The publication of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, was one of the most anticipated literary events of last year. The young Irish novelist is a commercial and critical sensation, her first three books all winning prizes; Normal People (2018) has sold a million copies in the UK, while Conversations with Friends (2017) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) have both reached the 500,000 mark. It may be a function of this success that Rooney is now more than a novelist—she is a cultural battleground. Some champion her work as capturing the voices and thoughts of a generation, “Salinger for the Snapchat Generation” in the words of one critic, while others are eager to dismiss her as the beneficiary of hype and a specific zeitgeist.
I will be quite frank: I think she is a dazzlingly acute and sensitive writer with a supple use of language and an ear for a telling phrase. It may in part be a legacy from her undergraduate days as a successful debater; she topped the European University Debating Championship in Manchester in 2013, representing Trinity College Dublin’s College Historical Society, and combines tremendous fluency with an ability to sense the right word or phrase to use. I read Intermezzo recently and found it beautiful, dense, complex and sad, but utterly absorbing.
One criticism which is frequently levelled at Rooney is that her novels are populated by the same kinds of people: students and alumni of TCD, living or working in contemporary Dublin. In Conversations with Friends, Frances, the narrator, and her friend and former lover Bobbi are students; the central characters of Normal People, Marianne and Connell, go from school in County Sligo to Trinity; Beautiful World, Where Are You is dominated by recent TCD graduates; and Intermezzo features a former debating and romantic partnership in Peter and Sylvia, and a current undergraduate in Naomi. Dublin features heavily as a backdrop.
James Marriott, reviewing Intermezzo for The Sunday Times, encapsulated the frustration or annoyance some critics feel.
Rooney’s books invariably lend their starring roles to attractive, sensitive, left-wing Dublin intellectuals of the millennial generation. For all her dazzling virtues as a psychologist and an observer of emotional life, Rooney’s artistic curiosity is unavoidably limited.
It’s impossible to deny, of course, that Rooney’s first four novels—we should remember she is only 33 years old—inhabit broadly the same intellectual and geographical space. Speaking personally, I don’t care: this is the world Rooney knows, as someone who graduated from Trinity College in 2013 and then edited the Dublin literary magazine The Stinging Fly from 2017 to 2019. She now lives in her home town of Castlebar, but Dublin is a rich setting for fiction, as Sheridan Le Fanu, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, J.P. Donleavy, Maeve Binchy, Roddy Doyle and countless other writers would attest. It seems a high bar to set to suggest that Rooney has wrung Ireland’s capital dry after four books.
There is a deeper critical motive at work here, one which can be found applied to all kinds of art forms. It is the disappointment, sometimes verging on a sense of angry betrayal, that the writer or poet or director or artist has failed to produce the artefact the critic wanted, even if that was never his or her intention.
There was a case in point with Christopher Nolan’s mighty biopic Oppenheimer last year. It was a blistering and affecting portrayal of the scientist who oversaw the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory and the creation of the first atomic bomb, notable for some scintillating performances by Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr (I reviewed it for this publication). Some reviewers, however, were critical of the fact that the film failed to portray the devastating destructive power of the weapons Oppenheimer and his colleagues created on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the effects of the nuclear tests on the Native American communities in New Mexico.
An article by Emily Zemler in The Los Angeles Times compiled the charge sheet. Professor Naoko Wake of Michigan State University lamented that “it leaves out so much. There are missed opportunities in terms of how Japanese survivors’ experiences were not at all featured in the film.” Paul Ham, author of 2011’s Hiroshima Nagasaki, remarked “we get a movie where the Japanese people are relegated to basically a historical footnote”. Brandon Shimoda, a Japanese-American poet and writer, argued that the very premise of the film was dangerous.
It will, in that way, create a limit on public consciousness and concern. ‘Oppenheimer’ reinforces, in the guise of false nuance, the tired and ultimately distracting debate of whether or not the mass murder and the incineration of over 100,000 civilians in an instant was justified.
At first blush, these are valid criticisms, all the more sensitive because of the scale of the horror which Oppenheimer’s scientific achievements unleashed. But, if one stops for a moment, there is the obvious realisation of artistic choice. Oppenheimer is not about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, except insofar as it is a story of the processes which facilitated them. It is a biographical study of the complex and haunted scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 profile American Prometheus. To criticise it for what it does not include is tantamount to saying it should have been a different film; but that is an absurd basis for criticism.
As it happens, Canadian filmmaker James Cameron is planning a film about the use of the atomic bomb. He has acquired the rights to two books by Charles Pellegrino, 2015’s Last Train From Hiroshima and the forthcoming Ghosts of Hiroshima, and will translate them in an “uncompromising theatrical film” which will focus on the bombings and their aftermath, and the experience of the victims. But that is the film Cameron wants to make, not the film Nolan set out to make.
Nolan had wanted to make a film about Oppenheimer for many years. Then Robert Pattinson, whom he directed in Tenet (2020), gave him a collection of the scientist’s speeches which fired his imagination. He is very clear about the scope he foresaw for the project.
I started to get very excited about… telling the actual reality of the story, really trying to be there, to give people the experience of what it would have been like to be Oppenheimer in those moments.
The director is explicit. He wanted to make a film about Oppenheimer and his experiences as director of Los Alamos, about “what it would have been like to be Oppenheimer”. If we are to accept that it is somehow indecent or insensitive not to feature the victims of the atomic bombs, how much further does decency insist Nolan casts the net? Ought he to have included a section on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which after all was the trigger for the war in the Pacific?
Perhaps he should also squeeze in the United States’ oil embargo on Japan, which some argue left the Japanese with little option but to go to war. But then, how could he start there, without also depicting Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo and the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? And it would defy the sensibilities to omit the widespread Japanese atrocities in China like the Rape of Nanjing in 1937/38.
Obviously this is an impossible line of argument. Its impetus would force Nolan, or any other director, virtually to make a history of the world. It is not as if Oppneheimer deliberately excises people or experiences from its immediate subject matter, like Jonathan Mostow’s woeful and leaden U-571 (2000) which shows the American seizure of a German Enigma cipher machine as if British sailors had not already captured a similar device months before the United States even entered the Second World War. Nolan has chosen his story and drawn perfectly reasonable limits.
In the same way, Rooney has chosen the milieu she wants to depict, the particular place and collection of people who allow her to tell her story. That is not indicative of what Marriott described as “limited” artistic curiosity.
Colin Dexter wrote 13 novels featuring Inspector Endeavour Morse, over a period of nearly 25 years, all largely set in Oxford and often featuring the university, students, staff and administration. John Updike, one of the grandest men of American letters, made no apology for the fact that often set his novels in “the American small town, Protestant middle class”; he explained “I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.” Barbara Pym, easily one of the sharpest and most observant English novelists of the 20th century, specialised in the countless shades of meaning and nuance of the polite post-War middle classes. Did they lack “artistic curiosity”?
In part this stems from the overdeveloped function of the critic as opposed to the lay audience. As readers or film lovers or theatre goers or art lovers, we may look for a million things in our chosen art form. We may want to be entertained, intrigued, amused, reassured, intellectually stretched or cathartically devastated. We want beauty and skill and a reflection of our own world as well as the exploration of others. What we rarely want, but what critics can find themselves expecting, is a demonstration of the artist’s range and depth of talent, a strange kind of cultural interview or audition. Show us what you can do.
To complain that a book or film or painting does not include something you wanted it to makes no sense on any grounds. After all, the world is not short of cultural artefacts, so if a book fails to deal with a particular subject or issue, it is overwhelmingly likely that there is another book that does. That is one of the joys of art. But this jaded, cynical disapproval, this judgement of what is not there rather than what is, also represents each individual critic. It would be almost impossible for an artist, should he or she even contemplate such a thing, to anticipate what an audience might want and make sure to include it. The wildest of wild goose chases.
Art is always contextual, but it must also be judged on its own terms. There are many works of art which fail on those grounds: comedies which do not amuse, music which strikes no chord in the heart, state-of-the-nation novels which do not say anything profound about their subject. They are more than fair game.
Criticism which concentrates on the space beyond the margins, however, is neither reasonable nor illuminating. An artist offers up a work for judgement—an act of extraordinary bravery—and we, the audience, have the privilege of judging it. That, surely, is more than enough.
