“I never read a book before reviewing it – it prejudices a man so.” So said the Anglican clergyman, wit and author Sydney Smith, whose own books I must confess I have never read myself.
It is in this same spirit that I notice Ireland’s most celebrated (by the Leftish media and literary establishment, anyway) novelist Sally Rooney has a new book out. Called Intermezzo, it apparently concerns the fascinatingly erudite inner lives and relationships of a group of impeccably Left-leaning Irish millennials who have probably not long left Trinity College, Dublin, and sit around all day being terribly concerned about women’s rights, the climate crisis, mental health issues and the alleged ills of late capitalism, because that’s what all of her books are about, ever: telling them apart is as futile a task as trying to remember which Hercule Poirot mystery is which, but at least those particular books have the virtue of seeing some of their main protagonists get horribly murdered, which does not appear to happen in any of Ms. Rooney’s works, sadly.
I specifically say “does not appear to” here, of course, as I have not actually read a single page of one of her soporific-sounding squibs; I might have got her all wrong, and each and every volume is actually chock-full of killings, car-chases, explosions, ghosts, talking squirrels, lightsabre fights and acts of explicit interspecies intercourse taking place before paying audiences within zoos, but if so, then the blurbs have unaccountably failed
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Her books are dreadful according to my daughter who is 24. Well she only bothered with Normal People. My son is in publishing and he his opinion was lower.
Rooney produces derivative dystopian self indulgent and dim output. The unutterably stupid protest against Baillie Gifford sponsored literary festivals is a spectacular own goal. A fund manager which invests more than any others in a post carbon world. A poorly considered narcissistic own goal which harms literature and allows her to feel good about herself while revealing intense ignorance..
This was brilliant . Thank you. I too viewed Sally Rooney through the lens of looking at who read her. It’s the sort you overhear in Hackney. The poseur childless. I guessed her ‘characters’ enjoy the navel gazing of privileged post-university students aiming well-rehearsed barbs at the privileged. Novels have to write stinging dialogue because it’ snot as if the characters haven’t been able to think about what they are going to say.
Never mind the politics, feel the grammar. I might be influenced by my early education in parsing and analysis of sentences, but a writer who can say “Me, my family and friends, we……” fails the 11+.
What a miserable sounding vacuous, ignorant old woman – even though she’s 30 something
I don’t quite get why somebody who starts off with ‘ I’ve never read any of her novels and I don’t intend to start now,’ has been given the task of her character assassination? That is just pure bias for its own sake. A massive drop in journalist standards by the Daily Sceptic here I’m afraid. I don’t agree with Hitler or Mao but at least I made an effort to read their writing before criticising.
I was disconcerted by his opening line too, but actually I got Tucker’s point pretty quickly, his dismissal of Rooney’s work without even reading it becoming perfectly acceptable to me: contemporary writing is sooo predictable – why waste one’s time with it? That’s not to say that nothing produced today is readable – but Rooney has been so repitively clear from the start about her views – she’s so much a purveyor of millennial angst and nothing else, and sooo happy to publicize it – that the assumption that this is just more of the same is probably justified. And “probably” is good enough for me, given how much good stuff there is out there. After all, Rooney herself is a fan of not reading things (see the ‘pre-1921’ reference in Tucker’s article). In the case of many writers, contemporary and otherwise, I’d agree with you; but you can smell the assembly-line predictably of Rooney’s views from a mile off – and, in the same vein, a big body-swerve of the kind that grown-ups give on principle to the effete 20/30/40-something tattooed, purple-haired, pierced brigade is a sign of maturity to me. I just know what they’re going to say.
It was hilarious. I loved it.
So did I!
Not long ago, the prospect of nuclear annihilation was the favoured excuse for non-fecundity, so the prospect of an imaginary climate apocalypse seems a remarkably feeble pretext. It wasn’t always thus – my sisters were both born in the darkest days of WWII, when a Nazi victory was a real possibility. (I’m a post-war boomer – boo, hiss(II)).
Tucker’s very enjoyable review of Rooney reminds me of the Beachcomber character who wrote “A marvellous book – I look forward to reading it!”.
Never heard of Sally Rooney. I don’t read any contemporary fiction. Still working my way through my parents’ book collection – that will keep me going for the rest of my days. Default assumption is that anything contemporary will be bollocks. There are hundreds or thousands of great works of literature I haven’t read. I feel no need to buy or read the “latest thing”.
Couldn’t agree more, although there is a contemporary work here and there that’s worth reading; it’s just that finding such rarities is so time consuming – while finding great works of art that were produced in the ‘past’ – a country Rooney doesn’t care to visit – is easy. So much great art to absorb, so little time. Rooney and her ilk just don’t matter.
In the 20th century the Marxists murdered at least 100 million people. In Russia 18 million people passed through the Marxist slave-camps. Yet dimly flickering fragments of humanity like Sally Rooney still think there’s something wonderful about Marxism. Weird.
Pol Pot
Mao
The Kim dynasty
“dimly flickering fragments of humanity like Sally Rooney”
Now that is poetry.
Thank you.
Interesting, isn’t it?
It’s OK to be a communist.
For me anybody who declares his/her support for communism effectively says “yes, I think Lenin’s idea of the red terror was a great one, the forced labour camps and the summary executions were a fantastic way of keeping the population under control and there is a lot to be said for mass famine and starvation”.
“The Bolsheviks started out with the determination to remedy the abuses of Tsarist Russia. Under the Tsars, about 17 death sentences were carried out each year. The communist revolutionaries thought that outrageous. They screamed bloody murder: The death penalty should be abolished. However the contract contained a small footnote: In the beginning, there still would be executions it it was necessary to install communism itself as a system. In the first months after the Russian Revolution of 1917, there were 540 executions per year; after a few years, this increased to 12,000 per year; and between 1937 and 1938 more than 600,000 executions were carried per year.
Even more astounding than the numbers of victims was the arbitrary way in which people were sentenced to death. Each city and region was given weekly and monthly quotas that stipulated how many ‘traitors’ had to be arrested. If, at the end of such a period, the local mandate holders observed that the target number had not yet been reached, they took to the streets and arrested people at random:”
Extract from The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet.
Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities whereas truth isn’t”——Mark Twain. —-Perhaps silly Liberal Progressives need to cut out all the fiction and check out some TRUTH