What’s to Come & Do Writers Need to Grow? (unrelated)
Authoritarians & Sally Rooney (unrelated)
Something to Not Look Forward To
America is a coin flip away from handling the entirety of the federal government over to the far right without checks and balances and it will be led by a person unshy about taking money for political favor or using his power with impunity. In the smallest corner of implications of What’s to Come is how the presidential election will affect writing and books, but here we go…
In addition to the active oppression of expression that this likely authoritarian style government will inflict like banning books and using the education system as a tool for propaganda, there is also a spiritual malaise these regimes impart. A general magnetism of fascist government that pulls art to predictable, necessary, but narrowed places. Art in societies like these becomes an exercise of “in response to” or “relative to”. It’s metaphorically like moving down a couple of levels on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs— art becomes more related to survival and fighting for basic freedoms rather than the more existential needs of art in a society where more of those base needs are met and we have the luxury of contemplating lofty things like the meaning of life. Writers, editors, and publishers will have no choice but to act and respond accordingly, contending constantly with the elephant in the room. In many respects it is much too early to say exactly what will happen and what the effects will be, but this one seems all but guaranteed.
With that said I keep coming back to a quote that’s used artfully as a motif in a novel I edited coming out next summer The Frequency of Living Things (a book I can highly recommend for turbulent times ahead, click the link and preorder) : “No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” —Dorothy Day. I’m personally grateful to be working on a number of books like The Frequency of Living Things that both feel like an escape due to their immersive quality but also feel relevant to what’s going on in people’s lives now and reasons to keep getting out of bed in the morning and fighting.
So, that was the “in response to” portion of the newsletter, and like any creative or critical output this newsletter will contend to find a balance between defying that magnetic pull of the distressing and continuing to write and think about things that aren’t political…while also not burying heads in the sand and contending with the moment when necessary. Although it is not easy to continue my regularly scheduled programming as if nothing is going on, I plan on doing that first part of resistance today and simply writing, with no relation to the US government, as I had planned to before election day, about Sally Rooney.
Do Writers have to Grow? The Sally Rooney Interview.
First, I have to admit that I was entirely hoodwinked by the clickbait title of the New York Times interview with the most well-known Millennial literary novelist of her generation Sally Rooney. The article is titled “Sally Rooney Thinks Career Growth Is Overrated.” And this baited me into thinking two things immediately: A) Rooney is not grateful for her success and B) Rooney doesn’t care about getting better as a writer.
Rooney throughout the interview seems rather embarrassed if anything for her financial success and wide commercial appeal—and gives off the impression of “I have enough” more than “this is what I deserve because of my genius.” As the interviewer notes, Rooney is one of the “rare authors who have been able to garner mass readership as well as serious critical attention.” She also puts her money where her mouth is, even though her first two novels were made into television shows — one of which is just as commercially and critically popular as her novels —she has decided not to option her third novel Beautiful World, Where are You quite yet and expresses her lack of desire to get back into the more lucrative world of tv/film. She’s a novelist that wants to be a novelist, which is a rarity among today’s successful young writers and one that should be applauded.
The answer to the second question —does Rooney care about getting better as a writer? — is a little trickier. On one hand there are many instances where Rooney talks about crafting her novels and trying to make them good, here’s how she answered for instance when asked about the differing styles in her new novel Intermezzo:
That’s a really good question. I would have to answer it by saying I don’t care about my career. I think about, How do I make this book the perfect version of what it can be? I never think about it in relation to my other work, and I never think about what people will say about how close or distant it is from my oeuvre. I don’t think of myself as even having an oeuvre. I just think about: I’ve got these characters. I’ve got these scenarios. How do I do justice to them? I don’t feel myself thinking about my growth as an artist, if you will.
What Rooney is not saying is she thinks growth as a writer is overrated, what I think she’s saying is something closer to: it’s useless for a writer to think about their career and the book they’re writing as part of their “oeuvre” while they are trying to write something and make it good. Working on books at this sort of practical level all the time that’s a sentiment I really agree with. It would be similarly useless or even counterproductive to think about these kinds of lofty questions like “how will this novel fit into this writer’s legacy?” while trying to offer helpful editorial feedback.
Neither should the base similarities of Rooney’s novels (spare style, intimate relationships, millennial anxiety), as she herself points out in the interview, be seen as a negative for a novelist in terms of their growth as a writer:
I’m wary of saying this, because it could sound like I’m trying to compare myself to the great masters of the past and I absolutely am not, but when I look at writers whose work has transformed my life, I look at Austen, Henry James, Dostoyevsky. Those writers produced work that adheres to what you’re describing, where it feels like a figure from one of their books could stroll into any of the other novels that they wrote and be at home. But each of the novels is its own world, and it’s intense and it’s profound and it’s beautiful, and that’s what I’m striving for.
There are scores of great writers that are the single subject type, attacking the same style, milieu, and themes again and again and again. But where the question of growth— if a writer should be trying to grow — gets a little dicey with Rooney is that this not thinking, about her own career growth or critics or doing something extremely different than the last time (largely healthy!), also extends to readers as well:
I try, and this may sound insincere, not to look at the discourse around my work. And do I ever feel like responding to it? No, I don’t think so. I don’t need to be over the reader’s shoulder, saying, What do you think of that page?
Frankly, Rooney doesn’t sound insincere at all. She talks at other points about channeling her characters etc., which is literary writer speak for saying I’m just doing what I want to do without mediation from pesky outside forces like what the non-imaginary people might think. Rooney sounds happy just to create this way, but it does raise the question of whether a writer who legitimately doesn’t care about the affect her words have on her readers can make their book “the perfect version of what it can be.”
The reader can certainly feel this “no reader feedback” ethos in Rooney’s third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? put into practice. Whereas her first two novels were pretty straightforward, Rooney gets more scattershot with the way she moves the narrative forward in Beautiful World, taking long digressions in the form of extended erudite emails between two friends. Plenty of readers liked this particular choice and plenty didn’t, but either way it’s got a distinctive “this is what I’m interested in doing” feel about it as opposed to the more time-honored method of “let me tell you a story” feel of her first two novels (readers do seem to agree, however, it is the lowest rated of her novels, not that too much stock should be put into this one metric of reader reaction).
If an author is intentionally and willfully ignoring all readers, it is a quick path to flying the plane blind. Rooney is so skilled that there’s always a chance she can produce her greatest work this way, but it is unlikely that even the best writers will land a novel perfectly without always trying to grow their command on what they want the effect to be and how it is received by the reader.
Editorial Assistant Book Club November 2024: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
The EABC is back and of course we must read Sally Rooney’s latest novel together. I’ve made the point ad nauseam that Rooney is one of the few agreed upon, appointment-viewing literary novelists in their 30s, so in the spirit of the editorial assistant book club we have to read this one and jump into discourse even further. So, pick up a copy of Sally Rooney’s chess book and join me here next month for a recap of Rooney’s career and discussion of *makes Italian hand gesture and does borderline offensive accent* Intermezzo.