the return of the novel of love

“save me sabrina carpenter!!”

I have been feeling for a while that we are in a particularly bad moment for women and that it’s only getting worse. I could make a list of the things that have made me feel this way: the overturning of Roe v. Wade and subsequent attacks on fertility treatments like IVF; the Barbie movie (yes, still) and its attendant media blitz wherein Margot Robbie, an adult woman, was dressed as a doll almost every time she was in the public eye for the better part of a year; Sabrina Carpenter’s pin-up persona; the case of Gisèle Pelicot, and in particular the fact that multiple men thought her husband could consent to their having sex with her on her behalf. I could go on.

What all of these things have in common is the reduction of women to objects. In the case of Barbie (and Sabrina Carpenter, though to a lesser degree) this reduction is supposed to be fun, an exalted performance of what being a woman has historically and stereotypically required that claims to contain some kind of embedded auto-critique. I don’t see that critique, not at all. What I see is a retreat from mainstream girlboss feminism into the embodiment of a hyper-femininity that ultimately upholds the idea that this—this bright pink, this curled hair, this tiny outfit, these perky tits—is what it is to be a woman, and that you don’t have to let the fact that you have to have a job take that away from you. 

Still, there is something of a critique, maybe an unconscious one, immanent in this type of performance—not of the stereotype itself but of the conditions that have made it so appealing. It is hard right now to be a person: wealth inequality has never been worse; the economy is awful; the dream of working so that you can have a house and a decent life has turned out to be nothing more than that, just a dream; the planet is burning; there are disgusting, devastating genocides happening before our eyes; there is little we can do about any of it. An aesthetic retreat to a time when, it’s generally assumed, women did not have to worry about any of that because their men did it for them is terribly appealing, and it’s also a kind of rebuke of the current state of things.

Of course, it’s a reactionary rebuke, which is why it comes hand in hand with the across-the-board reduction of women’s rights over their bodies. Playing the girl, to borrow from Carina Chocano, might be fun for individual women, but it won’t do anything for women as a class. Its success as a work-around for how fucking miserably hard it is to exist as a person in our exploitative system of global capitalism doesn’t even depend on how well one can pull off the performance; it depends almost entirely on having luck enough to, for example, not end up married to a guy who will drug you unconscious and invite men over to your house to rape you. 

I was thinking about all of these things while I wrote about Intermezzo, the new Sally Rooney novel, because I think it represents a version of this same fantasy of aesthetic retreat. 

Rooney’s books lack the typical trappings of romance novels; they are not like the books you might remember from the romance section at the library or the Barnes & Noble or the Walmart of your childhood; they are not Danielle Steel or Nora Roberts. There are no quivering members in their pages; the author’s name is rendered in a restrained sans serif on their covers. They are full of references to Joyce and Austen; their characters are often erudite and frequently tormented; they have social consciences; they can’t always make rent.

And yet—it all, always, works out in the end. Reading toward that last page is pure entertainment, biding your time until the next sex scene or the next argument, whichever is more your thing. That would be fine, in theory, let people enjoy things and all that. Except: the books don’t romanticize love; they romanticize women’s submission. This is the thing that Intermezzo’s placidly settled ending depends on, and it is unaccompanied by any sense of authorial critique or even irony. Rather, one gets the sense that this is how Rooney believes relationships between men and women are bound to work, that this is what women and men are. 

In Compact, Valerie Stivers writes that “Rooney’s enormous popularity [...] is due to the fact that she allows modern liberal audiences to enjoy the enduring appeal of old-fashioned, Christian, and specifically Catholic romantic forms without realizing that is what they are doing.” I agree, with the exception that I think the success doesn’t hinge on whether or not audiences realize that they’re enjoying old-fashioned romantic forms; I think they might know, and that the conservatism inherent to those forms does not turn audiences off them.

I pulled out Vivian Gornick’s The End of the Novel of Love this morning. “I remember the first time—it wasn’t so long ago—,” she writes, “I turned the last page of a novel and it came over me that love as a metaphor was over.” She’s writing about Jane Smiley’s The Age of Grief, a novella that follows a few months in the lives of a thirty-something married couple with children in which the wife is having an affair. “It was necessary that I believe the wife is driven to risk it all for an experience that promises to give her back a self she has failed to achieve in her marriage; but the conviction that such knowledge would be hers if she went off with the man she was now burning for refused to exert power over me,” Gornick writes. 

Gornick doubts that a novel written outside of the norms of bourgeois respectability, which could indeed make of characters “social pariahs” when they chose unsuitable love partners, can really use love as a clarifying force. “For this character to be hungering for erotic passion at a crucial moment when she’s up against all that she has, and has not, done with her life struck me as implausible. [...] On the other hand, if blissing-out was what the wife was up to, then the story could be made large only if the author of her being called her on it. But Jane Smiley wasn’t calling her on it.” 

Neither is Rooney, and this is where her appeal lies. This is not, as such, an indictment of her work, but rather a call to pay attention to what its popularity tells us about the desires of the people who love it, and to the state of the world around them.