The arrival on Sept. 24 of Sally Rooney’s new novel, “Intermezzo,” is one of this fall’s biggest publishing events — not only for the legion of devoted readers hungry for new fiction from the 33-year-old Irish author, but also for the literati ready to devour all the takes and think pieces the book is sure to spawn.
Listen to the Conversation With Sally Rooney
The star novelist discusses her public persona, the discourse around her work and why reinvention isn’t her goal.
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Rooney is one of those rare authors who have been able to garner mass readership as well as serious critical attention — I should probably just say attention, full stop. The popular success is, on some level, easy to understand. Her novels, two of which, “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends,” were adapted into buzzy TV series, are precisely observed relationship studies that deftly weave together politics, sex, moral philosophy, dry humor and a distinctly millennial unease with the state of the world. Fans will be happy to know that the same qualities are on display in “Intermezzo,” which centers on two grieving brothers, Peter, a lawyer who’s entangled with a younger lover, and Ivan, a chess prodigy who falls for an older woman.
Any writer who is held up, as Rooney is, as the voice of a generation is sure to be scrutinized. But the amount and intensity of both the praise and the criticism of her output can feel a little outsize, a little confusing — including to Rooney, who, as she suggested over the course of two long conversations in July, would much rather let her work speak for itself.
In an interview you did with The New Yorker that ran in conjunction with an excerpt from “Intermezzo,” you said that it’s stressful to publish your work and maybe even more stressful to wait for it to be published. Why? The part that involves me putting myself out there and trying to work out a way of talking about my book happens before the public has had a chance to read it. It’s a weird mental space to be in. I feel like everything that I had to say went into the book, and I have nothing left to give that isn’t already in the text.
Has it ever happened where you’ve paid attention to the discourse around one of your books and then thought, I wish I’d had a chance to respond? I try, and this may sound insincere, not to look at the discourse around my work. And do I ever feel like responding to it? No, I don’t think so. I don’t need to be over the reader’s shoulder, saying, What do you think of that page?
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