Millennial Literature – Sally Rooney: What’s so magical about it?

Where does the global fascination with Sally Rooney’s novels come from? Most recently, the Irish author made herself unpopular in this country with her boycott of Israel. Her new novel “Intermezzo” is still selling well. How is it that an author who describes herself as a Marxist and whose stories revolve materialistically around the needs of her protagonists and their class status is so successful that in Great Britain even bookstores open a few hours earlier when a new one opens? a novel by her appears? Are older Harry Potter fans who, even as children, slept in front of bookstores so that they could be the first to hold the latest story from Hogwarts in their hands?

What magic does Sally Rooney have to offer? In her fourth novel, “Intermezzo,” which the majority of local reviewers hail, not entirely without reason, as her best to date, two men are at the center of the story for a change. Two Dublin brothers are dealing with the trauma of their father’s death. The two couldn’t be more different. The 32-year-old Peter is a successful human rights lawyer in Dublin, a so-called womanizer and, despite his lower middle class background, has worked his way up into the better circles of the left-liberal academic upper middle class.

His brother Ivan, ten years his junior, is a chess genius, but is only having moderate success in tournaments. He is always insecure and wants nothing more than to finally have a romantic relationship with a woman. Because of course “Intermezzo” is about the women with whom the two of them have their naturally conflictual relationships in the course of this story for a Sally Rooney novel.

The always cool Peter obsessively pursues his great ex-love, the deeply bourgeois university professor Sylvia, with whom he has a close friendship and who suffers from a serious chronic illness that makes a conventional, romantic relationship between the two impossible. He is also in a relationship with the 22-year-old student and squatter Naomi, who is evicted by the police over the course of the story and even moves in with him. His brother Ivan, who is ten years his junior, meets Margarete, who is 15 years older and the head of a cultural center, at a chess tournament in the Irish provinces and begins a passionate love affair with her, which soon turns into a serious relationship.

Sally Rooney’s prose is close to the reality of a young urban middle class. The complicated relationships of these young, urban academics, who in this novel also, but not exclusively, come from a left-liberal milieu, are illuminated in extremely detailed detail. The two brothers soon get into a heated argument, especially because of Ivan’s relationship with an older woman. Is young Ivan being exploited? Does the older brother have to protect him or is this inappropriate, paternalistic tutelage? At the same time, Peter tries rather helplessly to decide between the two women in his life. He consumes large quantities of psychotropic drugs for anxiety disorders and increasingly slides into a fatal addiction.

The brothers’ argument ultimately escalates into a wild brawl, and ultimately it is of course the strong women who use moderation, reason and empathy to ensure the necessary balance between the two brawlers. The men, on the other hand, give in to their emotions, let themselves drift and continually turn up their noses in insult.

As in Rooney’s other novels, the characters in “Intermezzo” speak in the same banal way that people do when they discuss their problems with each other time and time again. It’s like sitting at the kitchen table in a shared apartment and listening to people congratulating themselves as they continually reflect on their everyday lives. But it’s not boring to read at all. Because Rooney knows how to portray this atmosphere in minimalist prose with pinpoint accuracy and in an almost disturbingly accurate way. Nevertheless, their stories take place to some extent as if under a glass dome. All of her novels, including “Intermezzo,” are almost entirely set in Dublin. The author also likes to explain in rare interviews that she doesn’t travel much. In terms of life and literature, it is firmly anchored in the Irish capital. Her books, which always deal with social barriers, class differences, their permeability or apparent insurmountability, are never about working environments.

Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and has been an extremely successful author since the age of 26, writing international, award-winning bestsellers, two of which have already been filmed as BBC series worth seeing. Wage work simply hasn’t played a role in her life so far, which is why she doesn’t write about it. Nevertheless, she manages to depict the social dimensions of her characters as if under a magnifying glass. Her novels also repeatedly deal with family trauma and psychological violence in interpersonal relationships.

There have been heated debates recently about Sally Rooney, who was named one of the “100 most influential people” worldwide by “Time Magazine” in 2022. The successful author had denied the translation and publication rights of her novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You” (2021) to an Israeli publisher because of Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians. This brought her harsh criticism, especially in the German feature sections. In her new novel, as in her other books, Israel or the Middle East conflict play no role.

Her style is fascinating, hyper-realistic prose with a recognizable appeal. This puts it right in line with the trend of millennial literature, which likes to deal with everyday life and the inner conflicts of young people in their thirties. But despite all the generation-specific hype, Rooney certainly stands in a literary tradition. The drug-addled inner monologues of Peter wandering through Dublin are often reminiscent of passages from “Ulysses” by James Joyce, as if “Intermezzo” were also an ironic-feminist meta-text for the most famous Dublin novel to date. There’s just a lot to discover in Sally Rooney’s books.

Sally Rooney: Intermezzo. A. d. Engl. v. Zoe Beck. Claassen, 496 S., geb., 24 €.