Sally Rooney Addresses Her Critics

The Irish writer has been accused of being overly sentimental and insufficiently political. In her new novel, she makes the case for her approach to fiction.

- Caleb Crain

In her first two novels, Conversations With Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), the young Irish writer Sally Rooney resurrected the depressive, evacuated style that Ernest Hemingway made his signature. “The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white,” he famously wrote in his short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” and in much the same deadpan way, Rooney has Frances, the narrator of her debut, look around a college library and think, “Inside, everything was very brown.” Ridiculous in isolation, Rooney’s line makes sense in context: Frances has just received an email from her lover’s wife, and while she waits for the courage to read it, she tries, unsuccessfully, to distract herself by focusing on her surroundings. At least, that’s what I imagine is going on in Frances’s head. With a writer so chary of detail, the reader rushes to fill in.

Rooney also resembled Hemingway—and Raymond Carver, a renovator of Hemingway’s minimalism whom Rooney has cited as an influence—in her ability to write dialogue that sounds unpremeditated but has a neutron-star density of drama and emotion. Here are Connell and Marianne, the teenage lovers of Normal People, after their first kiss:

All right, he said. What are you laughing for?

Nothing.

You’re acting like you’ve never kissed anyone before.

Well, I haven’t, she said.