Sex at the chess tournament

Famous and Beloved Book Club: Sally September in October, Issue 1

This is the first of a 4-post book club for Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. It covers the first 3 chapters, but is mostly about context and Rooney’s other books. It’s free, but following posts will be behind a paywall. For the month of October the paywall has been lowered to $4 monthly or $32 annually. That’s 20% off, which is so much.

Next week (October 10) will be about all of Part 1 (up to page 200), week after that (October 17) Part 2 (up to page 330), and then Part 3 & notes (October 24, page 454).

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I’m not “involved” in literary culture. Every so often I will go to a work thing (grad school), and everyone there wearing J. Crew sweaters will start talking about a novel I’ve never heard of that sounds awful. They behave as though everyone on the Earth knows about this novel by some woman, and they call it “potent.” They describe “discourse” about the novel that only lives on literary websites that seem like Jezebel for people who own J. Crew sweaters. I always think, “this is what it must be like for them when I talk about Hailey Bieber.”

what usually happens is that i quote “every rhode move is like heaven for me” & then i have to explain both hailey bieber’s lip balm brand and Gabbriette (tweet)

The most famous fiction writer under the age of 50 is as famous outside circles of these kinds of people as Hailey Bieber is to my mother: she knows who that is—maybe not even by name, but certainly with a context clue—but does not know what she “does,” let alone keep up with her lip balms. I feel the same way about filmmakers. People who are in the industry or who write about it or who really like movies are completely deluded about how famous Darren Aronofsky is to people who go to Panera or La Colombe.¹ When I saw Noah Baumbach at dinner and told my sister, who is young and normal, nothing could get her to care about it. Even when I described him as “the director of Barbie’s domestic partner,” she was like, “okay.” Sally Rooney might be the most famous, young novelist in the world, but the perceived “discourse” around her books is completely immaterial and funny to me.

That’s not to say it’s unimportant: literature and publishing are simply not my place. Though, as someone who finds Rooney’s books totally seductive, insular discussions about her attitude and politics add to my distant fascination with her prose and celebrity. Her fourth book came out last week, and nearly all the reviews reference a scandal surrounding the release of her last novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, because she’s supposed to be a Marxist and her publisher released a lot of merch to promote the book. If you told this to anyone who doesn’t work in publishing, writing, or cultural criticism, they would say, “are you serious?”. I’m a Marxist and an academic and a Rooney fan, and I have never seen a Beautiful World, Where Are You tote bag in my life. But if I did, I would want to buy it.

You’ll notice I didn’t call Rooney’s books “great” or say that I “love them.” I do, I guess, and they are, in a way, but they are weird so I am obsessed with them in the same way I am obsessed with Luca Guadagnino: I know their work will make me horny, but it also might bore me to tears, and I cannot wait to know how it might do both of those things.

I like that Rooney is both mean and nice about stereotypes. There is a woke lesbian in Conversation with Friends who is equal parts right and annoying, a bi guy in Beautiful World, Where Are You who is quiet and complicated, a dork and a jock who are both assholes in Normal People, and a girl with fake eyelashes who does OnlyFans to pay for her college flat who is actually, kind of a bitch in Intermezzo. Not enough contemporary artists indulge in stereotypes because of woke, posturing as if the archetypes like, say, finance bros or nonbinary roommates, are mean because they are untrue, rather than grappling with how cultural fragmentations of woke and bro are part of larger, more interesting, and true structures. Rooney always at least attempts a distinctly balanced approach to “types” of contemporary young people: it’s ok to be really into “Mr Salary” because he’s hot and rich. This reveals nuance not in untrueness but in an abundance of truth, too much for most mainstream culture to handle.

i’m just kidding

That she has managed to make this approach so mainstream is what’s interesting to me. But she’s not perfected it. Each book inevitably slips up and becomes too mean—Frances in CWF is relentlessly punished by her uterus—which begs readers to be too nice—women have it awful, and I must ruminate on what we can do to fix that. Connell (NP) is so mean he needs to be softened, but Rooney softens him into an unreal marshmallow, or, in another reading, a stereotypically emotionless man who never reveals any depth: maybe, in the end, he’s too mean.

Literary discourse would have you think that the romances at the center of these books never work out because structurally determined reality—work, money—is at odds with desire (remember Cruel Optimism?). I would argue, instead, that they don’t work out because the romance is too nice. The normal people kindly grow up with too much reverence for one another, the couple in CWF stay together because they’re a real adult couple, and yet Frances still has a chance to intervene. As much as I love the ending of BWWAY, it might as well be a thesis statement: it’s okay to have love for yourself.²

new face october (unrelated, getty)

These books build really rich worlds about how romance is the currency of youth. Beyond that, though, the stereotypes are quite funny, specifically the men. They never know what they want and are just desperate not to feel alone, to be taken care of, or for someone to take their feelings from them, sort them out, and give them back. They navigate real problems with either ease or forced distance, while women are on the ground, messy, busy, and tired. To do all that without seeming polemically adhered to 2017 is a miracle.

At some point, though, the romantic currency becomes unspendable in our decreasingly inhabitable world. I like the observant familiarity with which the books explore this, what I believe to be a fact of life. But she doesn’t know how to finish books, so when the romances crumble or change direction, they often just peter into ephemera. That could be formally interesting, but Rooney fancies herself very blunt, in prose, citation, and extratext. Letting the form parallel the content, just letting a narrative fall apart until there’s nothing left to tell a story with, seems accidental because she’s steered too mean or too nice, and knows, in the end, just as much about reconciling them as her readers (nothing).

Starting Intermezzo

The best feedback I’ve gotten on my academic writing is that, to some people, the article would seem like a final paper, and, to others, a performance of disciplinarity by someone from a different department who just learned about the topic last year. There’s a fine line to walk between the formula you have to follow to be published or respected by people gatekeeping your future jobs, and actually producing something that is neither embarrassing nor redundant. In that particular article, I was trying so hard to make it both palatable and novel that it sounded like an overloaded demonstration of course concepts. This is the lens through which I read Sally Rooney’s “Marxism.” 

In the first chapters of Intermezzo, the “dialectics” are gratuitous. There are two men and two women, one of each a mess and one of each composed, each with their distinctly masculine or feminine complications. Sylvia “holds the world lightly” and Naomi seems to dig her fingers into it, Sylvia with money to spare and Naomi with nothing but flatmates and Venmo transactions. Peter is financially solvent but addicted to benzodiazepines (this), and his brother Ivan has adult braces but is way more pleasant to spend time with. Then there’s a fifth character that is seemingly designed to complicate these archetypes, instantaneously interrogating her selfhood as a past-35 divorcée. There is way too much talk of money and the deadness of contemporary labor for expository world building, and the narrative framework reads as a final paper for a creative fiction class about materialism.

But I’m loving it. Ivan is a particularly interesting character to me, a “type” of guy Rooney hasn’t played with before nor that I’ve seen elsewhere. Margaret’s encounter with him is disarmingly sweet and contemplative, a sweepingly romantic short story on its own. Perhaps partially by design, Peter and Naomi are far less interesting and, frankly, disgusting. That’s enough to keep me interested in them too, counterintuitively, and I’m vaguely curious about Sylvia’s “deal” (dumb name), but I would rather just be spending time with Ivan. 

These first 3 chapters encapsulate my larger feelings about Rooney’s oeuvre; I understand why people would want to fixate on the political ideology of it all because it’s sitting right there screaming. But I don’t care to fixate on that, because the sex scene is so hot.

the british cover is so much sexier and more evocative than “five people on a chess board”—let’s get serious

The ultimate achievement of all Rooney’s books is that they are knowingly, luxuriously, romance novels for adults. Yes, she attempts to superimpose them with some sort of intellectual game of materialist feminism, but that’s not what makes them politically exciting. What makes them generically novel and formally compelling is that they are flatly sexy without any real sense of wish fulfillment. There’s little (not none, or it wouldn’t be as fun) childish albeit satisfying description of hotness or celebrity, just sex the way it really is when it’s new, frustrating, and emotional. That’s plenty productive without any talk of “labour,” though I’m curious to see how the “barrister” and the sex worker’s lives will continue to tangle. You can talk about Marx and Rooney until you’re blue in the face, but, for me, this is a book about sex at the chess tournament.

1. I saw Darren Aronofsky yesterday setting up a shot for Austin Butler to be in. I escaped before things devolved further—I can’t do this again.

2. No one asked, but my ranking of these books is: 1. Conversations with Friends, 2. Beautiful World, Where Are You, 3. Normal People. Putting Normal People first is not a mature thing to do.