Opinion | Sally Rooney Is the Least Interesting Thing About Her Novels

Sally Rooney is not an interesting person. She’ll tell you this herself — recently, in an interview with The New York Times for her new novel, “Intermezzo,” she replied to a question about her hobbies with: “What do I like to do? I feel like I’m so uninteresting.” In another interview, with The Guardian, she expressed the wish not to be “the focal point” for conversation about the role of “young women in our culture.”

She’s come to understand herself as having been selected for the role of the voice of a generation by a capricious literary establishment, a role she has neither encouraged nor enjoyed. She believes this has a lot to do with how young women are catapulted to positions of hypervisibility and not anything in particular to do with her books.

She’s right.

Not right about being boring — I love reading these interviews in part because of Ms. Rooney’s flat commitment to not talking about herself. But she’s absolutely correct about the way in which her gender has created a particular mania around her and her writing. And I think something has been lost in all the noise.

One magazine proclaims that there will never be another Sally Rooney; another feverishly announces that to have a galley of her latest book is to be anointed a “literary It Girl.” No male writer today is able to summon so much attention, much as no male pop star can monopolize the conversation like Taylor Swift. Buzzy debuts have come and gone, but Ms. Rooney has remained supreme, and if other female writers have briefly emerged as potential successors — Kristen Roupenian, Emma Cline, Raven Leilani, Ottessa Moshfegh — few have challenged her popularity.

As a result, “Sally Rooney” has become an abstraction more than a writer — a representative either of our deepest selves or of all we culturally loathe. Too many readers have come to treat her as synonymous with her characters and with the circus atmosphere that surrounds each new book.

One critic suggested that the character of Alice, a novelist, is “an obvious stand-in for Rooney,” then quoted Alice’s words as though they were Ms. Rooney’s own. “Somewhere halfway through ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You,’” the critic commented, “Rooney casually lets it drop: ‘I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel again.’ I’m pretty sure she means it.” But in addition to this not actually being a statement from Ms. Rooney, by the end of the book, Alice is writing another novel. Alice is a fictional character, “Beautiful World” is not an essay collection and the events that take place within the novel did not actually happen.

This tendency to conflate female novelists with their characters, and to misunderstand them as being somehow incapable of the imaginative work of novel-writing, long predates Ms. Rooney. In 1850, when Charlotte Brontë revealed that Ellis Bell, the purported author of “Wuthering Heights,” was in fact her late sister Emily, an immediate question arose that hadn’t occurred to anyone to ask about Mr. Bell: Where in the world did she get these crazy ideas? How could a sheltered young woman have come up with such a bizarre story?

The simplest answer — that Emily Brontë simply made her book up — seemed scarcely plausible. No, she must have had a dramatic love affair nobody knew about, or she was some sort of passive vessel of inspiration, or perhaps her brother, Branwell, was the writer — all arguments that echoed the notion that Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary, really wrote “Frankenstein.”

Women are no longer considered such naïve angels that they can’t produce works as strange or perverse as any man’s — but their imaginative powers still don’t receive full credit. Ms. Rooney has consistently stated she wants to remove herself from the conversation around her books but many readers won’t let the novels stand on their own, continuing to insist that women can write convincingly only when they write about themselves. Even Elena Ferrante, an author writing under a pseudonym, is routinely called a writer of “autofiction,” even though we know nothing about her life. Either that, or she’s suspected of secretly being a man.

At a concert in 2016, the singer-songwriter Mitski thanked an audience member who had shouted, “I love you,” but then added, “You don’t know me.” As readers, we need to remember that we don’t know Ms. Rooney — but that hasn’t stopped people from remaking her into a living symbol of literary success and generational influence. That inclination obscures what Ms. Rooney is actually doing very well: writing novels about love and manners, perhaps the most basic kind of crowd-pleaser there is. Yet her insistence on maintaining her privacy has only made imagining a “Sally Rooney” that represents everything you want or hate that much easier.

You could argue that, sure, female writers suffer from this sort of critical treatment but they’ve also benefited. The poetry of Sylvia Plath continues to be widely read in part because her readers are encouraged to identify themselves with her — and if her poetry is given less critical care than it deserves as a result, she’s also adored by generations of teenage girls who will carry her poems like a talisman into adulthood. If the trade-off for lasting, rapturous appreciation is the loss of a bit of literary respect, isn’t that fair? But writers can’t choose these trade-offs, any more than they can choose posthumous fame over present-day fame. They just make do. As readers, we have the choice to ask more of our culture — and ourselves.

As a longtime fan of Ms. Rooney’s work, I find that the key to her popularity isn’t so complicated. Her books are optimistic stories in which love is real, friendship is lasting, ideas matter and sex is a way for people to connect with each other rather than a set of abstract skills to master. Her books don’t always have a happy ending, but they contain the possibility of happiness. She doesn’t need to be the voice of her generation in order to be a compelling and interesting voice. In fact, she’s something better than all that: She’s a novelist.

B.D. McClay is a critic and essayist.

Source photograph by Westend61, via Getty Images.

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