Sally Rooney: the most overrated novelist of our generation
Why I dislike the most successful author of this decade so far, and it's not just because I'm jealous she wrote two bestsellers before she turned thirty.
Sally Rooney is a rare thing, a young, critically acclaimed literary bestseller. Before turning thirty, the Irish novelist had produced two novels, Normal People and Conversations With Friends, which had sold hundreds of thousands of copies and were both subsequently adapted for television by the BBC. The 2020 Normal People TV show became a worldwide phenomenon, with enthusiasm reaching such a fever-pitch that think-pieces were written about the significance of Connell’s silver chain necklace. Normal People was longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize; Conversations With Friends won her the 2017 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award; she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2022.
I am yet to read Rooney’s third, and so far less popular, novel Beautiful World, Where Are You. And at this point I have absolutely no intention to, for I am also a rare thing: a Sally Rooney hater.
It feels lonely sometimes, being so violently opposed to something everyone else seems to love. But we all have our crosses to bear, and mine appears to be gloomy Irish novels about quiet young women with family trauma forming unhealthy attachments to unavailable men.
Normal People and Conversations With Friends are basically the same story in different fonts. In Conversations With Friends, Frances, a student at university, begins a relationship with Nick, a married actor a decade older than her. Their relationship limps on through periods of secrecy, coupled by their inability to communicate with each other about literally anything.
In Normal People, Marianne and Connell meet at school and begin a relationship that continues on and off throughout their time at university. Their relationship limps on through periods of secrecy, coupled by their inability to communicate with each other about literally anything.
Similarities aside, Rooney’s main failure is the absence of compelling characters, or indeed character of any kind. Her protagonists could be replaced with wet tissue paper moulded into human form and they would still have more personality than Frances or Nick. Some might argue that the point of Normal People is that Connell and Marianne are ‘normal’; that at the end of the day we are all secretly drab and anxious like them.
I still have not so entirely lost my faith in the people of Earth that I believe long-faced loners like Connell and Marianne represent the average of the human experience. Aside from vague literary aspirations, none of Rooney’s characters seem to have any ambition or interests except their obsession with others. Frances in Conversations With Friends is a poet, but in neither the novel nor the TV show do we get any impression that this is something she cares about at all; it’s just another thing to shrug off alongside the grey Dublin weather.
Rooney’s characters are prone to forming obsessive relationships. But why? Why are Connell and Marianne so infatuated with each other, or Nick and Frances? None of these people have anything attractive about them. This is not to say that a character has to be perfectly likeable for me to be invested in them, but the lack of any redeeming or appealing personality traits whatsoever lends her novels this weird antiseptic quality that is thoroughly off-putting.
Frances’s horrible friend Bobbi is the only one I can think of whose personality I could pin down, and even then this is limited to being a judgy, controlling bitch. The reader is never given any good reason why Frances should continue being friends with Bobbi, let alone have been in a relationship with her for several years beforehand. Rooney’s characters are incomprehensible, and this is partly intentional - after all, in real life we stay in relationships with people we shouldn’t, seemingly inexplicably. But at least tell me something about Frances and Marianne aside from their vague leftist views and compulsive self-hatred.
The total absence of character makes scenes that are meant to be intimate and passionate fall completely flat. This is most glaring in the Conversations With Friends TV adaptation, where the audience is given no inkling of the characters’ thoughts, and thus renders the sex scenes so repellent I genuinely think watching two raw skinless chicken breasts copulating would be more satisfying than another scene of Nick (Joe Alwyn) and Frances (Alison Oliver) swallowing each other’s lips with all the tenderness usually reserved for licking the reverse of a yoghurt lid.
Amidst the plethora of praise printed on its opening pages, Vogue.co.uk is said to have described Normal People as 'a welcome reminder that there's a place for genuine love stories even in the age of Tinder'. If the codependence of Connell and Marianne, both empty, vacant characters, qualifies as a love story, I'll stick to Tinder, thanks. Look around your friendship circle and you will no doubt find an annoying on-again off-again couple that might as well be Connell and Marianne but without the romanticisation. That Normal People exists lends legitimacy to these sorts of relationships: no, this isn’t an awful situationship between two people who can barely speak two words together, it’s a love story!!! It’s one for the ages!!
The irony of Conversations With Friends is that no one at any point has an actual conversation of any meaning; this is intentional. Rooney is a great fan of simple, spare dialogue, and in both these novels refuses to use quotation marks to delineate dialogue in order to emphasise the blur between what is being spoken and what is thought. In a Sally Rooney novel, what isn’t being said is as important as what is. However, I find her characters too opaque, the characters’ words too sparse, and their thoughts too annoying for this vision ever to reach a profitable fruition.
Yet so many people love these books. Wading through the forest of five star reviews for Normal People, I often question myself: am I the problem? Do I need to get behind this new wave of contemporary literature or be left behind? Is my capacity for enjoying a book limited by the fact that I have never had an affair with an older married man, or been inextricably involved in a four-year long situationship?
The answer to that latter question is obviously no. Reading is meant to awaken our powers of empathy and to help us feel experiences that we have never and may never be part of ourselves. Reading Sally Rooney’s works has left me miserable and frustrated, rather like her characters, except my pain had nothing to do with the evocative powers of her writing but my being fundamentally incompatible with it.
Maybe I am the problem: so be it. I wear my Sally Rooney Hater hat with pride. If in future novels she manages to write a character who is more than just a bundle of vague conceptions about Marxism and mental illness wrapped up behind a mousy, pretty face, I will remove it with pleasure.
Good critique. I was rather confused when New Yorker called her novels the first classics of the 21st Century. It seemed very much like a more snobbish version of shopping mall romances. Perhaps a bit harsh, but if these books were to be the classics of this century, I would not want to read classics anymore.
Thank you for not only questioning the wholesale rave reviews of these books, but also providing a strong, cogent argument to support your position that both novels tell the same pointless story through the experiences of the same ho-hum characters different in name only. I suspect the literati who praise these books shared a keg of Kool-Aid and would have a tough time defending the books' literary merits one-to-one with, well, someone like you.