My friend sent me a sassy take down of Sally Rooney yesterday saying “boring” and I replied: Oh groan, oh groannnnn. So played out by this stage, so boring. Such a boring editorial decision, such a boring thing for a writer to do.
And they always have this little section where they complain about the fact she makes a load of money off her books despite being a Marxist, and insinuate that she wrote them knowing they would sell a million copies and be made into a TV series and it was all a sinister plot to do this while being marketed as a Marxist, which was apparently a really bankable marketing tactic to help sell someone to mainstream American audiences 10 years ago or whenever she started writing these books.
To be honest I will at least hear out elements of all sorts of conspiracy theories. I will watch the Youtube documentary about the twin towers and the melting point of steel or whatever it is. I will at least watch it. But even to me this is one of those theories that just stretches credibility too far, and which I think should stretch credibility too far, in the eyes of a reasonably intelligent audience.
And then we have the contradiction in terms of all of this. We all know that Rooney is the only novelist of our generation who has a big enough audience that writing something about her, literally anything, will garner you some attention. Maybe Emma Cline could be another? But there aren’t loads.
(This is why I thought, do I even bother writing this? I don’t want attention for talking about this, but then I thought I’ll just write it and not share it anywhere except here, to an audience who know that kind of caper is not my schtick. I do feel it’s undignified to even get involved in this kind of conversation, but then I also wanted someone to say this specific thing I am saying, so I thought I would just spend an hour saying it and then it would have been said. Please don’t try to involve me in a boring circular conversation about whether people are allowed to write negative reviews off the back of this, of course they are and I have done. I have no interest in discussing that, basically everyone vaguely sensible is in agreement about it. I see no point in discussing it. Don’t email me about it. I also felt kind of annoyed at the idea of this being framed as a rabid defence by a stan or something like that, even though that isn’t what I say here at all, but I think if you read this fairly regularly you’ll know that isn’t my schtick. Anyway.)
It is a, let’s be honest, not exactly opaque, strategic career move to write a Rooney takedown. It is strange to read a piece complaining about the canny careerism of a certain author when, again, a reasonably intelligent audience should see the careerist incentives motivating the author of the piece itself. I guess the takedown author would say: Oh it doesn’t matter if I’m cynical because I’m not a Marxist, aha!
I’ll admit the logic of this line of argument simply escapes me. And again, I don’t think this should feel like a convincing line of argument to a reasonably intelligent audience. If you don’t feel there is anything wrong with careerism, why should it matter if someone else is doing this? Why should anyone feel concerned about holding someone else to standards they don’t believe in themselves?
I mean, I get it, the idea is there’s a sinister hypocrisy at work here. (As I said I think the idea this whole thing was a canny plot is just a pretty fantastical idea, but let’s say it’s not.) Frankly I do feel the charge of hypocrisy is overused and under-examined by people around my age talking about anything to do with left wing politics. You see this kind of argument against anything to do with climate activism too. Like “aha they don’t eat meat but they do fly, I’m not a hypocrite because I do both”. But it factually is better for the planet to not do one of these things than to do both of them. You can point and shout hypocrisy, but the reality is one person here is doing something for the planet and the other is doing nothing.
The idea that left wing artists and writers are open to a line of critique which can simply never be applied to right wing artists and writers is certainly a convenient concept for right wing artists and writers. I can’t see that it has much use beyond this, I can’t see that it has any use in terms of helping us understand or situate art better.
And think about it. Where is the end point of this line of argument? Are we saying that the only people who should seek or attain a wide readership are those who are only self-interested and have no politics beyond that? With respect to the efforts of everyone involved here, having read a few pieces which make this kind of argument, I have never read anything by anyone who makes this argument who is making good or interesting work. Nothing. I certainly would not want a culture where this was the only work available.
For example this takedown was by Ann Manov. I remembered I had read a piece by her before which I had found to be hectoring and pedantic, full of zingers that didn’t make sense, the kind of lines written to be shared sassily on Twitter but which don’t actually mean anything. There was one where she said “the Renata Adler of looking at her phone” or something as if this is a bad thing. Renata Adler is widely viewed as a great writer and everyone is always looking at their phone these days. This is a compliment if anything. If it’s not meant to be a compliment it should be phrased differently. A phrase being a bit spicy should not be more important than whether or not it makes sense, or at least not, again, to a reasonably intelligent audience.
I talked to someone about the last piece and he declared that Manov “writes like a lawyer”. On the face of it this is a good description but the more I sit with it I don’t think it works. My boyfriend is a lawyer and he does not write like this. Working lawyers have to pay a great deal of attention to everything they do or else they will get in huge amounts of trouble with their clients. I do not see this care or diligence in Manov’s work. She writes like someone making a funding application to the council or something like that. Dry and pedantic and boring, but not particularly forensic.
This is a textbook Manov line: “Intermezzo is being trumpeted by the publishers as Rooney’s Great Leap Forward, and I suppose it will be seen as some sort of accomplishment that she writes about characters who are not literature students at, or graduates of, Trinity College.”
(This is actually not even true of Intermezzo, quite a few of the main characters did go to Trinity, and one works there full time, another part time, but this sloppiness fits with what I’ve seen of Manov’s writing. And actually, this is the kind of factual error that seems to pop up all the time when the guiding principle of a person’s writing is sassiness. Reality may always be sacrificed at the altar of the zinger. Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good sassy and all that… )
But anyway, I know this is supposed to be funny, like the Trinity bit is supposed to be this sassy “punch the air” punchline. But I do not believe a single person would read this and laugh. I believe they might share it on Twitter and say “ouch” or something, but nobody with any self respect should write for reactions like that. (I say this as someone whose pieces go viral on Twitter all the time, if someone shared a passage I wrote saying “ouch” it would make me want to die.)
I guess, more than anything else, I just find writing like this kind of cringe and embarrassing. I’m sorry but those are the only words I can think of for it. The artlessness and the sass is embarrassing to me. It’s goofy.
Why does this matter? It doesn’t really, I just love novels and criticism and I feel strongly about criticism not being goofy and embarrassing. I don’t feel there shouldn’t be negative reviews, literally nobody except Taylor Swift fans ever argues that, even though we see constant arguments against that position. It is specifically this sassy “puppy kicking villain in a cartoon” voice in writing that I am talking about. I find it embarrassing.
I didn’t finish the Rooney piece, I got about half way through and then thought it was too boring to finish. So I guess I have now read one and a half pieces. This was enough for me to know I think Manov’s writing is not good. It is, to my mind, pedantic but not meticulous, mannered but bland, sassy but unoriginal. She has no voice or arguments of her own that I can discern. I see a lot of stuff like this from people trying to get into criticism right now. Then I looked her up and scrolled through a defence of Fuccboi she wrote in Unherd. (So I guess I’ve really read one and three quarters.) At the end of that she implies that the Fuccboi guy is alone among his peers because “he unapologetically does care about literature”. The evidence for this is that he name checks esteemed authors in his book. Sorry, but what?
Let me rephrase that: The guy who wrote Fuccboi is the lone defender of literature in 2020-whatever because he refers to writers like Sheila Heiti and Bolaño in his novel.
Come on now! I thought Fuccboi worked as a fun beach read, I think the publisher made a mistake there in marketing it as a much more literary than it really is. Sometimes this works well as a marketing strategy but here I think no. But even his publisher didn’t go as far as to position him as the lone defender of literature.
And I mean, come on! I love work by many of the authors name checked in Fuccboi, but come on. Be serious. Who is writing lit fic in the 2010s/2020s and has not read these guys? Nobody should need to whack references of Bolaño into their novels for it to be obvious they have read him. (I actually have a lot of issues and arguments with this name checking tactic, it seems to me like a shortcut to infer style influences which would not be drawn otherwise, but that is for another post or maybe just for me to keep writing against.)
I don’t even think I need to say this, but anyway: This is all just so unserious. So totally and utterly unserious. Ludicrously and absurdly so. I guess that’s what I wanted to say, not a big defence of anyone or anything like that. But just, can we drop all the sass and the zingers and the circular and absurd arguments and be a little bit serious?
Manov is not the only person carrying on like this. I guess it feels like a way to start trying to get bylines or something, I don’t know. I’m not saying it's deeply wicked or it hurt my feelings or anything like that (god knows these types always try to frame any criticism in those terms), but just that this is all so unserious, vapid, boring and embarrassing. Write a proper review.
It doesn’t really matter what I think of course, I have just tended to notice that when something like this is in the water and I find it annoying other people tend to agree. So here you are, if you are fed up with it too. It’s not just you.
Till next time xxxxxx