Yet sometimes even this self-seriousness has its drawbacks. There is no doubt that Beautiful World, Where Are You will be an enormous bestseller, and with a television adaptation of Conversations with Friends due to be broadcast next year, Rooney’s name and reputation will continue to flourish for a considerable time yet, even as she seeks to cast off her anointed status as ‘the voice of a millennial generation.’ Many in her position might be less terrified by the idea of selling vast numbers of copies of their books, and grateful instead to have been offered such a platform. She describes her fame as a form of torment, and actively avoids reading reviews, profiles, or articles such as this.
She is a Marxist, apparently, but quibbles with interviewers as to whether she - also a graduate of Trinity College and a daughter of an arts center administrator and a telecom technician - is sufficiently working-class to be allowed to use such a term. Rooney herself has helpfully contributed to the mystique around her by offering gnomic (but reasonably frequent) interviews. She is usually photographed looking unsmiling and stern, and pronounces authoritatively on literary and social issues. Would that all of us English graduates had had such incentive in our younger years.
The biggest laugh I had over its 12 episodes came early on, when the beautiful Marianne begs the handsome Connell to follow his heart and study English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, rather than being diverted into some more superficially productive course. Its obvious sincerity and presentation of two young people discovering their intellectual and sexual horizons together was admirable the complete lack of humor in its po-faced seriousness, less so. The television adaptation of Rooney’s sophomore novel Normal People, broadcast shortly after the beginning of lockdown and co-written by her, showcased her strengths and weaknesses as a writer admirably.
Those of us who are neither millennials nor uncritically adoring of a young novelist may find this hype somewhere between amusing and inexplicable.
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