Sally Rooney disappears up her own etc

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Sally Rooney is no Plump Buck Mulligan, but a woman in possession of a publishing contract must be in want of an editorial team. Readers' lives matter.

These are the opening lines of the teaser extract from Rooney's latest, published in the IT, Aug 28th:

Of course, it's not necessary for the final product to possess the wit of a Muriel Spark, the genius of an Emily Dickinson, the gravitas and breadth of a Doris Lessing, the imaginative sweep of a Margaret Atwood, or the sex appeal of a Clarice Lispector, but make a bloody effort. (This is in no way aimed at Rooney. I am sure she submitted excellent work, which was mangled and degraded into its current form by a cabal of wolves in editorial.) Faber has published some of the greatest nitwits of all time, dammit... Joyce, Beckett, Eliot, Ishiguro... Posterity matters! :D

tl;dr The marketing team at Faber has done a fantastic job, but the lazy nitwits in editorial need to up their game, IMO.

No one ever needs to write a book. And in 99.9% of cases, we would all have been better entertained if they hadn't.

well not quite that word. Just a lot of privilege

Yet, her stories merely celebrate privileged white people doing privileged white things including going to elite colleges, voluntarily sleeping with bad men, having hang-ups about those bad men, and, if you’re a woman, asking to be hit by them during sex (and making that seem cool, or “grown-up”). Her female characters are depressed, starving,

in normal people the guy was the son of a cleaner from the West of Ireland. Trinity is elite(ish) but it isn’t Oxford

In fact the writer - herself upper middle class dismisses the Connell’s class

Normal People is about two white, able-bodied, beautiful straight people mulling about how hard it is to be white, able-bodied and straight. The girl is a loner who lives in a big house and feels unloved. The worst thing that has ever happened to her is that the boy she likes didn’t ask her toher school’s debutantes ball. The boy suffers from anxiety and doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up. He’s a misunderstood footballer whose mother is a cleaner (wow, am I supposed to feel sorry for you?)

lots of accusations of whiteness there.But as I said on my follow on post, Rooney invites it by writing generic western white characters. She could set the novel anywhere with tiny tweaks

Rooney is by far the most high profile Irish novelist currently working (Ireland being a country which is quite famous for producing talented writers). She has a new novel out this year, and last year the tv adaptation of her previous book was a streaming hit internationally. Naturally, all of those things generate publicity and merit column inches

By contrast, Amy Huberman is most famous for being married to a rugby player and starring in a couple of obscure TV series.

It’s difficult to see how there could be any similarity in the coverage they have received. Can you perhaps link to a few examples of articles with “flimsy” premises to illustrate this point?

Personally, living as we do in the age of endless streaming content and social media saturation, it’s heartening to see that the work of an intelligent young author can still garner this sort of attention (and without the aid of a hot take churning Twitter account).

….

She's writing about Ireland but in such a fashion that people can rant about "white privilege". People, in general, with no knowledge of the country.

the review was nonsense. Written by someone who knows nothing about Ireland.

as for Rooney’s Marxism - it’s clearly performative but Marxists don’t have to take the minimum wage, and she earns her own bucks. She’s not working class but not quite capitalist either.

I should say that I like her books. And the TV show. I was actually complaining about that review because I like her. That said she is writing for a generic western audience.