I started the book and then when i realized she was using characters in their young thirties as the wise old ones with a lot of history, as a 62 year old with children older than Peter and Margaret, it all felt ridiculous to me. So i stopped.
That's a very telling point. I was watching the 1979 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy miniseries with Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Guinness is 65, and refers to his sidekick as "young Peter Guillam." The actor who plays Peter Guillam is 44.
The movement of youth culture onto the internet (a space that excludes older people) has created a bizarre degree of separation between generations. I think it benefits young people and old people to interact with each other. To some extent young people learn to be adults by hanging out with older people. Without this exchange there's a lot of arrested development, and you get these quite young writers with a somewhat affected world-weariness.
Well, after Ogle is done, it's a little hard to see Rooney as a "giant." Not uninteresting, maybe. But I'm not feeling the need to make time for this, which is one of the functions of criticism and so Metropolitan Review. Keep up the good work!
I feel you. I felt similar re the clipped, terse sentences. I think she didn't fully get the male POVs right. That said, like you I became invested. She's a very talented author. I don't agree with her personal politics. But it's a good book. Here's my review of INTERMEZZO: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/sally-rooney-queen-of-the-millennial
Mary Gaitskill (https://marygaitskill.substack.com/) is the best female writer I've read in terms of accessing male thoughts. Plenty of great female writers (Alice Munro, Muriel Spark, many others) write realistic men, but Mary Gaitskill seems to be in a class of her own.
I started the book and then when i realized she was using characters in their young thirties as the wise old ones with a lot of history, as a 62 year old with children older than Peter and Margaret, it all felt ridiculous to me. So i stopped.
That's a very telling point. I was watching the 1979 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy miniseries with Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Guinness is 65, and refers to his sidekick as "young Peter Guillam." The actor who plays Peter Guillam is 44.
The movement of youth culture onto the internet (a space that excludes older people) has created a bizarre degree of separation between generations. I think it benefits young people and old people to interact with each other. To some extent young people learn to be adults by hanging out with older people. Without this exchange there's a lot of arrested development, and you get these quite young writers with a somewhat affected world-weariness.
Well, after Ogle is done, it's a little hard to see Rooney as a "giant." Not uninteresting, maybe. But I'm not feeling the need to make time for this, which is one of the functions of criticism and so Metropolitan Review. Keep up the good work!
I feel you. I felt similar re the clipped, terse sentences. I think she didn't fully get the male POVs right. That said, like you I became invested. She's a very talented author. I don't agree with her personal politics. But it's a good book. Here's my review of INTERMEZZO: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/sally-rooney-queen-of-the-millennial
Mary Gaitskill (https://marygaitskill.substack.com/) is the best female writer I've read in terms of accessing male thoughts. Plenty of great female writers (Alice Munro, Muriel Spark, many others) write realistic men, but Mary Gaitskill seems to be in a class of her own.