Last month a supposedly over-hyped ingenue author – a producer, many say, of glorified chick-lit – published a brilliantly nuanced essay in the Paris Review, casting an erudite eye over the history of the novel and drawing a provocative comparison between two of its giants, Austen and Joyce. How could one writer be both things: an unschooled, unskilled peddler of commercial pap, and a superb critic?
I’m talking, of course, about the author everyone talks about all the time: Sally Rooney. Doubleness is a theme of Rooney’s career: she is a darling of publishing, our time’s bestselling literary author – as well as the most patronised and reviled. People queued up to buy her latest novel from pop-up shops and converted ice cream vans, and meanwhile bien pensant commentators lined up to deride the “cult” of Sally Rooney, lambast the “Rooney industrial complex” and even accuse her of being an avatar of unchecked white privilege. Even worse, some serious reviewers doubted whether she was an especially good writer.
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