![]() ![]() ![]() For someone like me – who’s not so much read as inhaled every word she’s ever written – it’s simply bizarre. Even worse, some serious reviewers doubted whether she was an especially good writer. People queued up to buy her latest novel from pop-up shops and converted ice cream vans, and meanwhile bien pensant commentators lined up to deride the “cult” of Sally Rooney, lambast the “ Rooney industrial complex” and even accuse her of being an avatar of unchecked white privilege. Doubleness is a theme of Rooney’s career: she is a darling of publishing, our time’s bestselling literary author – as well as the most patronised and reviled. ![]() I’m talking, of course, about the author everyone talks about all the time: Sally Rooney. How could one writer be both things: an unschooled, unskilled peddler of commercial pap, and a superb critic? ![]() Last month a supposedly over-hyped ingenue author – a producer, many say, of glorified chick-lit – published a brilliantly nuanced essay in the Paris Review, casting an erudite eye over the history of the novel and drawing a provocative comparison between two of its giants, Austen and Joyce. ![]()
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