Written by: Madison Bigelow
There’s nothing more that I love than a novel about nothing. Genuinely.
While I continue to be amazed by the craftsmanship and utter genius required to successfully build a whole new world in a fantasy novel, 9 times out of 10 I will choose a plotless narrative that prioritizes characterization over all else.
Image from Shelf Awareness
Naturally, that makes me the president of the Sally Rooney fan club. To be completely candid for a moment, I first picked up her novel Normal People a few years ago because I saw the novel cover all over Pinterest. Effortlessly cool girls stashing their books under one arm, cold brew in the other hand, as they traversed the quiet streets of busy cities or staked out at a corner cafe to people watch, I thought to myself: This is my ticket, I can also be a cool girl.
Five years later, I’m still not cool. Far from it, actually. However, my life has been forever changed by Rooney’s ability to interrogate the nucleus of the young adult (often female) experience.
Author of four novels (Conversations with Friends, Normal People, Beautiful World, Where are You?, and forthcoming Intermezzo), Irish novelist Sally Rooney began her writing career by publishing in literary magazines like The Stinging Fly, where she remains a contributing editor to this day.
A self-proclaimed feminist and Marxist, she has a particular knack for excavating the tense and unexpected relationship between romance and late-stage capitalism in the 21st century. Against the backdrop of a taught Irish (and global) political climate and general existential dread, Rooney looks inwards to identify the state of the human condition as it manifests itself today.
Image from Vogue
Beautifully brutal and rashly quiet, her novels largely focus on interpersonal drama (with a particular interest in romance and friendship) to address themes like class inequality, exploitation, intimacy, art, and politics. And most identifiably: nothing happens in these books. While there are basic plots that tie together these narratives, she is much more interested in the characters that navigate these worlds than the worlds themselves.
It’s not a secret that the world’s affairs, especially right now, are devastating. I’m lucky to be able to say this from my vantage point as an American college student, but trying to change the world feels like an increasingly insurmountable task as I get older. And, as I get older, I become less interested in trying to escape the reality that I currently live in, favoring instead to learn how to aptly navigate my world so as to feel less defeated all the time.
Sally Rooney gets this. Maybe I’m just a bit of a voyeur, but it’s greatly reassuring to read about people that live in the same world as you and experience the same problems as you. While I’m immersed in the vulnerability of another person’s interior life, I often find myself thinking that I live parallel to many of Rooney’s characters.
As a woman in my 20s, I feel as though I’m constantly chasing a fleeting sense of intimacy that the world is constructed to prohibit. While there isn’t much that happens in the plot of my life either, the relationships I’ve sustained and/or smothered make up the mosaic of my personhood today.
Sally Rooney puts voice to these experiences. She uncovers them. She understands.
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