romance writers know wtf is up, actually

for the last time, YES, LOVE IS A WORTHY SUBJECT, SALLY ROONEY!!

Sigh. Let me start from the beginning: I was wandering the dark wood hallways of Substack when I chanced upon this post by writer Elif Batuman (whose debut novel I adore). Like many Batuman posts, it took a delightful, surprising turn, becoming a sort of review of the ideas raised in Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You?

Now, I read Beautiful World when it came out in 2021. Some disclaimers about that reading experience: I don’t really remember the plot. I skipped over most of the emails between the two protagonists because I’m everyone’s un-ideal reader. And I remember virtually nothing about the male love interests other than that one was possibly Catholic and the other worked in an Amazon warehouse.¹

But! This is not a review. This is a rant. A screed? It’s something that involves me being annoyed.

And it begins with this excerpt that Batuman lifted for her essay from one of those emails I maybe-didn’t-completely read from Beautiful World:

The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world — packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together—if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything. My own work is, it goes without saying, the worst culprit in this regard. For this reason I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel again.

I can get down with the basic premise of this concern. But I agree with Batuman, who essentially says, the world has always been bad, riddled with war and poverty (and actually probably worse on the poverty front?). Novelists have always contended with the problem (question, struggle, task) of how to bring the big world into their little novels. Love and the “right to personal drama,” are precisely why we fight so hard against poverty, violence, marginalization, subjugation so that, instead of worrying about your next meal, you can worry about who’s breaking up and staying together.

But it’s also a genre-blind concern (as literary fiction often is towards genre fiction). It ignores the fact that there is a whole genre rooted in the assumption that love stories are a worthy subject in their own right: ROMANCE, hello!!!!!

I’ll probably bang this drum until I die. Here’s the drum: Sally Rooney is a stone’s throw away from being a romance writer. She’s not shelved as one. She doesn’t appear to associate herself with the genre. Some people on Reddit get offended if you call her one. But she is absolutely writing, if not in, then around that tradition.

Don’t believe me?

#1 In her first three novels (she has a fourth forthcoming in September), the romance is the A plot. One thing about Sally Rooney, them subplots are there for show, I’m sorry. You gonna get one scene of this girl at work and two scenes of this crazy brother, but mostly you’re getting the Love Story.

#2 In all of her novels thus far, the love interests more or less get together at the end. Nick picks Frances up from the parking lot. Marianne tells Connell she’ll always be there. The Probably-Catholic guy and Eileen actually get married and have a baby. Like, come on.

I don’t know think it’s a coincidence that romance is a wildly popular genre and Rooney is as big as she is. If she were not writing love stories, I don’t know if she’d be as widely read. Her popularity is not nearly as mystifying as people like to imagine: I think there is an underfed appetite for literary romance; save for the classics, romance has become implicitly, but firmly, synonymous with commercial fiction, sometimes upmarket (see: Emily Henry).

And that’s why watching the writer character in Beautiful World lament her desire to write love stories while the world falls apart in that email is, I don’t know, silly? Again, the concern is not unfounded, it’s just silly. Because if Rooney understood herself as being in dialogue with romance writers (the vast majority of them women), she’d know that this is an old, old fight. These female writers (and their readers) have already been berated, discredited, shamed for their affection for love stories and—at least according to their bank accounts—have come out on top.

So why do we keep quibbling over the legitimacy of stories about whether people break up or stay together when we’ve always cared about this question? None of us would exist if two people somewhere hadn’t cared about this question. I mean, somebody had to get it on for all of us to even be here to create such a miserable world, and we can assume that love was part of some of those encounters. And also death. Or violence. Slavery. War. Because when in human history has there not been bad things in the fore-and backgrounds of life? That is life, actually.

One of my frustrations with litfic (I say this as a writer and reader of litfic) is that more than any other group of writers, I think we overblow what a novel is and does. Stripped of all the lofty goals we assign The Novel, it’s entertainment. A dirty word, I know. It’s not only entertainment, it’s art, too. But it also better be entertaining. I say this to say that sometimes writing a good story is enough. If I want to be miserable and know what’s happening, I’ll turn on CNN. I don’t read Sally Rooney to hear what she has to say about the war in Ukraine. I read Sally Rooney for how she portrays intimacy between characters.

This is absolutely not to say she shouldn’t write a novel about Ukraine, or is incapable of it. That fiction writers should be boxed out from political, social discourse because they’re “just” fiction writers. Fiction has always accomodated these issues. What I’m saying is, the people who want to write those novels are writing them, and if Rooney wanted to, she would, but she wants to write about relationships, yet beats herself² up for not writing that novel about Ukraine, and so instead gestures at this conundrum which could be solved by writing about Ukraine, or something else—or doing the difficult, painful, craft-intensive work of writing about both (don’t the best novels do this?), of simply letting the personal drama sit alongside the global one, without flinching so much.

I want to return to this line from the Rooney passage:

To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful.

But maybe you do it anyway? Maybe the alchemy isn’t exactly right and you get dragged online, but, okay, you’re getting dragged regardless? Maybe because, in real life, we walk past unhoused people every day, handing them a bill—or not— while contemplating what kind of creamer we’re getting from the store they’re sitting in front of? Do we omit the unhoused person from the novel so we can focus on the middle-class girl walking past? Do we omit the girl so we can focus on the unhoused person? Or do we let them live beside each other as in life, however fucked up, if, in fact, getting closer to life is what we’re hoping to do?³

Rooney was, it seems, bracing herself for the reviews. But critics don’t get to command what we write. If our attempts at art prove wobbly, fine. Art is all about the risk (cough, the promise) of artistic failure. Nearly all novels fail in some way. Because novels are experiments in how to capture life, a thing thats shifting while we’re shifting inside of it. That’s all we’re doing—taking a picture of a subject, at a particular angle, through a specific lens, narrow or wide, in a fleeting light. Like anything that exists within a frame, it has inherent limitations.

The fact that the writer character says she’s the worst culprit of writing these useless novels is interesting. Culprit: as if she’s committed a crime. Because New Yorker critic Katy Waldman said it best, I’m just going to drop her essay, “Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?” here. The subheading of the piece? Increasingly, characters are rewarded for the moral work of feeling bad.

I don’t think I need to connect the dots for you. But you should read it.

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I went to the National Book Festival in D.C last month which is hosted by the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world. Romantasy writer, Rebecca Yarros closed out the festival on the mainstage. She was the first romance writer in the history of the festival to do so. RomCom writers Abby Jimenez and Casey McQuiston also spoke before a packed room during the festival. The question of romance’s “seriousness” came up, as it always does. The moderator said something along the lines: “Can I just say, we have two romance writer’s on the MAINSTAGE at the freaking Library of Congress???”

The crowd of at least four hundred hollered. Maybe the better question is: serious to whom?

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I recently read a stunning profile about writer Garth Greenwell and his new novel, Small Rain, and teared up at this quote:

“In a way, the entire book is a message to my partner,” Greenwell said softly. “It says something about my whole approach to art, which is this hyperdevotion to the particular. Which is a way of turning toward the biggest questions we can ask about human life. To have turned from the world to a single face is to turn one’s face to everything.”

1. I am also a Rooney fan!!! I really enjoyed Conversations. I am re-reading Normal People as we speak!!!! And I feel bad because she has become such an easy target of literary “discourse.” But yes, as someone whose popularity is partly predicated on her choice of love as a subject, I sometimes wish she’d embrace it full-throatedly opposed to telegraphing shame when enough people are shaming women writers for this.

2. I know the “her” in question is really Alice that writer character, but I’ve seen Rooney talk about this same tension in her own writing.

3. Getting closer to life ISN’T always the purpose or point of a novel!!! Many romances are ABOUT the fantasy and I love books in all genres that lean into/aren’t afraid of fantasy. But Sally Rooney is what I call a slice-of-life writer. I think she does aim to get closer to life.

this was such a pain in the ass to make omg!!!!!!