Sally Rooney’s fiction has become a cultural flashpoint, sparking debate as fervently as her novels trace the ebb and flow of modern relationships. Dubbed “the first great millennial novelist,” Rooney’s works—Conversations with Friends and Normal People, more so than her latest Intermezzo—are as much about the individuals they portray as the system of literary production and consumption they inhabit. Her rise speaks volumes about how literature is written, marketed, and read today. But is Rooney a novelist of the zeitgeist, or is she bound to the system that seeks to commodify her work as “authentic millennial malaise”?
At the heart of Rooney’s appeal is her mastery of what we might call “controlled intimacy.” Conversations with Friends, her debut, is a cerebral investigation of relationships shaped by precarity—emotional, economic, and otherwise. Frances, the aloof narrator, and Bobbi, her charismatic foil, find themselves in an affair with a married couple, laying bare the transactional nature of desire. Rooney’s sparse prose and refusal to sensationalize her characters are deliberate acts of resistance against the florid, show-don’t-tell dogma of contemporary fiction workshops. Her dialogue is both weapon and salve—clinical at times, devastating at others, mirroring the way her characters navigate the unspeakable with icy precision.
Yet in Intermezzo, her latest release, Rooney ventures into less familiar terrain, provoking polarized reactions. The novel centers on two brothers, Peter and Ivan, mourning their father while grappling with their estranged relationship. Peter, a successful barrister, and Ivan, a chess prodigy and ten years his junior, serve as stark contrasts both to one another and to Rooney’s typical protagonists. While her earlier works find a home in romantic intimacy, Intermezzo shifts focus toward familial love and the ways shared grief can deepen—or destabilize—bonds.
This thematic evolution hasn’t been without its detractors. Critics of Intermezzo have branded it overlong, its narrative too diffuse, and its characterizations thinly drawn compared to Rooney’s usual incisiveness. The narrative gambles on complex dynamics: Peter is torn between his former lover Sylvia, left disabled by a car accident, and Naomi, his younger, unpredictable partner. Meanwhile, Ivan’s tentative relationship with Margaret, a much older woman, unfolds with a tenderness that recalls Rooney at her best—deliberate, quiet, and devastating in its emotional detail. Yet these threads, for some, lack the cohesion of her earlier works.
The backlash, though, says as much about Rooney’s public image as about Intermezzo itself. Once crowned the Salinger of the Snapchat generation, Rooney now finds herself at a precarious juncture, where the scale of her success makes her an easy target for critique. Midnight release parties for Intermezzo were dismissed by some as a parody of literary culture, signaling an uncomfortable tension between her artistic ethos and her branding as a cultural phenomenon. For all her attempts at a low profile, Rooney is a curiously overexposed figure, trapped between literary prestige and mainstream accessibility.
Yet Rooney is not simply a victim of commodification; she is, at times, its sharpest critic. Her novels repeatedly grapple with the mechanisms of late capitalism, even as they are consumed within that same framework. In Normal People, Marianne’s wealth and Connell’s working-class background create a gravitational force around which their relationship orbits, constantly reminding readers of the quiet violence of economic disparity. Similarly, Conversations with Friends interrogates the uneasy marriage of art and commerce, particularly through Frances, whose precarious finances undercut her intellectual idealism. These works seem to ask: Is it possible to create genuine connections in a world mediated by power, money, and status?
Rooney’s success itself embodies this tension. She writes about love, class, and intimacy with a minimalist style that feels both profoundly human and suspiciously marketable. Critics have pointed out that her “millennial malaise” is packaged as much as it is authentic. The clean lines of her prose, the spare dialogue, and the understated but impactful emotional arcs are perfectly suited to a generation steeped in the aesthetics of restraint, from Instagram minimalism to TikTok’s abbreviated emotional shorthand. If Rooney’s characters are often alienated, it is in a way that reflects, rather than critiques, the mediated experiences of her readers.
Intermezzo complicates this relationship further, foregrounding the tension between the commodified self and the authentic self. The novel’s protagonist, Peter, is a barrister navigating his role in the judicial system, itself a microcosm of power and economic privilege. Ivan, by contrast, exists on the margins, immersed in the world of competitive chess—a space that, much like Rooney’s literary world, commodifies intellect and ambition. The brothers’ dynamic reads as a critique of these systems even as it participates in them. Intermezzo ultimately underscores Rooney’s ambivalence about her own literary project: her work critiques capitalism even as it thrives within it.
Still, whether Rooney’s shift toward broader themes in Intermezzo will solidify or weaken her place in the literary canon remains an open question. Her earlier works—Normal People especially—stripped back narrative scaffolding to tell deceptively simple stories that resonated widely. Intermezzo takes a riskier path, seeking to blend the intellectual density of her writing with an expansive, almost Dickensian narrative scope.
What Rooney offers, then, is a paradox: her novels are intensely personal yet political, minimal yet richly layered, intimate yet distant. Intermezzo reminds us that the act of reading Rooney is as much about confronting these contradictions as about parsing the stories themselves. Whether she will endure as a novelist of lasting significance or as a lightning rod for fleeting cultural anxieties remains to be seen. But in grappling with the tensions of her work, we confront the contradictions of our literary moment: the hunger for authenticity in an age of performativity, the commodification of art in a culture that claims to resist it, and the uneasy relationship between critique and complicity. Rooney’s fiction doesn’t resolve these tensions. It lets them simmer, quiet but inescapable—much like her prose itself.