grudge,
I ask this as a reader, I ask this as a young woman. In
books which have gone so far am I wrong to place
some degree of responsibility in Rooney’s hands?
At the close of ‘Normal People’, Connell will move
forward into a world of promise with a coveted
scholarship and Marianne will be left behind,
unchanged, unfixed. We are never told what she is
doing in the world. Her world is not opened to us, but
she hands Connell the key to his freedom, nonetheless,
though her abandonment continues.
We deserve less randomness and more integrity,
explanation and ultimately justice. Only an author who
writes about issues as serious as this with so little tact,
could write love stories with no love in them.
In the case of ‘Beautiful World Where Are
You?’, what was most powerfully ironic
was that contriving to inscribe her radical,
what some may call nihilistic, beliefs
into a work of fiction only underlines the
conventionality of the tale
