The Governing Ethic of the Sexy: Sally Rooney as beach reading
Intermezzo is Annoyingissimo
I wasn’t planning to read Intermezzo, but my friend Hannah read it and said she liked it and it was on 3 for 2 at WH Smiths, which means I am suggestible to both my friends and capitalism. I read it on a sun lounger in a day, surfacing only to slurp Mythos and chomp souvlaki. Imbibing Intermezzo’s heady bouquet of literary references, social observation and chess theory made me feel gloriously intelligent, ennobled by the crumb trail of the author’s intellectual allusions.
Later, I was trying to work out which book first made me feel that way, and realised that it was The Da Vinci Code.
I’ll admit to having complicated feelings towards Sally Rooney as a cultural figure. I enjoyed Conversations With Friends as much as anyone, but I think there’s more to modern life than sexy people saying ‘is this okay?’ and being nudely intent at each other, until, presumably, one of them dies.
But that’s fine! Let a hundred flowers blossom!1 Except they haven’t. Try to name three other millennial novelist who, in the last ten years, has had even a half of the institutional and industry backing of Rooney. Natasha Brown? Eliza Clarke? You know they’re not even close. Yes, Rooney’s sold a lot of books, but is that because her books are uniquely brilliant, or because she’s the only novelist of her generation who’s been given the oxygen to develop?
What makes it doubly frustrating is that, while objectively winning at capitalism, Rooney identifies as a Marxist. That paradox isn’t her fault; she doesn’t control what the market wants. And yet. Does it not feel just a teensy bit like her output’s main achievement has been to present a version of Marxism that is palatable under capitalism? I am talking about her aesthetic, what we may one day call the Rooneyesque, which operates under the Governing Ethic of the Sexy.
Thin, attractive people, who went to Trinity College Dublin, debate Marxism in nice houses. Okay, they might not own those houses, but Rooney is far from the only person in our generation to have noticed that renting is precarious and unfair. In my experience, millennials actually talk about this quite a lot.
Rooney makes many allusions in Intermezzo: Wittgenstein, Hamlet, Wordsworth, Eliot, Yeats, Hardy, Keats, Henry James and, naturally, James Joyce. In case we fail to pick up any of these pearls, she lists them all in her author’s note at the end. And just in case we somehow miss that, she has provided a reading list in that well-regarded Marxist periodical, Elle magazine.
The main texts that she alludes to are Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Joyce’s Ulysses and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with Wittgenstein’s Tractato Logico-Philosophicus thrown in for good measure. This stack sounds like what you’d find untouched on the bedside table of a nineteen-year-old boy who wants the girls he sleeps with to think he’s an intellectual.
Rooney takes the structure of Hamlet: boy(s) sad because dad is dead. With this she combines the protagonists of The Brothers Karamazov: corporate lawyer Peter is clearly supposed to be Mitya, the sensualist; Ivan the former chess prodigy is, well, Ivan, who is Clever2; and Alyosha, the hero of BK and Dostoevsky’s riposte to the nihilism of Russian youth, is reincarnated as Alexei, a whippet. In the Rooneyesque, I guess genuine commitment to the social good and a belief in a better world is just for dogs.
Peter’s inner monologue aims for Joycean but comes out Joyce-lite, with none of the rigour and inventiveness of say, Eimear McBride. Consider, for example, Rooney’s opening:
Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent. On such occasions, one could almost come to regret one’s own social brilliance. Gives him the excuse, or give him in any case someone at whom to look pleadingly between the mandatory handshakes. God love him.
Then look at McBride’s opening of A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing:
For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day.
Both superficially Joycean, but one’s an honest attempt to continue the project of remaking language in a way that best honours experience, while the other’s a cosmetic manipulation of syntax. The Rooneyesque includes these references while failing to meaningfully develop them; it’s a pleasing literary Pinterest board, unburdened by substance.
There are questions in Intermezzo which could have substance: can age gap relationships work? What about polyamory, eh?
Well, what of these questions?
Young men who are chess prodigies are rarely Adonis types. This might sound like a cruel observation, but I don’t think it is. Most people are, by definition, not unusually good-looking, unless they happen to be a protagonist in a Sally Rooney novel.
But Ivan (22) is both good at chess and Sexy. Oh, he’s not perfect. We never said he was perfect! He has braces, for goodness sake. But he is tall, dark, handsome and - as Rooney for some reason is intent on repeatedly informing us, thin. No one likes a pudgy chessboy, I suppose? I think she uses the comparison of a marble statue more than once. Margaret, the 36-year-old divorcee with whom Ivan falls in love, is likewise unusually attractive. She doesn’t think so herself, of course, but luckily, we get plenty of external POVs to set our fears at rest: in true One Direction fashion, she simply doesn’t know she’s beautiful.
Whatever transgression is present in this age-gap relationship eclipsed by the governing ethic of the sexy. When I picture Ivan and Margaret in my mind I need only think of two sexy people, sexing it up. Any genuine aversion I might unconsciously feel towards the social taboo of an older woman having sex with a young, vulnerable, nerdy, grieving boy is gently lubricated by the assurance of their sexiness until all the friction disappears. It is cosmically correct that these two hotties should be together, age be damned!
And what of Mitya the sensualist Peter the corporate lawyer? Like any good literary carouser, his arc moves from common-or-garden womanising to something that you might (emphasis on the might, because we never actually see it in practice) call ethical non-monogamy. He is involved with two women: a Gen Z girl who can fuck, and an age-appropriate millennial who can’t. The answer? Unionise the girlfriends! Combine the skillset! From each according to her fucking ability, to each according to his fucking needs! Peter gets to fuck, Gen Z gets her rent paid, virginal millennial gets to be loved, and anyone who thinks this isn’t a brilliant setup is a square, or a capitalist pig-dog, or both.
Because remember, guys. these are sexy, sexy people. Do they not owe it to themselves, to their own perfect genitals, to the very idea of decency, to get it on, Tetris-like, in whatever combination is feasible?
To this end, we get a brief Wittgensteinian meditation on the nature of language: when someone refers to their partner, you assume that this is the person they sleep with. But ah! What if they do not sleep with them? What if they in fact sleep with someone else? Here does language not break down? How is it even possible to pronounce on a situation such as this? It’s just so complicated. As Wittgenstein himself opined, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’.
Except we won’t be silent. This is a Sally Rooney novel, people! What are we here for but sad girlies (who are sometimes boys) dissecting their problems for hundreds of pages? You know how Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were so profoundly moved by themselves on that Wicked press tour? Sally Rooney’s characters are basically that, but with added cultural theory.
I know some people who practise ethical non-monogamy. It’s a tough thing to do, and there aren’t many social blueprints for it. But so far as I can see, the people who succeed in those relationships are not the people who did the best job defining their terms, or who have somehow overcome the problems of language to speak on their situation with perfect accuracy. The people who succeed seem to do so with some combination of mutual understanding, generosity of spirit and a willingness to iterate on their imperfect communication with profound commitment. But this is too knotty, too experiential for a Sally Rooney novel. It is not enough like thinking, and too much like living.
Look, clearly, I am here for this stuff. I ate it up faster than a portion of tzatziki-laden oregano chips. I’m no saintly Alyosha, I love sexy people, and I love books that flatter my desire to feel smart. I just think it’s important to recognise the distinction between feeling smart and actually being made smarter, which usually involves at least temporarily feeling dumb. Age gaps and ethical non-monogamy are dilemmas of life, not language, and a taste of Wittgenstein that slips down like a glass of Pinot Grigio isn’t Wittgenstein at all,
You know who said that? Chairman Mao. Weirdly, I’m not sure he was genuinely committed to pluralism.
He is also, it is strongly implied by other characters, on the autism spectrum. But Rooney herself is at pains not to explicitly place him there, so he’s just got that superpower quirkiness which makes him extraordinarily honest and perceptive but has no downsides or frustrations. And if you think that’s a bit cowardly, Rooney never said he had autism! Why would you assume that, you beast? You Are The Problem.