Sally Rooney's New Novel
by Dana Brown
Hello and happy Sunday!
Nothing says “spoiled” like croissants and coffee, so I urge you to grab some and sit down to read this week’s Grapevine.
There will never be another Sally Rooney, says Time Magazine
A few years ago, someone posted a photo of a man walking through Brooklyn with a copy of Conversations With Friends tucked in the back of his trousers, the words SALLY ROONEY peeking out above his waistband. It was an accessory that telegraphed as much about his personal style as his choice in attire did. Less than a month earlier, the book critic Constance Grady had published an essay titled “The Cult of Sally Rooney,” deeming it “aspirational” to be a fan: “If you read Sally Rooney, the thinking seems to go, you’re smart, but you’re also fun—and you’re also cool enough to be suspicious of both ‘smart’ and ‘fun’ as general concepts.”
Thanks in part to endorsements from Taylor Swift, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Lena Dunham, Rooney, the 33-year-old Irish novelist known for her exacting, witty portraits of the romantic and sexual entanglements of Dublin millennials, broke out in 2017 with her debut novel. Her name quickly became a shorthand for a cultural sensibility—the way young people in the late 2010s sublimated their deep uncertainty into a performance of anticapitalism and avoidant attachment. Conversations With Friends probed the ambiguities of friendship and affairs, while Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, published in the U.S. in 2019, charted how social class and miscommunication derailed a romance.
Time Magazine
Sally Rooney is publishing a new book, a novel called Intermezzo, to see the light of day on September 24th.
The New York magazine published a piece on Sally Rooney's novels and her unique position in modern literature. Deemed “the first great millennial author,” Rooney has written three books—Conversations With Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You—which focus on young people falling in love. Despite being marketed as "literary fiction," her books have achieved mass popularity, surprising even Rooney, a self-described Marxist critical of capitalism's erosion of human existence. Given her commercial success, this irony aligns with millennial anxieties: a desire for anti-capitalist ideals while pursuing conventional life goals like stable incomes and housing.
Critics have accused Rooney of writing repetitive romance novels, with some dismissing her accessible prose as incompatible with serious literature. However, her work is more complex. Rooney does not claim to write Marxist novels, only that she holds Marxist beliefs. She critiques the capitalist framework that benefits from the very novels she writes, recognising the inherent contradictions in critiquing the system while profiting from it.
Rooney also defends the novel’s deep connection to love, arguing that love and marriage have been central stakes of English-language fiction since Jane Austen. For her, novels uniquely engage readers emotionally, making them inherently tied to romantic relationships, even if they're about broader themes. Critics who label Rooney as "merely" a romance novelist are not only questioning her literary seriousness but also acknowledging the economic nature of the romance genre, which is a dominant commodity in the fiction market.
Rooney’s novels explore how love and social dynamics are intertwined. Her characters see love as a potential escape from societal roles, but they ultimately confront inequalities that challenge their idealism—though not love itself. In this way, Rooney presents love as both a product of social conventions and a real, meaningful force. While not strictly Marxist, this view represents a "lover’s theory of Marxism," emphasising the tension between love's emotional and economic dimensions.
Read on only if you want mild spoilers for Intermezzo.
In Intermezzo, Sally Rooney's latest novel, the plot and themes echo her earlier works, particularly Conversations With Friends. Though not as acclaimed as Normal People, Intermezzo improves Beautiful World, Where Are You, according to the New York magazine’s reviewer. The novel uses Rooney's signature free indirect style to explore relational drama among three characters: Peter, a 32-year-old lawyer, who is entangled with Naomi, a 23-year-old college student, and Sylvia, his 32-year-old ex. Meanwhile, Peter's younger brother Ivan, a 22-year-old chess prodigy, becomes romantically involved with Margaret, a 36-year-old arts centre director. As with Rooney's prior works, the novel’s drama is subtle, focusing on social conventions, relationships, and personal struggles rather than events.
The novel centres on characters wrestling with societal expectations and their own desires. Margaret, for example, hides her relationship with Ivan, fearing judgment from others while grappling with her own feelings. Rooney builds on a long-standing literary tradition, as explored by Marxist theorist György Lukács, where characters exist within arbitrary social systems that feel disconnected from authentic human nature. Margaret's desire to break free from conventional life, and yet her realization that life itself is constrained by conventions, mirrors this tension. Love becomes a means of escape, but it is limited by societal norms and expectations.
Rooney's characters, like those in Pride and Prejudice, attempt to transcend the roles they are assigned but always encounter the inescapable framework of their social reality. Margaret’s internal conflict, oscillating between love and social etiquette, illustrates how love, despite its romanticised nature, is bound by the same conventions. The characters’ struggles reflect the novel’s broader commentary on the human condition within a constructed social order.
Rooney also highlights the performative aspect of sexual dynamics. In Intermezzo, characters reflect on the artificiality of sexual roles, contrasting the “natural” and “normal” with the contrived. Kink, in Rooney's world, isn’t condemned for deviating from normative sexuality but for making obvious the conventions that underlie all relationships. While the characters seek authenticity, they are often caught in roles that feel artificial, a tension Rooney constantly examines. Even in "normal" sexual relationships, as depicted between Marianne and Connell in Normal People, the characters are aware of the invisible tropes guiding their actions.
Ultimately, Intermezzo shows how Rooney's novels engage with the complexity of love, relationships, and societal conventions. The characters’ attempts to escape their roles, only to return to them, underscore the inevitability of social structure. Love, as Rooney suggests, may offer a brief respite from these confines, but it remains deeply entangled with the very societal rules her characters wish to evade.
Get your Sally Rooney fix
In an essay for the New York Review of Books, the novelist Namwali Serpell identified at least nine books published from 2020 to 2023, including Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan and A Very Nice Girl by Imogen Crimp, that felt reminiscent of Rooney’s first two novels and featured similar plots and tensions. Some of those nine books were in progress long before Rooney made her mark, responding independently to the same cultural undercurrents. Nonetheless, they were relentlessly compared, which calcified the group as “a period style,” Serpell wrote. She called them “remaster novels”—stories about young women in relationships with imbalanced power dynamics, creating a double bind that tips the scales in their favour. Though some of those books were successful, none of them touched Conversations.
Time magazine
The Guardian’s recommendations if you love Sally Rooney:
Didn’t know she was a Marxist, makes me more curious to check her out.