In Sally Rooneys novels, love is always being bought, sold, or reduced to tropes.
But this is also what makes it real.
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Its that time again:Sally Rooneyhas written a novel.
This tension seems to be exemplified by Rooneys own commercial success.
She knew he was going to kiss her, and he did.
Even if the book is full of Marxist propaganda, its still sealed off from any real political potential.
I think we have to admit that the feeling itself is important.
But when critics say Rooney merely writes romance novels, they are not just accusing these novels of unseriousness.
The funny thing is that this is precisely what Rooney writes novels about.
This is not, I admit, a Marxist theory of love.
It is something more unexpected: a lovers theory of Marxism.
(That book features a best-selling Irish novelist named Alice who is ambivalent about being rich and famous.
As in Rooneys previous novels, very little happens.
Margaret asks herself as Ivan kisses her.
Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?
This question lies at the heart of the novel itself.
Life has slipped free of its netting, Rooney writes.
She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person.
Yet convention has a way of reasserting itself.
It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence.
(No man orgasms in a Sally Rooney novel without apologizing.)
Sadomasochism is particularly suspect.
I didnt need to play any games with you.
Look, its different for your generation.
Im thirty-two, okay, were normal.
But they can always rise to the surface.
When Marianne asks Connell to hit her during sex, the request disturbs him.
Im not going to let anything like that happen to you again, Connell tells her.
He could let her submit willingly, without violence.
Was it just a game, or a favour he was doing her?
Did he feel it, the way she did?
Did he love her?
This sudden glimpse of Eileens consciousness through the blinds of fiction is what makes Simon come.
Of course, the reader knows the truth: Eileen is a fiction too.
Power, rather than language, becomes the medium through which the message is communicated.
A nearly identical look will be shared by Peter and Naomi.
Just use me, Naomi tells him over and over.
The feeling however futile and senseless is in its own way mutual.
This raises an unsettling question.
Is the reality of love nothing more than one persons power over another?
At least, he tells Margaret, I knew what I was doing.
Rooneys protagonists discover that the same is true of many actual relationships.
Someone just seems like they have to be exploiting someone here, Peter thinks of Naomi and himself.
He her, financially, sexually.
Or she him, financially, emotionally.
It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it.
Love is the discursive practice, and unpaid labor is the result, Frances texts.
Im anti-love as such.
You dont like to be reminded how powerful you like to feel, she tells him.
Maybe we both thought we could get away with it, Peter thinks.
To be loved, yes, for no reason, with no imaginable reward.
Then again, what is a relationship other than these needs and wishes?
Marx, as it happens, had little patience for the idea of universal love.
There is something to this.
But there it is: literature moves him.
Rooneys own career gladly testifies to the novels uses as a marker of status or generator of profit.
Is it even true that the novel cannot love us back?
I am not so sure.
Rooney has lamented a literary culture that fetishizes the authors real life over the substance of the work.
She is insisting that it is a relationship between people.
Then again, I just got engaged.
Intermezzoby Sally Rooney is out September 24.
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