Hot Commodity

In Sally Rooney's novels, love is always being bought, sold, or reduced to tropes. But this is also what makes it real.

- ANDREA LONG CHU

IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN: Sally Rooney has written a novel. Her books are spoken of in such epochal terms—“the first great millennial novelist,” the New York Times has called her—that one forgets that, until this week, she had written only three: Conversations With Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You. These are thoughtful, well-written books about young people falling in love, and they have attracted, with the logic of a lightning strike, a degree of mass popularity that is rarely achieved by what is marketed to consumers as “literary fiction.” This feat appears to baffle even the author, a self-described Marxist who believes human existence is being eroded at every level by the “transactional framework of capitalism.” Somewhat unwillingly, Rooney has become an emblem of a (perhaps imaginary) millennial ethos, one in which that generation’s anti-capitalist beliefs sit uneasily alongside its quiet but determined pursuit of a conventional life (traditional marriage, income stability, affordable housing) that appears to be vanishing. This tension seems to be exemplified by Rooney’s own commercial success. The industry will not soon forget the yellow bucket hats that Rooney’s publishers doled out to influencers in 2021 during the publicity campaign for Beautiful World, which also stationed a coffee truck bearing the novel’s cover art outside select New York bookstores.

Unsurprisingly, with the hype has come criticism: that Rooney is writing the same novel over and over; that she is writing the upmarket equivalent of a romance novel; that her prose is too accessible to be the stuff of serious literature; and, above all, that her professed Marxist values, much dwelt on in the press, are at odds with a theme as transparently bourgeois as romantic love.

Now, it is simply untrue that Rooney’s prose resembles that of a commercial romance; her sentences are spare, exact, and disarming.