Sally Rooney is in her Norman Mailer era. Forever dismissed – though mostly, it must be said, by Spectator columnists rather than literary critics – as an insipid, even annoying novelist, Rooney has declared she will be diverting the proceeds from the BBC adaptations of her novels to a terrorist organisation. Specifically, Palestine Action, that crew of grannies and poets that the police have been carrying into vans the past few weekends.
And it sounds like she really means it; in fact she’s practically daring the coppers to come and scoop her up too. Rooney has already furnished support for the legal campaign of the group’s founders against the proscription, and will refuse to conduct any public events in the United Kingdom until the proscription of Palestine Action is ended. “I could not in good conscience disguise or lie about my principles in public,” she said.
Terrorism! Scoot along, Michel Houellebecq: Europe has a new literary controversialist. But, this being Sally Rooney, it is controversy of a precise, spare and considered sort. Rooney has made just five major political interventions in her public life. In 2018, she wrote an essay for the London Review of Books arguing in favour of legalising abortion in Ireland as the issue was put to a nationwide referendum. In 2021, she refused to sell Hebrew translation rights to her novel Beautiful World, Where Are You due to her stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, inevitably withdrawing her novels from sale in Israel. In 2023, she published a long essay for the Irish Times condemning housing inequality; a year later, she wrote for the same paper about the climate crisis and capitalism. And this year, she has made a series of statements about Israel’s war in Gaza.
It’s not exactly a portfolio, especially compared with how writers used to behave, cheerleading wars, slamming world religions and marrying Marilyn Monroe. But Rooney has always been more of a mirror than a lamp, absorbing her world and her milieu into the tight quadrilaterals of love and conflict that define her stories. The same is true of her politics. If Rooney is not her generation’s greatest writer, she might well be its most representative. And in her political priorities the same is true, a perspective built in a language of unsteady morality.
The young Sally Rooney loved arguing. In 2013, representing Trinity College, Dublin, she placed first in the European University Debating Championships. She later travelled to India to compete in the World Championship. Adjudicators celebrated her as “passionate” and “forceful”. She argued about everything from why “capitalism benefits the poor” to “sexual violence, racial profiling, police brutality”. Winding up an essay reflecting on the experience, she wrote “I was number one… I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best.”
If it was this Sally Rooney, the Sally Rooney who sounded like Muhammad Ali, who’d hit the big time, you feel like there’s no red carpet, no Sunday newspaper review, no local radio spot she’d have turned down. But, by her account, the result of her debating experience was a process of withdrawal. She’d begun to find the process of generating argument for the sake of it “depressing and vaguely immoral”. “After all, nothing in the outside world has changed as a result of my accumulation of debating accolades. I haven’t contributed to anyone’s understanding of anything, except maybe my own, and that only partially.”
Rooney wrote this in 2015, not long before she was launched into fame by her Conversations with Friends and then confirmed as the leading novelist of her generation by Normal People. And while both books are full of characters who lapse into adolescent political overconfidence – “I’m never going to get a job,” says Frances, who instead performs at spoken word poetry events – Rooney’s people aren’t “forceful”. They’re inclined to melancholy and stasis, and room-temperature Marxism. They’re hurt by others, often with their glum collaboration. When they seek out politics – or indeed religion – it’s usually as a prop for some broader period of emotional crisis, rather than an expression of confident ideological priors.
If Rooney is anything like her characters, we can imagine that her own political positions emerge from a similar, wrangled mind. You can see it in their construction. Her op-eds read like the products of considered reading, thoughtful quotations noted and instructive percentage points gathered, all marshalled towards a conclusion that only feels secure when it arrives. Rhetorical questions are her handholds, testing her convictions against self-doubt and counter-argument. Her writing is free of metaphor or even polemic, proceeding in the purest, indecorous, communicative prose.
This is the style of the debater – but it comes in service of critique, not conviction. And sometimes even its conclusions are tempered: at the end of her climate essay, Rooney tip-toes towards advocating the abolition of property, before slipping back to the cry of social impotence, “wondering how so many of us – including myself – could have been so quiescent, disorganised and cowardly when we knew that their lives were at stake”.
These are the political instincts of a demographic which, like a pro-debater, have watched their political lives pass in a blur of ineffectual argument. Millennials have watched political movements rise and fall, with or without their assistance. It is no wonder they favour more nebulous inquiries. Housing and the climate crisis are exactly such questions, on which further study can quickly become addictive but tends to result only in outrage or despair.
Sally Rooney’s generational status is, at this point, a matter not of critical garland but name-recognition, much as it was for Norman Mailer. If we didn’t know she thought like her cohort – looping introspections upon introspections – it is confirmed by her small but certain list of public stances. But with the millennial mood now hardening, amid thunderous talk of “genocide”, it feels that even the cerebral Rooney is now hardening with it, staking her literary fortune behind a pro-Palestinian cause now in criminal opposition to the British government. Normal people have changed, and Rooney has changed with them.
[See also: Journalists in Gaza are accepting a death sentence]
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