ARTS & CULTURE
LOVE MEETS SYSTEMS COLLAPSE:
COMMENTARY ON SALLY ROONEY
By Eloise Vaughan Williams
W
hy has Sally Rooney, hailed the Salinger of the Snapchat generation, become the voice for a generation of depressed and indebted college students? What is the draw, and what is her readers’ place in such an elitist literary scene? Rooney is a young Irish writer who leveled the contemporary fiction scene after her 2007 debut novel Conversations with Friends. Since then, she has written two more novels: Normal People, which went on to become adapted into a popular TV series, and her newly released Beautiful World, Where Are You?, one of the most reviewed books of all time. Her work generally tracks the lives of college students, and most recently those in their late 20s. Within this, her focus is on the characters’ relationships: where they fail, how they communicate, and why they love the way they do. Considering Rooney as a specific type of figure might allow us to track why youth flock to her novels. Rooney, a self-declared Marxist, frequently critiques Western literature’s immoral basis: its relationship to the commodification of culture and elitist cultural capital. In high school, many students may have only been exposed to novelists who often left systems of power unacknowledged and unmentioned in both their writings and personal lives. These students might finally find some accountability and mirrored issues of concern not only in Rooney’s writing, but in the way she navigates the world. Rooney is noticeably absent from all social media platforms, meaning she takes few public stances on prominent issues. However, on October 12, 2021, she announced her decision to withhold translation rights of Beautiful World, Where are You? from her previous Israeli publisher in order to stand with the Palestinian people and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. She released a statement that explained, “I simply do not feel it
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would be right for me under the present circumstances to accept a new contract with an Israeli company that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.” Rooney also made clear that she would be happy to sell the Hebrew translation rights to a publishing house that is compliant with the BDS movement’s guidelines. With this decision, Rooney is wielding her power and platform as an author to advocate for change according to her values—something many fans of pop culture figures have been calling for. The desire to respond to the effects of systems of power is something Rooney’s characters also deal with on a personal level. Although Rooney is often quoted saying that she does not write specifically Marxist books, her characters show how concerns over socio-political and cultural systems are dealt with in daily experience, specifically through love, sex, mental health, personhood, and relationships. Rooney’s characters address these concerns through their own complex emotional worlds. Her characters generally fear intimacy, avoid processing their emotions, and feel utterly stagnant and lost in both their relationships and the world. So is it really surprising that an entire generation of college students— constantly questioning their selfhood, identity, and placement in communities and relationships—are drawn to characters that not only mimic that experience back to them, but love and are loved
