With Sally Rooney’s highly anticipated new novel, Intermezzo, appearing on autumn must-read lists and fans eager to get their hands on a copy from September 24th, the Mayo author is the name on many book-lovers’ lips. The pace of modern life and its demands on memory real estate can mean that, for bibliophiles and beach readers alike, even much-loved stories by beloved authors can blur into one another some time after the last page is turned or the ereader is turned off.
So for those who want to join the cultural conversations around the office water cooler or at the book club on all things Rooney but don’t have time to reread her back catalogue, we offer a primer or, dare we say, a bluffer’s guide. Here is a short steeron the plots of Rooney’s previous bestselling novels, and their popular visual afterlives:
Conversations with Friends (2017)
What’s it about?
Rooney’s debut novel explores the fraught dynamics that arise when two college friends become entangled in the lives of a married couple. Friends Bobbi and Frances, who were once in a relationship, are interviewed and befriended by journalist Melissa, who is writing a profile on the pair and their spoken-word act. A complex menage à quatre ensues when Melissa introduces the two women, not just into her comparatively high-end world, but to her actor husband Nick. The situation turns stickier still when Frances and Nick develop a closer relationship.
How was it reviewed by The Irish Times?
In advance of its release in 2017, Sarah Gilmartin described Conversations with Friends as “a dynamic debut novel about the messy, overlapping relationships between four captivating characters” and pointed out the “emotional intelligence and precision” present in Rooney’s work.
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“This is fearless writing that seeks to get at the truth of an affair and a singular young woman who decides, with very little soul-searching, to enter into one,” Gilmartin wrote.
The “conversation” of the title is a recurring preoccupation of the novel, Gilmartin suggested, “from the breakdown in communication between Bobbi and Frances, to Nick’s role as listener, to the fact that during the affair their eyes ‘seemed to be having a conversation of their own’.”
“The disparity between what people feel and how they express it is expertly mined by Rooney,” she wrote.
Beyond the book
A TV adaptation of Conversations with Friends was aired in 2022 (following the success of the televised version of Rooney’s later novel Normal People), directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Leanne Welham and starring Taylor Swift’s ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn and Girls actor Jemima Kirke as Nick and Melissa, Alison Oliver (who has since played Venetia in Saltburn) as Frances, and Sasha Lane as Bobbi.
“As with Normal People, Abrahamson astutely locates the visual poetry threaded through Rooney’s unadorned prose,” Ed Power wrote for The Irish Times. “Rooney fans will lap it up,” he continued, adding, “for everyone else, the wow factor of a prestige television take on Dublin – albeit empty and lockdown-grim – is sure to bring its own pleasures.”
Normal People (2018)
What’s it about?
Rooney’s second novel – easily recognised by its sardine-can cover art – charts the relationship between Marianne and Connell, from a small town in the west of Ireland to the hallowed halls of Trinity College Dublin. The difference between their backgrounds and social statuses provides the intriguing context for this complex, modern love story.
How was it reviewed by The Irish Times?
“Lord be with the days when the job of the critic, especially the Irish critic, was to reassure everyone that a recently successful writer was no good”, Booker-winning author Anne Enright wrote to introduce her review of Sally Rooney’s “superb” second novel.
“Normal People takes those themes of passivity and hurt and makes them radical and amazing. There is an amount of sex in the book and the sensibility is entirely contemporary, but there is no hint of modernism here,” Enright wrote.
“Normal People has the engine of a 19th-century novel; there is an encompassing sense of authority in the voice that makes it more terrible when the characters’ lives start to slip away from them. The book grows up under your eyes: it is so much wiser and more moral than you thought it would be. Rooney is completely in control.”
This novel, Enright wrote, “adds, fearlessly, to an unsettling discussion about submission – I felt I understood something, at the end of it, that I had previously pushed away. But the truth is that this novel is about human connection and I found it difficult to disconnect. It is a long time since I cared so much about two characters on a page.”
Beyond the book
“Painful, joyful, gorgeous” was the headline of Mary Hannigan’s review of the 2020 TV miniseries adaptation of Normal People directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald. “[The directors] have created is a quite beautiful portrayal of the novel,” she wrote, with “its main characters Marianne and Connell played superbly by Daisy Edgar-Jones (Cold Feet, War of the Worlds) and Paul Mescal, who is making a memorable television debut ...
“In the opening two episodes alone, there are bountiful reminders of how that stage of life is filled with as much pain as it is joy, both Marianne and Connell fragile and filled with self-doubt as they try to figure out who they are and how to take their next steps together. And you can’t but root for them.”
Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021)
What’s it about?
Rooney’s third novel tells the story of four characters on the cusp of 30 who find themselves at a stage where they are still young “but life is catching up with them”. Alice, a novelist, invites a man she just met to travel to Rome. Esewhere in Ireland, her best friend Eileen slips into flirting with childhood friend Simon after a break-up. Contemporary modes of communication are used as a device as the characters themselves grapple with modern life.
How was it reviewed by The Irish Times?
“Sally Rooney takes the very considerable risk of allowing the experiences of her character Alice to mirror, in career terms, her own. Alice is a young writer deeply unhappy about waking one morning to find herself an international literary star,” Fintan O’Toole wrote.
“The obvious risk here is that of a ‘poor me’ solipsism. But Rooney counters it with a passionate and searching inquiry into the connection between the problem of writing and the problem of living. In both guises, the question is the same: what form can the experience – economic, sexual, historical, political – of her generation take?”
O’Toole describes Rooney’s prose as “cool, transparent, almost scientific in its rigour”, adding: “For all Alice and Eileen’s despair at the inadequacy of public language, Rooney is always making the opposite case with her clarity of expression. Even when her characters are overwrought, her writing never is.”
Intermezzo is published by Faber & Faber on September 24th
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