How do you follow two brilliantly acclaimed novels? Rooney examines meaning, art, friendship and the price of fame through the story of two couples
There has been such a lot of noise around Sally Rooney’s work, such an amount of fervour and possibly manufactured division. “The cult of Sally Rooney,” says one headline. “Why do so many people hate Sally Rooney?” asks another. The discussion cannot be about the quality of her sentences, which are impeccable, or about her tone, which is thoughtful, often sweet-minded and always rigorous. This is prose you either get or don’t get; for some it is incisive, for others banal. Which makes me wonder if it is so clean, it reflects the readers’ prejudices right back at them.
Rooney is certainly interested in accuracy: her first two novels managed to be sexually exact without being smutty, and this is an interesting trick. In its repudiation of shame, the style represents an advance of some kind, and it may be this autonomy that irritates those notional critics who are notionally male and notionally misogynistic. Also – and this really does annoy some people – Rooney writes about love.