What do you think of this book? So thats how its like having a gf?
Degenerate and disgusting book written by an Irish retard. No OP, this book is nothing like what having an actual girlfriend is like because the majority of women aren't as retarded as the main female character in that book was.
>>25083006Sally, while not hideous, is objectively definitely bellow average, and yet I can't help find her cute. With some look maxim she wouldn't make a terrible gf. I'd still cheat like crazy though.
>>25083006lets just say its not written for guys like me
>>25083012specify which of Marianne's actions classify as retarded
>>25083168Fucking a sadistic nigger to spite her ex
>>25083224of course. is there more?
>>25083006I like women who look like this. You could tell the gods haven't made her attractive but yet you feel attraction to her while simultaneously you attempt to force yourself to find the flaws attractive themsleves
>>25083013>>25083312Retarded simps
>>25083006I didn't read it, but probably. Anyone who has 1 serious girlfriend pretty much has all the same relationship experience as anyone else.
>>25083013>I'd still cheat like crazy though.How do you do this? Is it that easy to find women who wanna fuck?
>>25083006Didn't this bitch die?
>>25083006The thing nobody in this thread is really getting at is that Rooney novels function as wish fulfillment, but a very specific kind that explains exactly why her readership looks the way it does. Her core audience is educated women in their late twenties to mid thirties who are politically progressive, probably work in media or academia or adjacent fields, and are navigating the gap between what they think they should want and what they actually want.What Rooney does really well is construct characters who have all the correct opinions, all the right intellectual furniture, Marxism, feminism, vague anti-capitalism, and then lets them want something embarrassingly ordinary. They want a beautiful heterosexual romance with good sex and financial stability. That's the fantasy. The intellectual scaffolding is there so you don't have to feel guilty about wanting what is basically a Jane Austen plot. Conversations With Friends and Normal People both do this. Beautiful World does it with two couples simultaneously. Intermezzo does it with a throuple that resolves into comfortable pairings.Connell from Normal People is the clearest example. A working class guy who is a jock AND deeply literary AND emotionally sensitive AND sexually attentive AND shares your politics. That character doesn't exist to represent a real person, he exists so the reader can project a fantasy boyfriend onto him without feeling like they're reading romance genre fiction, because the prose style and the references to Marxism give it literary cover.Granted, many writers build these enclosed arenas where attractive educated people circle around each other having conversations about feelings and morality. But other writers' characters are allowed to be selfish and scheming and weak in ways that create real tension. Rooney's characters generate conflict almost entirely through an inability to communicate, which keeps them morally clean. Nobody cheats for real, nobody is genuinely cruel, the worst thing anyone does is fail to send a text. So you get the emotional intensity of drama without anyone actually doing anything you'd have to judge them for. It's a very safe kind of storytelling.
>>25083006>So thats how its like having a gf?No, having a wife is even worse
>>25083550That's.. surprisingly spot on.
>>25083550The popularity makes complete sense once you see it this way. She's writing literary fiction that delivers the emotional payload of romance novels to an audience that thinks they're too smart for romance novels. And what does that audience want? That audience wants to be Marianne. Wants to drift through life with a studied passivity, never visibly striving for anything, never asking anyone out, never chasing a promotion, never even articulating a desire clearly, and yet having everything good land in your lap anyway. The hot sensitive boyfriend just materializes. The financial stability just sort of happens. The sex is great without anyone having to negotiate or work at it. Rooney's characters don't want things, or more precisely they perform not-wanting as an identity. They're too smart, too depressed, too politically aware to actually pursue happiness in any direct way. And then happiness arrives anyway, because the author loves them.This is where Rooney reveals herself as a deeply conservative novelist despite all the Marxist wallpaper. Forget the references to Palestine, forget the characters' opinions about capitalism, whatever interview you're thinking of where she describes herself as "not vibing with authority" or whatever she said. Look at the novels' structures. Every single novel resolves into heterosexual coupledom. Beautiful World literally ends with both women pregnant and settled down with their men. The bisexual characters in that book explore their queerness exactly enough to seem interesting before collecting their husbands. Conversations With Friends flirts with polyamory and then retreats from it. The narrative engine of every Rooney novel is a marriage plot, and the marriage plot is the most conservative structure in the English novel. She just furnishes it differently so her readers can feel like they're consuming something subversive while getting the most traditional payoff imaginable.And the passivity thing is key to why it works as fantasy. Striving is vulgar. Wanting things openly is embarrassing. The ideal Rooney protagonist has enough class comfort and enough social capital that desire never has to become effort. Things just work out because you're the kind of person things work out for. Which is, if you think about it, a more aristocratic worldview than anything you'd find in an actual romance novel, where the heroine usually has to do something to get what she wants. Rooney's protagonists (Rooney's readers) just have to exist correctly, and the plot rewards them -- they get everything they want without actually having to want it or strive for it.
how to connellmaxx?
>>25083550>The thing nobody in this thread is really getting at is that Rooney novels function as wish fulfillment, but a very specific kind that explains exactly why her readership looks the way it does. Her core audience is educated women in their late twenties to mid thirties who are politically progressive, probably work in media or academia or adjacent fields, and are navigating the gap between what they think they should want and what they actually want.>What Rooney does really well is construct characters who have all the correct opinions, all the right intellectual furniture, Marxism, feminism, vague anti-capitalism, and then lets them want something embarrassingly ordinary. They want a beautiful heterosexual romance with good sex and financial stability. That's the fantasy. The intellectual scaffolding is there so you don't have to feel guilty about wanting what is basically a Jane Austen plot. Conversations With Friends and Normal People both do this. Beautiful World does it with two couples simultaneously. Intermezzo does it with a throuple that resolves into comfortable pairings.>Connell from Normal People is the clearest example. A working class guy who is a jock AND deeply literary AND emotionally sensitive AND sexually attentive AND shares your politics. That character doesn't exist to represent a real person, he exists so the reader can project a fantasy boyfriend onto him without feeling like they're reading romance genre fiction, because the prose style and the references to Marxism give it literary cover.>Granted, many writers build these enclosed arenas where attractive educated people circle around each other having conversations about feelings and morality. But other writers' characters are allowed to be selfish and scheming and weak in ways that create real tension. Rooney's characters generate conflict almost entirely through an inability to communicate, which keeps them morally clean. Nobody cheats for real, nobody is genuinely cruel, the worst thing anyone does is fail to send a text. So you get the emotional intensity of drama without anyone actually doing anything you'd have to judge them for. It's a very safe kind of storytelling.
>>25083550>>250835673/3The really interesting thing about Rooney is that she clearly has the talent and the intelligence to see all of this about herself, and she just doesn't, or maybe she does and can't figure out what to do with it. Beautiful World Where Are You has these long email exchanges where the characters basically ventriloquize Rooney's own anxieties about being a famous novelist. She's aware enough to stage the critique but never follows through on it. And the tension with her public persona makes it sharper. She refuses to sell her Hebrew translation rights over Palestine, talks about Marxism in interviews, clearly wants to position herself as some kind of political writer. But then the novels themselves are about beautiful people falling into comfortable relationships and having really good sex in nice apartments. There's no material deprivation in these books that isn't aesthetic. Poverty in Rooney is Connell not having quite as much money as Marianne, which mostly means he feels a bit awkward at parties. What would actually be interesting is if she leaned into the contradiction instead of papering over it. The fact that her characters want bourgeois domesticity despite their politics is genuinely compelling territory. There's a real novel in there about people who know that their desires are ideologically incoherent and have to sit with that. But Rooney never makes her characters confront it because that would break the wish fulfillment machine. The reader needs to believe you can have the correct politics AND the perfect boyfriend AND never compromise or choose between them.Like look at work/its absence in Rooney's novels; like Rooney's characters technically have jobs. Connell does an MFA, Frances writes poetry, Alice is a novelist. But it's invisible. Nobody is shown struggling with a piece of writing, shit like grinding through a bad draft, dealing with an editor, etc. The characters jobs just exist to signal they're the right kind of person. Same thing with their politics. Nobody organizes, canvasses, sits through a boring meeting for a cause they believe in. The politics exist as a set of already-held positions, fully formed, requiring no effort to maintain or develop. Everything that in real life demands sustained unglamorous work is presented as simply a feature of the character's personality.What Rooney has accidentally written across 4 novels is a fantasy of effortlessness. The desire to have things without working for them, to be a leftist without the labor of organizing, to be in love without the tedious slog of actual partnership. She'd be a better novelist if she wrote from inside that discomfort, but she just won't let her characters get caught wanting the wrong things with real consequences, and until she does the novels will keep functioning as reassurance for people who need to believe you can be radical in theory and traditional in practice and never account for the gap.
>>25083594>get ripped>read whatever a sally rooney protagonist wants to have read>be woke but chill about itez
>>25083550>>25083567>>25083616wild amount of effort to put into a /lit/ post but I think you’re onto something
>>25083616So you think she or her characters should be true revolutionaries, ie bend lesbians in a commune? The criticism in your effortpost seems weak. I haven't read the books, only watched the show (to masturbate)
>>25083006The show is much better than the book because it removes most of the annoying intellectual posturing and is more of a straightforward romance
>>25083224based
>>25083006I still don't get the titleIs the implication that Connell and Marianne simply are "normal people"?Is it meant to be ironic? i.e. they're not normalIs it some kind of commentary perhaps to say "this is what normal is now" or "normalcy is in fact abnormal" or "there is no such thing as normal".What is the book presupposing about the value of "normalcy" really? Is it good or bad?Was it just a title chosen by an editor based on "vibes"?I am summarily stumped.
>>25083616>>25083567>>25083550Good post, but I'll need a little more proof of Rooney being an unwitting conservative. "Her characters end married and/or pregnant" only tells us that she's writing her own desires.
>>25083616spot on in everything except two pointseverybody who reads enough literature (not much) know in two chapters that she is not writing it, his style is dry and unimaginative and the only intellectual facade it have is his characters talking about politics in a very shallow way. i insist, nobody who reads a little more than average see this as quality writing. so you have people who don´t read assuming this is some kind of modern ana karenina, not people who actually read ana karenina. second. you assume she is concscious enough to understand the contradictions of her characters or herself, something that there is no proof in his writing or interviews. you just assume it. as you put it, she is consciously making jane austen modern novels, why do you think she is some kind of clever mastermind behind the scenes?. just because she have this aloof and sensitive-intelligent look in his eyes?, dont be misguided. she is dumb as a brick. very one dimensional person. as his books.
>>25083616I'd need to read Beautiful world again, but I remember Felix actually being cruel at points
>>25083380I don't know. It just happens. Frankly, don't waste your time even interacting with women who clearly aren't into you, but when you can tell someone is into you then just gently love bomb them and keep pushing until you're fucking them. Most women are submissive when it comes to relationships and will take your lead. But don't lie about your intentions. I guess that's really the trick to cheat successfully. You must charm these women, ideally smart women you can have open conversations about most things with, but you must remain shamelessly blunt about how you're a cheating scumbag and they are agreeing to it and have no right to demand anything. I don't know. It's tricky to get it right, but you will get there.
This is all well and good but Connell is literally me where is my Marianne gf (who I would simply treat well and communicate with normally so she wouldn't leave for no reason)
>>25083616
>>25084634Just be a Chad bro, its easy
>>25083999>tripsChecked. The point isn't that her characters need to make different life choices. People can be Marxists and get married and have kids, obviously. The point is about narrative structure and what the novels reward. You can write a novel where characters end up in heterosexual coupledom and still interrogate what that means, still let it feel like a compromise or a choice with weight behind it. Rooney's novels don't do that. The settling down IS the resolution, presented without friction, and every potentially destabilizing element (the bisexuality, the polyamory, the class tension) gets quietly absorbed on the way there, which is what makes the structure conservative.>>25084252The conservative thing isn't really about marriage and pregnancy as endpoints, you're right that those are just personal choices. It's more about what the novels systematically exclude. There's never a version of the good life in a Rooney novel that doesn't look like bourgeois domesticity. The characters talk about capitalism being broken but nobody experiments with an alternative way of living that sticks. Nobody stays in the complicated arrangement. Nobody finds meaning through political work or community or anything collective. The only emotional resolution available is the couple form. And that's fine for 1 novel, but across 4 books it starts to look like an imaginative limit, the radicalism staying at the level of opinion while the narrative grammar underneath is completely conventional. That's what I mean by conservative, not her politics but her formal imagination>>25084593Rooney's prose is good at the sentence level even if you find it dry. IMO she handles dialogue better than most of her contemporaries. The intellectual content of the novels is shallow, agreed, the political conversations are surface-level. But I don't think she's dumb. I think she's a talented writer operating inside a very narrow frame and probably not fully aware of how narrow it is. The Beautiful World emails show someone trying to think through her own position and not quite getting there. If she were dumb the books wouldn't work as well as they do at the thing they're actually doing, which is constructing an emotionally compelling fantasy with real craft behind it>>25084629He's probably the closest Rooney gets to writing a character who's abrasive. He's dismissive, he can be cutting, there's real class hostility in how he interacts with Alice's world. I'd still say the novel ultimately domesticates that cruelty though. By the end he's folded into the couple structure and the sharpness gets sanded down. But I get what you're saying, Felix is a real counterpoint to the idea that nobody in these books does anything you'd have to judge them for. He does, but the question is whether the novel lets that meanness have lasting consequences or just routes around it, and IMO it's the second
>>25086269Felix poster here, thank you for the effort post. I see indeed what you mean, but I was thinking about convos with friends, and that ending is more ambiguous than the others. Although Francis has made up with Bobbi, she still runs back to Nick, and will likely suffer for it emotionally later. Rooney at least understands some aspect of head-on-wall banging that people might want to do. In fact, ill say that Convos is probably my favorite book of hers
>>25083224Real hoe's intuit this breakup response rather than learning it from feminist literature>I miss her bros
>>25083006Don't remember if it was in Normal People or not, but one Rooney book has this great bit where Rooney's saying "you can only enjoy BDSM if you're psychologically damaged" but it has more erotic charge than anything else in the book. Much to consider!
off topic maybe but why have I never seen anyone compare sally rooney to mary mccarthy? if you're talking feminist authors with marxist attractions who examine topical, slightly controversial relationships with surgical prose, I really can't understand how mccarthy's fallen so out of style while rooney reigns supreme, "the company she keeps" is everything rooney wishes she could do with her meandering female leads.
>>25088158>can only enjoy BDSM if you're psychologically damagedWell thats obvious. Look at the type of girl whos into that shit. Ive heard its how they deal with traumas.
>>25088351That's what Mary McCarthy looked like? I'd cum in her ass. I would cum deep in her asshole. Is Company the best place to start with her?
>>25088449 you would be stunned at how many women are deeply, deeply turned on by BDSM, anon
>>25088518In my experience most women like gentle passionate sex
I don't bitchterature
>>25086269to what degree one can single out rooney for this is questionable to me. i can't think of a single contemporary author who succeeds in this regard. say what you will about fisher (lol) but at least within literature today there is no radical imaginary that doesn't end with cataclysm. sure, rooney is a good example, but that's only because the problem is one endemic to "culture" today. even philosophically: habermas, not sure why he comes to mind, has a problem parallel to rooney's. i'm not sure what the solution is, barring a new, sincere political vision of the future.
