Peaceable Land 8 - The Keys to the Rooneyverse
A full view of Sally Rooney so far
We’re a month from the novel after the most-reviewed novel of all time by the one secure Major Novelist of a generation. Sally Rooney’s fourth book comes out on the 24th of September.
How might we structure our anticipation? The three previous novels are best set out on the baking tray. Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018), and Beautiful World, Where are You? (2021) are the collapsed first try, then the raw batter gorge, then at last the stately, composed execution. The first and third attempt the same project and of them the third succeeds, while the second is a book-length indulgence of that project’s most delicious aspect.
Rooney thinks in relationships more than in characters. “I can’t actually imagine what it would be like to write about a character who was just on their own… They become who they are through their interactions with other people.” Characters arrive “preentangled”, bound up in one or many “dynamics” — the dynamic is the atom and the interest.
The first and third novels each attempt a set of six dynamics, mapped as each of the relationships between a cast of four characters. (A square has four edges and two diagonals.) Again, Beautiful realises this lace more successfully than Conversations.
Conversations’s flaw might seem banal: it’s in first person. We’re kept in the head of the introverted female character, who is self-concerned, so our sympathy is limited with hers. The highest feeling comes during extended dialogue, when the narration is subdued.
Beautiful, in a fluent, detached third, observes the cast more kindly. Alice and Simon are repeats of Bobbi and Nick. But while Bobbi was the brazen and indestructible girl best friend, Alice is brazen, but visibly destructible from the first scene, and where Nick was lucky and untouchable, Simon is lucky but touched. Near the end of Conversations, Bobbi actually tells the narrator ‘You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi’s rich, Nick’s a man, I can’t hurt these people.’ Everyone can be hurt in Beautiful.
It also makes bolder choices. The fourth character is outright replaced. Felix isn’t a deeper Melissa. She, urbane wife of male love interest, was a direct antagonist. He, laddish and abrupt, is alien to the book’s prior characters and forms complex relationships with them. He and Nick, for instance, are the two new partners of a pair of old friends, but become to each other teases, counsels and confidantes. It’s much more interesting.
There's also the straightforward camera point. A first person narrator has to be present in every scene. Conversations couldn’t have followed Nick and Felix when they leave the girls on the beach and walk to the sea. Beautiful is more complete in that way.
“It’s about the dynamic that emerges between them and trying to trace as attentively as I could the developments in that” Rooney has said. Scenes of Beautiful do this with a sensitivity and skill that – really – could stand with George Eliot. Near the book’s close Eileen enters a living room and finds the others around a table, then argues with Alice, and you are alive to every character’s feeling about every moment.
We might have the Rooneygasm as the elicitation by steady and minute attentions of crashing and massive climaxes. Its texture is special for being at once detailed and vast. It consumes and races, bristles and heaves; McCarthy has “lush and tactile”, Rooney herself has “hot and passive”. It’s like a large yawn, the ocean’s glitter, or a night flight’s take off. The reader becomes to the text like Marianne to Connell, “attuned to the presence of his body in a microscopic way, as if the ordinary motion of his breathing was powerful enough to make her ill”.
Normal People. It’s the most ravishing, by far, and I won’t forget the September day I first read it – I trembled like a leaf in gale! But it is probably less hard won. It traces one dynamic. That dynamic (boy-girl) is the best blueprinted in art. Both personalities are of Rooney’s natural introvert mould. Time skips between chapters, providing excuses to recollect the past aloud.
The style’s consistent. There's a slightly higher degree of finish in the later ones: she eases off of coffee-making, ceiling-staring, and a few other crutches, and slightly lame bravados like sitting beside a nameless ‘bronze bust’ on Stephen’s Green – James Joyce – peel away. But the style really starts and stays pretty deft.
Critics trace it to Hemingway correctly, but there's room for clarification. She’s not at all in the hard-boiled lineage, for instance. She is distinctly of Hemingway via James Salter. Salter was a fighter pilot who made ‘an effort to nurture the feminine’ and described his style as ‘fluid but succinct’. The woman in his big novel is called Anne Marie; Normal People’s female lead is called Marianne, and its male is shown carrying a Salter novel.
So the cake is baked. Whatever itch spawned Conversations, Beautiful has surely scratched, and a period feels complete. That’s the Something Trilogy. That’s Early Rooney.
I hope Intermezzo will announce Early Middle Rooney. What might it depart from? Ireland, the present day, the three-hundred-page range, Facebook-native ‘spare’ prose? One day I’d like to see her write mania or endometriosis or grief as not just a fear but a consumption, and I’d also like to see her try for a slot on the shelf of monumental sympathy between Tolstoy and Eliot.
Of course that’s far too prescriptive. Only Sally Rooney can decide how her future books will be new. But you do feel that they must be that: new.
Anyway, it’s something to look forward to, isn’t it. For now we await Rooney like no other young novelist. She stands alone, and will do; at least until, that is, and as Rooney has it, “the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along”…
George Monaghan