[music]
Sally Rooney is perhaps best known as the author of Normal People, the bestselling novel that was adapted into a television show starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones. The show and book were hits, launching Mescal and Edgar-Jones’s careers and putting Rooney on the national stage.
Weinberg junior Yong-Yu Huang first read Sally Rooney in high school, starting with her first novel, Conversations with Friends, and then picking up and loving Normal People. However, she says, Rooney’s writing style can be difficult to get used to.
Yong-Yu Huang: It’s definitely nothing like you would read in school. And it’s very um, it’s very kind of stream of consciousness, I feel. And something that she’s really known for is the lack of punctuation when it comes to dialogue, which can be really off putting at times, because then you just look at the page and it’s like, you can’t tell what’s dialogue and what’s, the internal, like, thoughts of the character that you’re reading at first glance, unless you like, properly read it. So it’s really hard to, like, convince yourself, “Oh, this is a writing style I’m going to commit to for like, a whole novel.”
Medill senior Jaharia Knowles also loved Rooney, at least until she encountered a common critique of the author.
Jaharia Knowles: I was devouring her work, I was obsessed. I read “Conversations with Friends” first. I loved it so much. I think that she has a really, really great way of doing one type of story. But that’s just the thing, it’s only one type of story. So I finished “Conversations with Friends,” and I move on to “Normal People.” I’m like, “Okay, this is the same thing.”
But she doesn’t necessarily agree with people whose reason for not reading Rooney is her style.
Jahari Knowles: I’ve never understood why people complained about the lack of quotation marks… Mama, let’s research, because she’s not the only author that does that.
Rooney saw success with her recent novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” but it’s her most recent novel, Intermezzo, that created an unprecedented buzz in the literary world and beyond. Huang even attended a launch party at local bookstore Bookends and Beginnings.
Yong-Yu Huang: they had little like, um, pins, and they had bookmarks. And there was like a raffle going on for bags as well…But, yeah, that was crazy. “Intermezzo,” a lot, a lot of, I guess, hype, marketing and hype.
Although Knowles’s Rooney-obsessed days are behind her, she’s behind the Intermezzo hype.
Jaharia Knowles: I love book hype because I think that bodes well for our culture, no matter the book … It’s always a good sign to me when people are getting really excited about a piece of physical media, like a book or a magazine or something. It’s crazy, though. I feel like we haven’t seen something like that since Harry Potter.
Katie Brighton was unable to attend the Bookends and Beginnings release party, but she is a current fan of Rooney, and is most of the way through Intermezzo. So far, for her, it’s living up to the hype
Katie Brighton: So far, I’m really liking it. I recently did an update on my Goodreads of like when I was 26% in and I said, I’m either gonna really love it or really hate it. I’m thinking I’m really loving it right now.
The book, which is about brothers navigating life after their father’s death, diverges from Rooney’s previous books in subject matter.
For one, it is her first book featuring two male main characters. For another, it is longer than many of her other pieces, perhaps explaining why no one I interviewed had finished it.
Still, it is a true to form Rooney novel in that it features in-depth looks at a constellation of relationships that span the familial, romantic, and casual, all set in Ireland.
Katie Brighton: I think it’s really fun. It’s feeling more in the vein of “Beautiful World” to me right now than “Conversations with Friends” or “Normal People.” I adored “Beautiful World. Where are you?” So, yeah, I think it’s kind of fun. It’s good, it’s unique. I’m kind of surprised by it.
Intermezzo may be a flash in the pan in terms of the literary world, but Knowles pointed out that it doesn’t always have to be that way.
Jaharia Knowles: I kind of wish that it didn’t feel like such a singular event. I wish that, if it were a little bit more common, you know, to see a book get that much, that much hype leading up to its release, like the way you see with movies, like, there’s never just one movie a year that gets a big marketing push. There’s several for each season. Like, I’d love to see that with books.
In a lot of ways, book culture on TikTok has offered up an opportunity to create cultural hype and interest around literary culture as a whole – even introspective, difficult books like Rooney’s.
So whether you’re a real Rooney Tune, of if you’re tired of reading about Dublin denizens who debate, most readers agree that Intermezzo should be the beginning of a new era of book buzz, not the end.
For WNUR News, I’m Mika Ellison.
