Glimpses of Utopia

‘Love,’ Alain Badiou wrote, ‘is the minimal form of communism.’ In communism for two or for two billion, the way the gulf between people narrows is of great interest: both scenarios seem to involve mysterious and transformative forces. I remembered Badiou’s formulation when I heard Sally Rooney describe the genesis of her books. Her characters don’t arrive singly, she told Molly Fischer in an interview in 2019, but in twos and threes, and the dynamic between them is what makes her think she might have an idea worth pursuing. In all of her novels so far, a couple begins with differences of power to overcome. In Conversations with Friends, Nick is older and richer than Frances (not to mention married); in Normal People, Connell is more popular and more sexually experienced than Marianne (before things reverse at university); in Beautiful World, Where Are You, Alice is wealthier and more accomplished than Felix (though not as robust) and Simon is older and more enamoured of Eileen than she of him (though he hedges his bets more). Each relationship as it blossoms causes the redistribution of popularity, money, energy, knowledge, wit and security, and creates a tiny cell of resistance to the idea that society’s stratifications are immovable.

In life, falling in love doesn’t always end well or ennoble the lovers, but in a Rooney novel it nearly always does. The biggest risk to her characters is that once they’ve found the minimal form of communism, they give up on the maximal, retreating to ‘a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me’, as Eileen puts it in Beautiful World, Where Are You. Communism is often the subject of discussions between her characters, but her strongest arguments for a more equal, caring and just society happen on the level of plot, in the emotional experience of loving someone. Here is Frances of Conversations with Friends exchanging instant messages with Bobbi, her friend and former lover:

me: capitalism harnesses ‘love’ for profit

me: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect

me: but I mean, I get that, I’m anti love as such

Bobbi: that’s vapid frances

Bobbi: you have to do more than say you’re anti things

Smart undergraduates like them can recognise the exploitation but can go no further without experience. Could there be a way to capture some of love’s profit for themselves? There is naivety in their essay-crisis declarations: familiarity with Marxist-feminist theories of love and labour doesn’t, after all, provide any protection from catching feelings in the real world (and it isn’t charming to say to a lover that love is unpaid labour). But actual political commitment seems impossible too: Alice in Beautiful World, Where Are You might not want to buy a sandwich wrapped in single-use plastic, but she has to eat lunch. She’s made no claim to be the new Simone Weil and she is powerless in any case: no one has consulted her on the arrangement of the world’s resources. How can these characters believe in political organisation when what is obviously untenable to them – inequality, the climate crisis, racism – isn’t really being countered by any mainstream political party? In love, both Frances and Alice oppose small cruelties: by challenging a slight about Nick’s mental health, Frances makes an evening less callous; knowing that Alice will be angry to learn that a box cutter tore into his palm at work, Felix’s attitude towards his uncaring employer hardens. At the end of each of Rooney’s novels, love triumphs partly because it might be the only form of solidarity, the only glimpse of utopia, the only intimation of political change a normal person has in a lifetime.

When I try to account for Rooney’s position as the pre-eminent millennial novelist, one of the most loved women writers working today, I land on the ratio of utopianness to ordinariness, a mixture as familiar to Karl Marx as it was to Jane Austen, that makes her writing so appealing. I like Rooney’s books, and am excited when a new one comes out, and one of the many things I like about them is that almost every time two characters have sex – and it’s pretty often – they discuss contraception. Such conversations are realistic, even if they aren’t included in the sex scenes in many other books. It makes me trust her. And in not being hidden, these discussions quietly stake a claim. Until relatively recently, taking into account a woman’s desire not to have a child would have been utopian, as would a couple determining, with equal say, the consequences of sleeping together. Rooney’s novels are full of such moments, all the more radical for being unobtrusive. She has said that during her childhood in Castlebar, County Mayo, her parents would adjudicate squabbles using the Marxist adage: from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs. To a writer born in February 1991 to the manager of an arts centre and a telecom worker in the west of Ireland, barely a year after the Berlin Wall fell, communism was something a child could grasp. It was common sense. It was how you knew you were loved and would be cared for.

In Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, a conversation takes place over the expiry date on a condom. Ivan Koubek, who is 22 and grieving the recent loss of his father, has had one in the zipped pocket of his suitcase for a while. Margaret Kearns, who is 36 and recently separated, suggests he fetch it and check the date on the foil (the packaging reads 07/25. They’re safe). The long-undisturbed contraceptive is a sign that neither of them has been expecting their mutual attraction, during an autumn drive home from a simultaneous chess event in an arts centre in Leitrim. At the wheel is Margaret, the programme manager in Leitrim, and in the passenger seat is Ivan, a former child prodigy visiting the local chess society in his attempt to climb the rankings again. There are fourteen years between them. Margaret has her own place, Ivan lives with flatmates; Margaret is salaried, Ivan freelances; Margaret has been married, Ivan has had a handful of disappointing sexual experiences. They have both lost their fathers and acquired a sense that life is ‘a collection of essentially unrelated experiences’. As they begin kissing, Margaret allows the idea that life means nothing to bloom for a moment: ‘doesn’t it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person?’ The forces of society, propriety and economics, supposedly so heavy, are puffed into smoke. Even the next morning she can’t regret it, hesitating only when he asks for her number. In a single night, they did each other good, restoring surprise and pleasure to a flattened existence.

The reader first glimpses Ivan through the eyes of his older brother, Peter. ‘Didn’t seem fair on the young lad,’ the novel begins, eavesdropping on Peter’s internal monologue, ‘That suit at the funeral.’ Peter, a human rights barrister, is ten years older than Ivan, and looks down on him. He experiences his grief in a different key because he never felt close to his father the way Ivan did. The younger brother in his mourning has gravitated towards someone more mature; the elder brother has found himself returning again and again to the shared house of a student called Naomi, who is 23 and occasionally posts nude pictures of herself on the internet when in need of money, or to the calm flat of his former girlfriend Sylvia Larkin, who is 32, a lecturer in English literature, and kind to Ivan in the way Peter wants to be. The novel gives us two romantic couples with at least ten years between them, one with an older woman, Margaret and Ivan, and one with the more usual older man, Peter and Naomi; a filial and a quasi-filial pair, Peter and Ivan, and Ivan and Sylvia; and one age-matched couple, Peter and Sylvia. Across expected lines of sympathy and understanding, new groupings form, and each makes at least one unexpected gesture towards the good functioning of the whole. It is a rare parent in a Rooney novel who can be admired – the obvious example is Connell’s mother in Normal People – and in general the generation above the protagonists is drunk, cold, distracted or all three. Good relationships have to be built from scratch.

Until Intermezzo, the titles of Rooney’s books have functioned almost like search terms. Normality, conversation, friendship and the idea of a beautiful world are preoccupations, almost ideals. With the choice for this novel of the term ‘intermezzo’, differences come into view. An intermezzo in music is a light composition played between the acts of an opera, in dining it is a palate cleanser between courses, in chess it is an unexpected move. Thrust into the all-bets-are-off in-between time of mourning, the brothers begin romantic relationships that could be what they need to survive in a trying time, the relational equivalent of lemon sorbet and a pretty melody, or could indicate that they will no longer accept the world as it is, staying in-between for ever. Shadowing all this is the literal sense of intermezzo as something intermediate. At 32, Peter is approaching the middle of his life, and he can’t much longer maintain that he is still becoming who he will be. (His father died at 65, and Peter could already be halfway through his own life.) At 36, Margaret, newly separated from a husband who is an alcoholic yet beloved of the rest of her family as she isn’t, asks herself: ‘what’s the point in pretending my life makes any sense anyway?’ At 22, Ivan feels his best chess-playing days could be over. ‘It is better to feel hopeful and optimistic about one’s life on earth while engaged in the never-ending struggle to pay rent,’ he reasons, ‘than to feel despondent and depressed while engaged in the same non-optional struggle anyway.’ Love’s energy might be needed at certain times in your life not so that you can foment revolution, but to get through the day.

Sally Rooney​ is 33, a year older than Peter and Sylvia, three years younger than Margaret, and approaching the middle of her own life. With her fourth novel comes a more settled sense of the sort of writer she will be. Her gifts are clear: writing realistic dialogue and creating believable characters; narrative economy and instinctive pacing; capturing the way we live as it moves and changes; depicting emotion. She has a particularly deft sense of the writer’s role in a political landscape of boycotts and statements and open letters: her actions, such as opting not to sell the Hebrew rights to her most recent books and writing a brief and unshowy op-ed in the Irish Times on President Biden’s visit to Ireland in March, stand behind her commitments without making herself the event. She needn’t do anything, and yet what she does is effective and thoughtful.

Rooney’s reputation as a prodigy has the effect of drawing attention to the less successful elements in her books. The first of these is the leniency with which she treats her characters, and which often results in improbably happy endings. Normal People is an interesting case study because we have three versions of it: ‘At the Clinic’, the story in a 2016 issue of the White Review which marked Connell and Marianne’s debut; the novel Normal People, which was published in 2018 and became a bestseller; and the TV series Rooney worked on with the playwrights Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe, which first aired in 2020. One of the reasons the TV series bettered the novel, I think (Paul Mescal aside, come on), was that the ending was more realistic. In the final episode Marianne tells Connell, who is considering studying in New York, that they’ll be all right. In the novel, she says she’ll ‘always be here’. There is some ambiguity in both versions, but on the page it seems likely that they’ll stay together and on screen that they won’t, crying together on the floor of Marianne’s flat with the realisation that their childhoods are over. It’s deeply pleasurable to read an intelligent novel that ends happily, but in Rooney’s endings couplings persist beyond the probable for no real reason. It’s not as if marriage is women’s only escape any longer. I don’t want to ruin Intermezzo for the readers who queued at midnight for a copy, but I don’t think any of them will be upset by its ending.

The second weakness in her writing is the sentences. ‘I don’t think my prose is fantastic,’ she told Patricia Lockwood in an interview two years ago – I felt this when I started taking notes on Intermezzo, but hadn’t thought much about it before. As I lay in the sun reading galleys dog-eared by three colleagues before me, the point of a Sally Rooney novel had seemed to be the plot, the characters, the way we are all Marianne and Connell and Bobbi and Frances. The plain prose was an admission of modesty: Rooney didn’t want to get in the way. When she did have things to say about the unfairness of the world, she would say them in the least intimidating way, and perhaps after an emotionally wrenching sex scene. Conversations with Friends was written in a minimal, first-person narration by Frances, which showed the influence of the American greats, particularly Salinger and Carver. Normal People was in an unshowy third person, alternately cleaving close to Marianne’s and then to Connell’s perspective, with complexity in the timeline rather than in the prose. Beautiful World, Where Are You began with a flat impersonal roving-eye narration which watched characters do things from the outside and then brought those characters’ thoughts into the narrative with an email correspondence between the best friends at the novel’s heart, Alice and Eileen. Rooney doesn’t seem to have settled on a mode. (I think my favourite might be Conversations with Friends, a first-person narrative compelling in itself but with enough room to hear the voices of others, as we hear Bobbi’s over instant messenger.)

In Intermezzo, Rooney tries something else, moulding a style for each of the brothers, who narrate the novel in alternate chapters (the thoughts of the women they love are heard in each chapter too). Ivan the chess prodigy dispatches one idea after another. His relationship with Margaret has made him think again about an argument he had with his brother about offering pregnant women seats on public transport: ‘That makes her so important, he thought, just because she’s going to have a baby? Isn’t the wealthy global north overpopulated already? And how can feminists say they want equality, if what they really want is to be considered biologically more important than men?’ Peter had called the argument fascist, and it does sound incel-like. Ivan’s vocabulary isn’t wide – he uses ‘important’ twice, and ready-made phrases such as ‘global north’ – but the thought is clearly expressed and its subsequent reversal is poignant: later in the novel, he notices in pregnant women the consequences of their desire, a ‘particular weakness of women’ for men which ‘strikes him as beautiful, moving, worthy of deep respect and deference’. Over the course of the book Ivan rethinks his most callow ideas, and the prose style makes the intellectual revision he is undergoing clear. But his voice isn’t as charming as Frances’s.

For Peter, Rooney has chosen a style she hasn’t used before: a Joycean internal monologue, full of snatches of poems and prose – which Rooney lists at the end of the novel – from Shakespeare, Hardy, Sontag and Yeats (Bobbi: ‘No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy’). In place of simple sentences, Rooney uses fragments, drops articles, inverts conventional word order and quotes snatches of the canon. It’s not Ulysses, but it does have the virtue of expressing character. Peter’s state of mind is wobbly, and he veers close to suicidal ideation several times. Here is one of the more successful passages, when he is thinking about his hard-won cultural knowledge:

Magnificence of classical statuary, yes. Late style of Henry James, sumptuous tactility of crêpe de chine, Sarah Vaughan singing ‘April in Paris’. What they would never understand. Mere privilege he thinks can’t touch what he has so richly acquired. Beauty, culture: yes. Can’t be bought. Reactionary, people call that now. Master’s tools and the master’s house, what would Bourdieu have to say. And perhaps it is just a delusion.

What comes through are Peter’s inchoate, fast-moving thoughts and a sense that he’s shoring himself up with things learned in Florence and Rome. It isn’t gorgeous to read: the word ‘yes’ tacked to the end of sentences, the inversion of ‘people call that reactionary’ to no strong effect, the silent quotation of Audre Lorde like a catchphrase. You get used to the style, and it occasionally produces a euphonious sentence like ‘Strands of her hair light and fine between his fingers he feels and remembers feeling.’ But the rewards are few.

‘My novels are not fundamentally about language,’ Rooney said to Lockwood in that interview, ‘they’re about people and their lives.’ When I noticed on a second reading that Peter isn’t showing off by quoting Hardy’s ‘The Voice’ but clinging to his relationship with Sylvia, who first read the poem to him ‘lying naked with her chin in her hand’ in a ‘hot curtained hotel room overseas’, I realised that all his quotations, from The Golden Bowl to Ulysses itself, reveal the way one mind is profoundly changed by contact with another. Peter’s thoughts are in the shape of Sylvia’s, and that is one reason he’s finding it hard to let her go. ‘Woman much missed’ is the phrase Rooney uses, layering Hardy’s regret about his first wife, Emma, with Peter’s for Sylvia.

‘I like to drink a glass of tap water and think my little thoughts,’ Rooney told Lockwood. I like the image of the glass of tap water. It’s just a detail from her life, as it is from all of our lives. I have one by me now. And I think the metaphorical glass of tap water reveals an important attitude in Rooney’s work. It used to be that the only people afforded an emotional life, and given latitude to write novels about falling in love, were the leisured classes, people with money enough to be liberated from daily presence at the factory or on the farm. Rooney’s novels stand for the notion that ordinary people should also be allowed the tumults and comforts of an emotional life, along with a sense that their existence is important because it is precious to the people they love. This, it seems to me, is one of the ideas underlying communism.