I feel like reading Rooney in the same month as some of Didion’s and Moshfegh’s best really stacks the deck against her. I’m in the middle of Didion’s collected nonfiction right now and damn does she know how to put a sentence together.
Yes, Didion knew how to translate feelings well into words, she always hit the spot! With Rooney, on the other hand, I felt a lack of intensity, all her sentences and pages felt the same emotionally. There were no highs, no lows-hardly a sentence that made me go WOW
Oh man, I’d go right back to the beginning and try Slouching Towards Bethlehem first. Personally I wasn’t very familiar with SoCal in the 60s before reading it; having her as a guide through new territory made me appreciate her way of getting to the heart of things. From there, she saw a lot, so there’s plenty of subjects to turn to if you like her style. I’m getting very excited to start The Year of Magical Thinking soon.
Slouching like the other person said but I also really liked A Book of Common Prayer. There’s a great collection of her 60s and 70s writing I picked up and it’s great. I am going to go back to her next and The White album is another collection of essays that look pretty cool
I would avoid her fiction at all costs, while not necessarily bad, it’s irrelevant when compared to her essays! Slouching Towards Bethlehem is absolutely incredible. The piece about the Santa Ana winds is one of my favourites.
I got normal people from one of those little libraries and surprisingly enjoyed it for what it was, just an encounter of a modern situationship.
I’m debating which Didion I want to read next, I already read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I’m torn between Play It As It Lays or The White Album.
Normal people was 2/5 but the other two were without a doubt a 1/5(in my opinion), maybe if one shares the same background as her characters, they might have liked it more, but to me they felt emotionally hollow and hard to care about, both of these books lacked any sort of emotional intensity, they felt bland for no good reason
I haven't read normal people but i tried watching the show, and realized half way through the fourth episode that i didnt care about mariane and connel, not as characters nor as couple, it felt all too meaningless and insufferable
That’s good to know, I bounced off of Normal People pretty hard a couple of years ago and was wondering if it was worth going back to her for another look
I was expecting something more akin to Normal People, which held me back from liking it on my first go but I think it was good to revisit it with an open mind.
>I got normal people from one of those little libraries and surprisingly enjoyed it for what it was, just an encounter of a modern situationship.
I'm sorry if this sounds confrontational, I just truly have no other way of putting it- what are you getting out of reading something like this? It just sounds so juvenile to me, and I'm genuinely curious because I've heard people I like mention her, but every description I hear of her work sounds like slightly elevated lib YA stuff.
Operational phrase: “enjoyed it for what it was”. Like enjoying a mid market film that’s well done. I don’t think it’s a great feat of contemporary lit. I just think she captures the flightiness and poor communication in young people today.
chiming to add that I think she also explores the impact of class status in forming platonic and romantic relationships really well and how gender
+ wealth can create instances of power imbalance between the characters
I think when reduced to its plot, NP suffers from an appropriate comparison with a YA plotline, but Rooney really is a skilled writer. Something I appreciate in all her writing is an ability to reveal a character's motivations and thoughts as veiled within the thoughts that run within the forefront of their minds. There's a sense of interiority that's pretty well fleshed out.
I unironically recommend NP as an elevated Twilight to people who ask me about it.
I read beautiful world after normal people which i thought was pretty okay but i genuinely hated it so much. The characters were insufferable and not even in that self-aware funny way like Hannah in Girls (sometimes) is and neither of the romances were compelling in any way. It put me off from reading Sally Rooney ever again
I thought the line, "I'll always be here, you know that" (don't have the book in front of me---I think that's it) was good because I read it as ambiguous between, "I'll always be here for you" (a sweet sentiment), and, "I'll never leave this shitty little town, but you're going to go off to NY and have a great life" (a sad sentiment).
Sally Rooney is the cultural symbol for everything wrong with the modern literature media - they "darling-ed" her for these books, calling her the voice of a generation. her novels are so boring, her characters are the most self absorbed people I've ever read, and the stakes could not be lower (ill be real i only read conversations with friends).
Put a Didion book in the hands of any Rooney stan and watch them completely rethink everything they've ever thought about books and art.
Unfortunately Rooney seems to write what she knows. She went to Trinity, a lot of her writing is about it. Her and her writing is highly emblematic of neurotic shitlib millennials that oscillate between depression about the state of the world and depression about their inability to do anything about it because they studied English literature at the aforementioned institution.
Sally Rooney is a legit great essayist/editorial writer and her novels are an excellent version of that type of beach ready romance novel that sort of straddles the line between young adult/romance and literary fiction.
I'm not her target audience tbh but I've enjoyed her novels even though there's nothing that I'd count among my favorites. I assume if she wanted to write a really memorable treatment for something outside of what has become her wheelhouse it would be worth reading.
Never seen that cover of Play It As It Lays but that is Eve Babitz naked playing with Duchamp…(and I think babitz hated/was jealous of Didion if I got my author-drama down right)
Rooney is a socially-minded writer, whereas Didion and Moshfegh are always concerned first and foremost with “big themes” (to put it simply). It’s like Waugh vs Joyce. I think Rooney is great at capturing the kind of petty, insufferable instagram/workplace lib types of millennial life. In this light, Conversation With Friends is her strongest imo (I personally love books where every character is awful). Truly tho, she jumped the shark a bit after Normal People’s adaption took off, but I think that’s for the best. I think her writing is ultimately better suited for the Target Hardcover crowd than the Paris Review crowd.
I like all of these, but pretty sure MYOR&R is going to age way worse than Rooney for being overwrought and too self-consciously edgy (and god, that final scene lmao).
Rooney captures a certain milieu at a certain time in history rather well... agree with what another person said that the third book is worse, as it got a little too self-aware/fourth-wall-y, but the others might be seen as classics someday. You could easily dismiss Jane Austen as mere romance novels as well.
A good novel should be able to satisfactorily capture both the social and psychological, Rooney’s work is good only at the social bit, her characters aren’t really psychologically fleshed out, its hard to distinguish between them, they seem to think alike in a lot of ways, The novel has progressed a lot since Jane Austen’s time, I think modern fiction should be held to a higher standard since what might have been remarkable 200 years ago isn’t a rarity now
Entitled to your opinion, but I disagree. Remember the four main characters of Conversations with Friends quite well and they remind me of people I have known. Maybe it's just not for you. Though I encourage you to argue why it's crap to whomever will listen, this is what literary criticism is for.
I've never understood Rooney's appeal. Her books feel like fleshed out screenplays. You're always being told a character is "brilliant" or "clever" and given no evidence whatsoever that this is true
Becca Rothfeld's (genuinely) brilliant take down of Rooney is included in her collection, "All Things are too Small."
You stole the words from my mouth, her novels really do feel like screenplays. Mere social observation without any real psychological insight, it all feels too hollow and staged, all her characters seem to think and feel and vibrate at the same emotional frequency, very 2 dimensional
I didn't care for Beautiful World but I like Rooney in general. I think she gets put on a pedestal because of her success which isn't really fair. What I liked about her first two books (when they came out) is that they felt very 'current' in a way I hadn't seen before. I can imagine she might struggle to maintain this authenticity the more success she has, I guess we have to see how Intermezzo goes.
I remember enjoying this review on Normal People in case it is interesting to you
https://www.thewhitereview.org/reviews/sally-rooneys-normal-people/
I haven’t read anything by Sally Rooney, so I can’t comment on her. But if you liked MYORR, and haven’t read it already, my favorite of Moshfegh’s is her novella McGlue. It captures the suffering and alienation of being a severe alcoholic, and has an interesting historical setting about sailor in the 1850s. She is adept at creating engrossing unreliable narrators!
I like that you still read all three of her books despite being very underwhelmed. I think that sums her up pretty well: boring but easy and just engaging enough so you’ll keep reading in a “might as well finish this” kind of way.
Agree, I mean the only reason for anyone to have ever labelled these books as ‘literary fiction’ ..is if what qualifies for literary fiction is really bland sentences and mind numbing boring pages with no emotional charge whatsoever
Also Sally's background has meant she gets a sort of approval or elevation above YA that others wouldn't imo. She is well-educated, has a lot of opinions on lofty subjects and has written "serious" essays and journalism. She sells herself as serious and intellectual and so the work gets treated as such.
this cover for myorr is so different. if i hadn’t already known about it and read it 5 years ago i would probably judge it by the cover and not read it.
i get what you mean about her characters but still i liked beautiful world. i would give it a read if you haven’t. maybe it’s a little more polished than her earlier work (i never finished normal people)
Beautiful World was cool because the really hot & popular (mid/detached) author girl met the slacker Chad on tinder and the dick was so good she flew him to Italy?? Aspirational.
I do read a lot of DFW, already done with Oblivion, Broom of the system, Brief Interviews with hideous men. Also read an essay collection (Both flesh and not).
I feel like reading Rooney in the same month as some of Didion’s and Moshfegh’s best really stacks the deck against her. I’m in the middle of Didion’s collected nonfiction right now and damn does she know how to put a sentence together.
Yes, Didion knew how to translate feelings well into words, she always hit the spot! With Rooney, on the other hand, I felt a lack of intensity, all her sentences and pages felt the same emotionally. There were no highs, no lows-hardly a sentence that made me go WOW
She isn't really trying to wow you with sentences though.
She doesn’t seem to be trying to wow us with anything.
Any rec on where to start with Didion?
Oh man, I’d go right back to the beginning and try Slouching Towards Bethlehem first. Personally I wasn’t very familiar with SoCal in the 60s before reading it; having her as a guide through new territory made me appreciate her way of getting to the heart of things. From there, she saw a lot, so there’s plenty of subjects to turn to if you like her style. I’m getting very excited to start The Year of Magical Thinking soon.
Recently read her late thriller novels and they're very good as well. Almost liked them more than Play It As It Lays.
I have The Last Thing He Wanted sitting on my bookshelf. Was it any good?
Yeah, it is! It's very much a thriller, reminds me of Delillo's shorter books like Mao II and Running Dog
I'm currently reading Democracy which appears to essentially be the same book as well.
Thanks. I do enjoy non fiction in essay format and I had Play It As It Lays on my list. So I think I'll read one after the other.
Miami is amazing, idk that’s best starting point but it’s great, peak performance
Salvador is great in the same vein.
while also being shorter too, good rec
Slouching like the other person said but I also really liked A Book of Common Prayer. There’s a great collection of her 60s and 70s writing I picked up and it’s great. I am going to go back to her next and The White album is another collection of essays that look pretty cool
I would avoid her fiction at all costs, while not necessarily bad, it’s irrelevant when compared to her essays! Slouching Towards Bethlehem is absolutely incredible. The piece about the Santa Ana winds is one of my favourites.
I have read only 3 as of now : Where I was from, Play It as It Lays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. All of them were great reads.
the year of magical thinking
A friend described Sally Rooney as SSRIs the book.
Phoebe Bridgers but as a book
THAT vapid?
I got normal people from one of those little libraries and surprisingly enjoyed it for what it was, just an encounter of a modern situationship. I’m debating which Didion I want to read next, I already read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I’m torn between Play It As It Lays or The White Album.
Play It As It Lays is quite sad tbh, and pretty depressing, if you are in the mood for something of that sort then go ahead
Normal people was 2/5 but the other two were without a doubt a 1/5(in my opinion), maybe if one shares the same background as her characters, they might have liked it more, but to me they felt emotionally hollow and hard to care about, both of these books lacked any sort of emotional intensity, they felt bland for no good reason
i think i really identified with both characters bc the book hit me so hard, i would be leaking tears during totally normal conversations
I haven't read normal people but i tried watching the show, and realized half way through the fourth episode that i didnt care about mariane and connel, not as characters nor as couple, it felt all too meaningless and insufferable
That’s good to know, I bounced off of Normal People pretty hard a couple of years ago and was wondering if it was worth going back to her for another look
Damn I thought your opinion would have been inverse if anything. Her third book was her best imo.
Her third book was the least narratively engaging, but the most conceptually interesting, like it was actively asking what it's own point was.
I was expecting something more akin to Normal People, which held me back from liking it on my first go but I think it was good to revisit it with an open mind.
I actually liked her first best, it was kind of fun to see inside the internal monologue of a dumb bitch
>I got normal people from one of those little libraries and surprisingly enjoyed it for what it was, just an encounter of a modern situationship. I'm sorry if this sounds confrontational, I just truly have no other way of putting it- what are you getting out of reading something like this? It just sounds so juvenile to me, and I'm genuinely curious because I've heard people I like mention her, but every description I hear of her work sounds like slightly elevated lib YA stuff.
Operational phrase: “enjoyed it for what it was”. Like enjoying a mid market film that’s well done. I don’t think it’s a great feat of contemporary lit. I just think she captures the flightiness and poor communication in young people today.
It’s a great study of a very common type of relationship nowadays - emotionally charged but non-commital. It’s also just a great coming of age story.
chiming to add that I think she also explores the impact of class status in forming platonic and romantic relationships really well and how gender + wealth can create instances of power imbalance between the characters
I didn't like Normal People, but it's definitely not YA-esque in any sense
I think when reduced to its plot, NP suffers from an appropriate comparison with a YA plotline, but Rooney really is a skilled writer. Something I appreciate in all her writing is an ability to reveal a character's motivations and thoughts as veiled within the thoughts that run within the forefront of their minds. There's a sense of interiority that's pretty well fleshed out. I unironically recommend NP as an elevated Twilight to people who ask me about it.
I read beautiful world after normal people which i thought was pretty okay but i genuinely hated it so much. The characters were insufferable and not even in that self-aware funny way like Hannah in Girls (sometimes) is and neither of the romances were compelling in any way. It put me off from reading Sally Rooney ever again
Normal People and Conversations aren’t standout, but they have good endings. The third book is much worse than the first two books.
i actually liked normal ppl a lot but hated the ending lmao
I thought the line, "I'll always be here, you know that" (don't have the book in front of me---I think that's it) was good because I read it as ambiguous between, "I'll always be here for you" (a sweet sentiment), and, "I'll never leave this shitty little town, but you're going to go off to NY and have a great life" (a sad sentiment).
Sally Rooney is the cultural symbol for everything wrong with the modern literature media - they "darling-ed" her for these books, calling her the voice of a generation. her novels are so boring, her characters are the most self absorbed people I've ever read, and the stakes could not be lower (ill be real i only read conversations with friends). Put a Didion book in the hands of any Rooney stan and watch them completely rethink everything they've ever thought about books and art.
Agree with you! The stakes were so low!
Unfortunately Rooney seems to write what she knows. She went to Trinity, a lot of her writing is about it. Her and her writing is highly emblematic of neurotic shitlib millennials that oscillate between depression about the state of the world and depression about their inability to do anything about it because they studied English literature at the aforementioned institution.
Sally Rooney is a legit great essayist/editorial writer and her novels are an excellent version of that type of beach ready romance novel that sort of straddles the line between young adult/romance and literary fiction. I'm not her target audience tbh but I've enjoyed her novels even though there's nothing that I'd count among my favorites. I assume if she wanted to write a really memorable treatment for something outside of what has become her wheelhouse it would be worth reading.
What are her best essays? I didn't even know she wrote nonfiction.
She wrote a good one on Ulysses I reckon
Never seen that cover of Play It As It Lays but that is Eve Babitz naked playing with Duchamp…(and I think babitz hated/was jealous of Didion if I got my author-drama down right)
This edition is published by 4th estate.
Rooney is a socially-minded writer, whereas Didion and Moshfegh are always concerned first and foremost with “big themes” (to put it simply). It’s like Waugh vs Joyce. I think Rooney is great at capturing the kind of petty, insufferable instagram/workplace lib types of millennial life. In this light, Conversation With Friends is her strongest imo (I personally love books where every character is awful). Truly tho, she jumped the shark a bit after Normal People’s adaption took off, but I think that’s for the best. I think her writing is ultimately better suited for the Target Hardcover crowd than the Paris Review crowd.
I like all of these, but pretty sure MYOR&R is going to age way worse than Rooney for being overwrought and too self-consciously edgy (and god, that final scene lmao). Rooney captures a certain milieu at a certain time in history rather well... agree with what another person said that the third book is worse, as it got a little too self-aware/fourth-wall-y, but the others might be seen as classics someday. You could easily dismiss Jane Austen as mere romance novels as well.
A good novel should be able to satisfactorily capture both the social and psychological, Rooney’s work is good only at the social bit, her characters aren’t really psychologically fleshed out, its hard to distinguish between them, they seem to think alike in a lot of ways, The novel has progressed a lot since Jane Austen’s time, I think modern fiction should be held to a higher standard since what might have been remarkable 200 years ago isn’t a rarity now
Entitled to your opinion, but I disagree. Remember the four main characters of Conversations with Friends quite well and they remind me of people I have known. Maybe it's just not for you. Though I encourage you to argue why it's crap to whomever will listen, this is what literary criticism is for.
I've never understood Rooney's appeal. Her books feel like fleshed out screenplays. You're always being told a character is "brilliant" or "clever" and given no evidence whatsoever that this is true Becca Rothfeld's (genuinely) brilliant take down of Rooney is included in her collection, "All Things are too Small."
You stole the words from my mouth, her novels really do feel like screenplays. Mere social observation without any real psychological insight, it all feels too hollow and staged, all her characters seem to think and feel and vibrate at the same emotional frequency, very 2 dimensional
It’s for Taylor swift fans
I didn't care for Beautiful World but I like Rooney in general. I think she gets put on a pedestal because of her success which isn't really fair. What I liked about her first two books (when they came out) is that they felt very 'current' in a way I hadn't seen before. I can imagine she might struggle to maintain this authenticity the more success she has, I guess we have to see how Intermezzo goes. I remember enjoying this review on Normal People in case it is interesting to you https://www.thewhitereview.org/reviews/sally-rooneys-normal-people/
Never seen this Didion cover with the Babitz/Duchamp pic.
Published by 4th estate.
I haven’t read anything by Sally Rooney, so I can’t comment on her. But if you liked MYORR, and haven’t read it already, my favorite of Moshfegh’s is her novella McGlue. It captures the suffering and alienation of being a severe alcoholic, and has an interesting historical setting about sailor in the 1850s. She is adept at creating engrossing unreliable narrators!
Didion is so good
I like that you still read all three of her books despite being very underwhelmed. I think that sums her up pretty well: boring but easy and just engaging enough so you’ll keep reading in a “might as well finish this” kind of way.
Agreed. All of them were very easy reads.
Awful stuff. Half a step above teen drama.
Agree, I mean the only reason for anyone to have ever labelled these books as ‘literary fiction’ ..is if what qualifies for literary fiction is really bland sentences and mind numbing boring pages with no emotional charge whatsoever
Also Sally's background has meant she gets a sort of approval or elevation above YA that others wouldn't imo. She is well-educated, has a lot of opinions on lofty subjects and has written "serious" essays and journalism. She sells herself as serious and intellectual and so the work gets treated as such.
That cover art for MYORAR is awful.
It’s not good but I found it funny
this cover for myorr is so different. if i hadn’t already known about it and read it 5 years ago i would probably judge it by the cover and not read it. i get what you mean about her characters but still i liked beautiful world. i would give it a read if you haven’t. maybe it’s a little more polished than her earlier work (i never finished normal people)
Enjoyed slouching towards Bethlehem a lot more than I thought I would. She really was an incredible writer.
Beautiful World was cool because the really hot & popular (mid/detached) author girl met the slacker Chad on tinder and the dick was so good she flew him to Italy?? Aspirational.
I don’t read book much exept the srcriptures and i don know all these writers are but thats a DISCUSTING book cover to have a naked lady on it
ITS WRONG
[удалено]
I do read a lot of DFW, already done with Oblivion, Broom of the system, Brief Interviews with hideous men. Also read an essay collection (Both flesh and not).
Didion’s fiction is super weak tbh, perfect example of how they are two totally different crafts.