What was the use of my having come from Washington it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything I like but not there, there is no there, there.
N.B.:
The next monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Can we choose our beliefs?”, will take place this Saturday, September 28. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In The Paris Review, an excerpt from Edwin Frank’s upcoming book on the twentieth-century novel (Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, November 19)
In the end, however, “Melanctha” is not so much about telling anyone’s story as it is about putting story aside. Here, Stein, trained in scientific experiment and emboldened by the experimentation of the artists around her, turns from story to take a new look at what stories are made out of: language, sentences, words. “Melanctha” is written out of an intense, even desperate awareness of how language shapes experience—its imprecisions, its evasions, its formulae, its structure, its unavoidable limitations. She takes, for example, the clogging –ings and jingly –lys intrinsic to the English language, and instead of playing them down, as “good” writers have long been taught to do, she lets them loose. Is what results “bad” writing? It is writing that tends toward a drone, and a drone is perhaps the tone of boredom, depression (the melancholy inscribed in Melanctha’s name). Certainly, to echo Stein, one of the things this sad tale of an unrealized life is designed to do is to make the reader feel language and also feel language fail.
Reviews:
Roundup for Intermezzo (by Sally Rooney, September 24) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 21, 2024; we linked to some discussion of Rooney there as well.]:
In The Atlantic, Amy Weiss-Meyer:
Intermezzo’s emphasis on aging reads in part as a reflection of the evolving Millennial group-consciousness. Boomers said that 40 was the new 30; Millennials, we’re told, act as though 30 is the new 70 . . . In tapping into 30-somethings’ self-serious cries of mortality, Rooney is examining that impulse to wail—and gently mocking it.
[Deliver me, O LORD, from the Boomer-Millennial psychodrama. —Steve]
In the TLS, Ann Manov:
Intermezzo has the form but not the content of a novel of ideas. Here is the female character of sensuality; here is she of the mind. And here is the male of the mind, here he of the body (but also of the mind—which is perhaps why he gets to have his cake and eat it, dating both women to the consternation of neither). Each character has been flattened like the butter on the bread they incessantly eat, turned into a blandly satisfying fantasy of good humor, essentially good motives and good old romance.
In the local Post, Lillian Fishman:
In the age of frequent and accessible divorce, [Vivian Gornick] theorized, love has become neutered as the great metaphor for the terrifying brevity of our lives. Yet when we read a Sally Rooney novel, we feel, against our better judgment, and despite the well-rendered text message exchanges and other paraphernalia of contemporary life, that we haven’t lost that “world” at all; that we too are occupying a severe, cold, judgmental place, in which we are thrust into quasi-intimacy with people who couldn’t possibly understand us.
In Compact, Valerie Stivers:
As for gender, both Peter and Ivan feel “protective” toward their female partners. And Naomi, like Marianne in Normal People (2018), offers a kind of lavish and total submission in bed. The S&M dynamics in Rooney’s work often seem to allow her female characters to express a form of submission that isn’t culturally allowed, but dovetails nicely with traditional heterosexual gender roles. (“Wives, submit to your husbands. Husbands, love your wives.”) At other times, the S&M represents the character’s personal and psychological decline—hardly a liberal, sex-positive viewpoint.
[More on this in Critical notes below.]
In The New Statesman, Lola Seaton:
To love someone in the novel is to feel good when you are near them. Peter and Sylvia—like Rooney, former student debaters—enjoy high-flown conversation about current affairs and critical theory but we’re mostly not treated to it first hand. “Oh, you take conversation too seriously,” Sylvia says to Peter early on: “Life isn’t just talking.” Verbal communication is demoted with almost propagandistic insistency: “Who can explain such a thing, and why even try to explain: an understanding shared between two people.”
[“Who can explain such a thing,” sure, “and why even try to explain”—maybe Milton and screwball comedies live too much in my head, but why bother writing at all if you think this? —Steve]
In The Nation, Jess Bergman:
The politics that they do ruminate about are no longer tied to questions of world-historical matters, but instead to one’s intimate and familial relationships: What kind of families could we choose to make when our imaginations are not limited by convention? For Margaret, the connection she feels to Ivan prompts her to think that they are creating “a new relation . . . a way of being.” Falling in love with someone so outwardly unsuitable allows her to imagine “another kind of life, free of all the remorse and unhappiness she had accumulated before,” when her priorities were shaped by the perceptions of her mother and her small town. Does this new kind of life require the creation of a new world, too? Perhaps not.
[Behind the paywall: Steve on Jane Eyre as a Sally Rooney character and his final thoughts on Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, Grace on the changing of the seasons, Olga Tokarczuk, shepherds, Helen DeWitt, marketing, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]
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