This is great for readers who want to look clever on the bus without having actually to exert themselves on the page. This gives her books the public impression of profundity but the private experience of levity. In interviews she talks a big game about capitalism, Marxism and critical theory, but the books read like upcycled YA. Rooney, by accident rather than by design, plays into this perfectly. Secondly, literary fiction is a genre in search of a floor (in terms of quality). Critics then rationalise the success ex post facto.
(The distinction is important, I think, because whilst nobody should ever begrudge a writer success, I do believe that the claim to literariness should be contested.) Firstly, literary fiction is beholden to a mob mentality. I have two theories as to why people think that Rooney has written not just a commercially successful novel but a literarily significant one. TF contributor John Shade, who works at a major publishing house, supplied me with some valuable industry insight into Rooney-mania: But still I kept up, questing towards some considered display of equilibrium. The New Republicīy this stage, I was feeling like I might commit a terrible crime myself. Her debut, Conversations with Friends, was as star-making as White Teeth and as zeitgeisty as Less Than Zero. The 28-year-old Rooney has been hailed, not implausibly, as ‘the first great millennial author’. In every generation, there are writers who speak for that generation, who bottle some essential current or mode of thinking and being, and arrange it in letters on the page.
We might love with bleeding, imperfect hearts. She is positing a world in which we might stop apologizing for apologizing, in which we might seek compromise and see vulnerability as a form of courage. Impossibly intellectual, impossibly tender. Were these putdownable novels the same ones that had critics saying things like: I didn’t like them – in fact, I didn’t think they were very good at all. When, eventually, I did pick her novels up, I was surprised. But she became the zeitgeist! It was starting to affect my conversation at parties.
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