FEATS

CONVERSATIONS WITH THINGS

Status as fetish in Sally Rooney’s romantic novels

If Jane Austen relies on eye contact—or a skirt rustle or a finger twitch—to imbue her novels with unbearable sexual tension, Sally Rooney employs text conversations, transcribed in full and formatted in bold, to quicken the novel’s pacing and showcase her characters’ intense awareness of the literary craft that is iMessage flirtation. She also uses actual sex. Unlike Austen, however, Rooney does not gesture towards physical intimacy as a private yet thoroughly knowable act—one whose peculiarities are assumed to follow directly from what we know of her characters—but as something preeminently political and continuously surprising, crucial terrain in which to explore the identities and anxieties of her characters.

Alongside their contemporary romantic storylines, Rooney’s characters take Marxist political perspectives. Both Normal People and Conversations With Friends are laden with casual conversation about the necessity of state government, among a number of other leftist flashpoints, and Conversations With Friends features a protagonist who identifies unequivocally as a communist. For her mixing of a contemporary aesthetic with diegetic discussion of Marxist politics, Rooney has been heralded in the New York Times as “the first great millennial novelist,” and the release of her third novel this September has been eagerly described as “one of this year’s most anticipated books.”

For its updated romantic intrigue as well as the political and cultural postures of its characters, Rooney’s work has drawn particular praise for its “relatability.” The Brown Daily Herald, alongside British Vogue, the BBC, Business Insider, and TheRinger, has described the novel as such, presuming that Rooney’s fans devour her work because they see themselves in her protagonists. However, many readers level relatability as a criticism against Rooney’s work. For many haters of her novels—and there are many of them—these novels amount to nothing more than indulgent contributions to the echo chambers that their presumptively bourgeois, millennial audiences occupy. By and large, though, Rooney’s fans and detractors agree: her novels are straightforward reflections of a certain strain of millennial life.

Both criticism and praise on the grounds of Rooney’s relatability rests on a particular understanding of Rooney’s readership. Her audience has been regarded, variously, as rich, literary, female, socialist, not-socialist, and, perhaps above all else, millennial. Such diagnoses, however, quickly become circular, as these demographics are extrapolated directly from the characters that Rooney depicts. Rooney’s essential reader is understood as someone who could relate, in these culturally determined ways, to Rooney’s protagonists.

What this argument about relatability takes for granted is that identification is what Rooney’s readership actually experiences. Given these novels’ place on worldwide bestseller lists, it seems very likely that not every single reader is a bird-boned academic wunderkind spending their summers in Italy or France. To call plots that center rarefied cultural and economic capital primarily appealing for their ‘relatability’ is to ignore the actual function these descriptions serve within their stories. Rooney’s work often veers into what author Elif Batuman calls, in her wry review of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, “‘Sex and the City’-style lifestyle porn.” Like A Little Life, Rooney’s novels follow young adults navigating careers and relationships against status-laden urban backdrops. Rather than presenting relational details, Rooney’s work, like Yanagihara’s, presents aspirational ones.

Conversations With Friends and Normal People follow similar characters in similar plots: college students talking about books and politics, having sex, arguing, and reconnecting, in a variety of configurations. In both books, Rooney is highly economical in her application of actual plot and profligate in her use of status symbol-laden description. The story beats of Conversations With Friends are dictated primarily by contact with, and accruement of, status. Arguably, the decisive moment of Conversations With Friends is the introduction of Frances, the novel’s protagonist, to a couple that consists of a famous artist, Melissa, and the moderately successful actor, Nick, with whom Frances begins an affair. Outside of this primary brush with the rich and culturally powerful, Frances works a publishing internship, gets a short story published in a literary magazine, and writes papers that professors mark as “brilliant.” In Normal People, Connell and Marianne, the protagonists and mutual love interests, both receive prestigious scholarships, and Marianne studies abroad at a program in Sweden. The novel concludes with Connell’s admission into some unnamed New York City creative writing MFA program. In novels so light on overt narrative movement, these affirmations of status take the place of plot points, demarcating one era from another.

Even more striking are the material worlds of these novels. Both describe European summer homes in lush detail. In Conversations With Friends, Frances narrates, “The house had a huge stoneword façade, with blue-painted shutters on the windows and white stairs running up to the front door. Inside, everything was pristinely tidy and smelled faintly of cleaning agents and suncream. The walls were papered with a pattern of sailboats, and I saw the shelves were full of French-language novels.” Here, she, her friend Bobbi, and two literary adult couples eat “lots of fresh croissants and various preserves and hot coffee” every morning, with painstakingly-noted variations in the amount of coffee Frances drinks depending on her mood. In Normal People, Marianne’s Italian summer home receives similar treatment, narrated by Connell: “Inside the hall a stone archway leads down a short flight of steps. The kitchen is a long room with terracotta tiles, white cupboards and a table by the garden doors, flooded with sunlight.” Here, they eat delicious, if slightly too al dente, pasta and drink champagne from coupes instead of flutes.

In both these settings, the novel’s narrator feels set apart from their surroundings. Connell and Frances, both of working-class families, enter these spheres with fresh eyes; Rooney initiates her narrators and her readers into these worlds in tandem. But rather than undermining the flashy appeal of these worlds, the sparkling novelty these settings hold for the narrators who confront them heightens their power. Rooney’s narrators meet these settings as aspirants, not as insiders, and the setting themselves are accordingly imbued with an aspirational glow. Her readers, along for the ride, meet these settings from the same position.

The novels also account in similarly painstaking detail for the clothes worn by their female characters. Normal People, for example, features two separate descriptions—one from Connell’s point of view, one from Marianne’s—of a presumably fetching felt beret of Marianne’s. In Conversations With Friends, Frances catalogues her outfits in extensive detail according to her modus operandi of “a lot of dark colors and severe necklines.” The bodies of Rooney’s women are conscripted into these captivating fashion descriptions: her protagonists doubt their own beauty, but the narration continually emphasizes their extreme thinness, their striking faces, the otherworldly glamor of their clothes, and the relationship between all of these factors. Readers are not asked to see their own faces in these characters; they are instructed to want what they have. Rooney’s archetype of the impeccably dressed and ethereally beautiful young woman is not relatable but powerfully aspirational.

Reading about these lives, surroundings, and bodies create the Gestalt effect of playing with a very old, very beautiful doll house. Rooney’s words provide omniscient access to an ornately perfect world. It seems, then, that these are not novels primarily intended to traffic in universal human truths. The richly textured descriptions of houses and food and clothes, the namedrop-burdened intellectual repartee, the sense that each and every major character hovers on the edge of literary, political, or artistic notoriety—only a person who is abnormally lucky, abnormally self-congratulatory, or both, would really class these as relatable narrative elements.

The work these touchpoints do in the novels is not necessarily inviting identification from readers. Instead, the world Rooney creates inspires a certain kind of aspirational distance. Aspiration is kitty-corner to relation, but it’s a different affect with its own motivations and its own logics. Rooney describes stuff in such a way that her reader has little choice but to want it.

For novels that critics have lauded as the Marxist work that millennials have been itching for, this effect would seem to amount to a glaring political contradiction. Why would ostensibly Marxist novels lavish so much glamorous and genuinely appealing description on the wealth of the secondary characters? Rooney compels us to fetishize these perfect meals, perfect bodies, and perfect lives, and none of these is of particular Marxist feminist value.

But Rooney’s argument is that they are not, after all, perfect. Underneath the surfaces, these characters’ souls teem with misery. Batuman’s diagnosis of A Little Life’s lifestyle porn also points to this dynamic. Batuman writes that A Little Life, a novel famous for heaping a staggering quantity of tragic backstory onto a staggeringly perfect corporate lawyer, blends “two of [her] least-favorite literary topoi (pedophilia, lifestyles of the rich and glamorous)” to irresistibly compelling effect: “It’s as if you get to see all the misery—the moral compromise, inequality, jealousy, and self-doubt—that we know lies behind every gorgeously finished brownstone floor through, every ‘prestigious’ career, every ‘major award,’ every super-expensive sushi dinner at a New York City restaurant with only six seats ... displaced onto this one guy. That’s why his suffering has to be so far over the top.”

Batuman’s insight that seeing status symbols juxtaposed with misery makes for good reading explains some of the appeal of Rooney’s novels. We see these characters suffer terribly even in their aspirational statuses. Marianne’s wealth is connected to an abusive family and an interior life that, as a reader, is often dizzying in the vertiginous depths of its self-contempt. Connell has an agonizing conversation with a university psychologist during a depressive episode. Most strikingly, Frances, in the lead-up and fallout from an endometriosis diagnosis, stumbles around Dublin broke due to issues with her alcoholic father and in terrible pelvic pain, sometimes fainting. Many of the sequences that ensue from these protagonists’ grimmer life situations are genuinely moving. The draw of Sally Rooney is that she shows us something perfect, then lets us pierce its surface to a fundamentally alienated, unhappy inner core.

Arguments against envy are old hat. Rooney’s intervention lies in her genuine subversion, and neutralization, of the appeal of all this literal and abstract stuff. The feeling that many of Rooney’s readers

mistake for ‘relating’ is something else entirely: the feeling of being soothed. Rooney lets readers—even, and especially, the ones without summer homes, bylines, and berets—revel in the seductive luxuries of cultural capital. She plays on the currents that make these things desirable, the dynamics that make them inspire envy. But she neutralizes the pain of not having them by tagging each with a steep price. Rooney inspires envy and then redirects it by showing, in often dramatic and sometimes unsubtle terms, that envy’s objects come with high personal costs, that the glamorous suffer in ways we would not actually have much interest in emulating. Rooney does not chastise her reader for their desire for stuff, but she unburdens her reader of the imperative to actually obtain it. She offers an escape route from the status games that occupy her novels. Indeed, she interrupts the process through which status is endlessly reproduced by severing aspiration from its usual outcome—that is, mimetic achievement. It is here, not in the stated views of her characters, that Rooney’s novels do their real political work. By first glamourising status symbols and then revealing their attendant miseries, Rooney achieves a far more effective distance in her readers than if she had simply told us, at the outset, not to yearn for wealth, prestige, or expensive felt berets. It is, perhaps, a Marxist undertaking—or, at the very least, a bourgeois self-help project toward some genuinely anti-capitalist political end—to convince readers that it is not enviable to be wealthy, and Rooney succeeds to the extent that she attaches psychic price tags to the status symbols she romanticizes.

Rooney’s analysis of the role of status symbols within social relationships—of the way that wealth, prestige, and beauty are idealized and objectified—extrapolates on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism: the false perception that social relationships among people are actually relationships among statured things. By naming, glamourising, and then deromanticizing objects of social value—be they mansions, champagne flutes, or accolades—Rooney explicitly counters her characters’ persistent fetishizing of status objects and reveals the extent to which relationships are shaped by dynamics of social power.

Yet Rooney fails to extend her critical interruption of the process of fetishization to Marianne and Connell’s relationship. Her unchallenged idealization of this central romance, which evolves from a friendship marked by significant and shifting power differentials to a romance, constitutes her one glaring blind spot: Normal People successfully defetishizes many status objects, but in leaving untouched this idealized and seemingly transcendent romantic relationship, Rooney betrays the Marxist project she assigns herself.

Throughout Normal People, both Marianne and Connell offer each other a healing recognition of the other’s interiority. In doing so, they develop a shared social language that serves to keep them protected from—and more knowing than—the outside world. The exclusivity of their connection, emerging from the idea that they will never again experience such a degree of understanding, seems to offer each protagonist a type of necessary transcendence. At the novel’s close, Rooney’s readers are left with a lingering envy: to achieve the shared recognition of the secret, separate, singular language between Marianne and Connell. This relationship itself becomes an object, fetishized for its ultimate purity and its transcendence of attendant status-based pressures.

Perhaps ironically, this blind spot is the result of Rooney’s attempt to offer her characters—and her readers—an alternative to the seemingly endless and insidious identification with various status symbols. The novel’s epigraph, a quote from George Eliot, argues that “to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.” The idea that each of us has the power to profoundly affect each other is a central thesis of Rooney’s work: Marianne, at the close of Normal People, reflects on the ways in which both Connell and Marianne have “done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.”

Rooney seeks to emphasize the importance of relationships in informing what is meaningful and worthwhile amid a plethora of insidious status symbols within the social world. In attempting to offer relationships as a refuge from status and social hierarchy, Rooney idealizes—and ultimately fetishizes—the relationship between Connell and Marianne. Their romance, in its singularity and its transcendence, is ultimately the social object that Rooney refuses to touch.

CAL TURNER B’21 & SARA VAN HORN B’21 are failing to defetishize the literature review.