The Books Briefing: The Uneasy Place of Politics in Fiction
Sally Rooney’s novels have long been criticized as insufficiently political, but reconciling ideology and storytelling has always been a thorny issue for writers.
In Sally Rooney’s novels, idealistic college students espouse Marxism despite never having read any of the ideology’s foundational texts; they advocate for radicalism while keeping up their grades and wrestling with deeply traditional romantic desires.. Mentions of leftist politics suffuse her works (, , and her new release ), but although her characters aim to diagnose the ills of the system, Rooney herself barely addresses those issues. If she comes to any conclusions at all, they are situated at a much smaller level—personal realizations about individual, , not society as a whole.
