Sally Rooney. Photograph by Kalpesh Lathigra.

Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But while Rooney is delightfully conversant in the history of the novel, it is not, she says, her first thought when she starts to write. Her characters simply walk into her mind and stay there until she has puzzled out the precise nature of their relationships to one another. In Intermezzo, as in the novels that preceded it, her characters—Peter and Ivan Koubek, and the women they love—are often self-deceiving, misguided, and dishonest. No one’s intentions are pure. No one’s actions are consistent. Yet amid this tangle of secrets and lies there is, every so often, a glimmer of mutual understanding—a minor triumph in a world designed to erode all human exchanges and emotions. It is the burden and the pleasure of the novel, from Austen to Rooney, that it can animate these triumphs and the unbeautiful world from which they arise, so long as we keep turning the pages.

This summer, Rooney and I met in Dublin, where we mostly talked about novels, old and new. We met again on September 25, for a public conversation onstage at the Southbank Centre in London. Before Rooney and I began to speak, she delivered a brief statement condemning the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the deaths of civilians in Israel, in Palestine, and in Lebanon. She urged the audience “to keep protesting, to keep speaking out, to keep demanding an end to this horrifying war.” Although our conversation in London was a continuation of our earlier exchange, her words were a reminder that any discussion of the novel, cannot be, and must not be, isolated from a consideration of longer and broader histories—of death and dispossession, beauty and belonging.

INTERVIEWER

In Dublin this summer, we talked about contemporary novelists who, quite self-consciously, are writing back toward the history of the novel. You said something that stuck with me—“Many writers are contemptuous of the novel as a bourgeois form, but I love the novel.” How does one sustain that love for the novel at a time of horrific violence? More specifically, what shape does that love take in Intermezzo?

SALLY ROONEY

I stand by that. I do love the novel, and I think a lot about its specific textual lineage. My great friend Tom Morris is a fantastic short-story writer, and he often says short-story writers get asked about form, but novelists just get asked what their novels are about. We tend to forget that the novel isn’t just a big, long piece of text. When we say it’s a bourgeois form, what we mean is that it emerged coincident with the emergence of industrial capitalism, and it documented a kind of psychology, a kind of individuality that that historical moment produced and made possible, which was, at the time, a bourgeois subjectivity. Now, in the twenty-first century, most novels have been written by people who had to work for a living, who didn’t just live off passive income, capital income, and most protagonists of novels similarly don’t live off the riches of their tenant farmers, as the protagonists of nineteenth-century novels often did. How can contemporary novelists work in conversation with that textual lineage, respond to it, subvert it, make it more capacious, or change the kinds of subjectivity it’s capable of documenting? Read More