Open letters claim to restore moral clarity; but too often they spread confusion. Open letters purport to express obvious truths; but recent events have highlighted the worrying tendency of the genre to be hijacked for counter-productive ends: to express obvious non-truths, for example, or — and this can be worse — non-obvious non-truths.

Some of the foregoing dangers are, we believe, inherent in the collective epistolary form itself. The trick, in crafting the perfect open letter, is to give maximalist expression to a minimalist position. Authors of open letters need to be selective enough in relaying the background “facts” of their case so as not to alienate potential signatories: these are celebrities we’re dealing with, remember, and therefore natural free-thinkers. At the same time, one has to give the letter enough moral phlegm to make it worth clearing one’s throat to put one’s famous name to it. 

The result — you might call it Maier’s Canting Theorem — is that the assessable argumentative content of an open letter is inversely proportional to a weighted average of the fame and number of the celebrities whose names are appended to it. In the place of explicit reasoning, in the course of which a position’s flaws and vulnerabilities are all too liable to be exposed, the reader of an open letter is treated to broad moral pronouncement, rendered in a high-committee prose style, and which tends to veer towards melodrama and alarmism. 

Needless to say, we, the undersigned, feel this chilling trend poses an existential risk to democracy, harms the most vulnerable in our society, and is likely to eradicate life on Earth as we know it.

OPEN LETTER: Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for… pic.twitter.com/QLQel0EC7N

— The New Statesman (@NewStatesman) October 21, 2026

Connoisseurs of the open letter have by now probably seen the above-described defects recently on display in the public tangle that The New Statesman has got itself into. In a letter whose length is robustly predicted by Maier’s theorem — being really more of a tersely-worded postcard with 158 signatures — the magazine denounces as unconscionable the recent “censorship” of the novelist Sally Rooney. 

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The facts of the case are well-known. Among the political causes close to Rooney’s heart is Palestine, and a group called Palestine Action. Rooney has pledged to use royalties to support the group — despite the fact that it was lately sanctioned as a terrorist group by the British government, making funding them an offense. We, the undersigned, cannot help but conjecture that Rooney might have got away with her wheeze — were it not for the fact that she announced her intention to break the law in advance, and in a manner almost designed to attract attention. Given the legal jeopardy, at any rate, Rooney’s publisher at Faber has decided, with the author’s consent, to suspend sales of her novels. 

Now, we do not wish to take a collective stand on the controversial question of whether Rooney’s silencing omens a sinister curtailment of the right to free speech. We only wish to note that, if a novelist’s right to free expression includes a guarantee that others must cooperate in activities which the author loudly declares will be used to raise funds for terrorists on British soil, Rooney may well have a complaint.

It is one of the rhetorical liberties taken by open letter writers that they sometimes pass off caustic jibes as concessive praise. We only wish to add, then, that the Statesman’s own letter exhibits, rather brilliantly, one further trick common of the form: that of smuggling in inflammatory speculations to the extra-epistolary text, which the signatories themselves might have preferred not to be implicated in. In this case, there is a somewhat daring analogy attempted between the fates of Sally Rooney and Salman Rushdie. Just consider, we are invited to reason: both write novels; both have had trouble selling them in Britain at one time or another; both… have the initials “SR”? (At some point, the brainstorming exercise takes a slightly feeble turn.) 

Still, we note that one further peculiarity of open letters is that, once they begin to attract enough ink below the line, they inevitably tend to be judged as much on the basis of those who notably fail to sign as on the basis of those who do. (That may be more a “feature” than a “bug” of the genre: the creation of an implicit cost to withholding assent being part of the form’s coercive effort to organize public thinking). Notably, though presumably he was invited to, Salman Rushdie did not sign.

These quagmires give only a merest hint of the varied trouble open letter writing can lead to. Though they pretend to give a voice to suppressed truths, too often they simply echo a preachy moral consensus. Though affecting nuance, their inevitably coarse-grained rhetorical style is a standing disinvitation to detailed engagement. Even well-intentioned interventions — the famous 2020 Harper’s letter championing free speech — can undermine their own cause in subtle ways. Having spent so much time throat-clearing about the threat of “right wing demagogues”, “Donald Trump”, and slavishly assenting to the need for more DEI, the Harper’s letter may have done more to underscore the inescapability of a woke consensus than it did to oppose it.

Or consider — if you can bear to — the glaringly avant-garde approach that Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project takes to his open letters. One recent exhibit, a letter in defense of Jason Arday’s right to evade media scrutiny, was a superficially well-reasoned account made about an utterly alternative reality. Arday, the 21,000 undersigned agreed, was facing “entirely false allegations of plagiarism”. There was “no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing” against him. The “baseless allegations” were therefore a “right wing” smear campaign. “Universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the color of their skin,” the letter concluded, apparently without irony. If ever it is complacently assumed that the open letter lends itself to the service of clarification, then here is evidence that it is just as easily commandeered as a vehicle for the brazen propagation of falsehood.

The home stretch of an open letter is the time to get expansive; and even in denouncing them we, the undersigned, do not wish to buck the form. Why do people set so much store by open letters? What epistemic authority are these bewildering lists supposed to exert over us? Someone who thought moral opinions more reliable when dispensed by motley bands of intellectuals would seem, on reflection, as mad as someone who thought all songs sound better when performed by Live Aid. Yet the appeal of the genre seems to rest on the strange assumption that when a missive has been jointly audited and solemnly endorsed by a mongrel committee of bewilderingly disconnected names, it enjoys some strange, placeless authority. “If Kneecap, Zadie Smith, and the Chichele professor of social and political theory can all agree on this one”, such letters seem to ask, “why can’t you?”.

Needless to say, in a world without open letters floating about, some might justly worry about where we are to get our opinions from, and how we are to verify that they are in good standing with the moral majority. We acknowledge that this is a serious problem. However, having consulted each other, we believe it best that everyone should think for themselves. 

The show they see on an opening night will consist of two things in existence prior to rehearsal: the actors, and the script. The actors don’t need to discuss the script, they understood it when they read it. They don’t need to zhuzh up their performance through elaborate analysis, they just need to show up and speak up — the subsequent performance will be appreciated on their ability to do so, and on the worth of the script. No performance can enhance a bad script, and a good one needs no help.

Prior to the Twenties, the director was known as the stage manager. It was his job to block the actors such that the audience could see them and hear them, and they didn’t trip over the furniture. “Louder, faster, pause here, don’t fidget while the other fellow is speaking”: these were the panoply of the director’s tools.

But the cobb salad of psychoanalysis and the method replaced the stage manager with the director. His job was to analyse the script psychoanalytically, and lead the actors in a month-long encounter group called the rehearsal process. None of it made any difference to the audience, save that the self-consciousness the charade engendered in the actor, transformed him from performer, to lay analyst. After all, anyone reading a play text understands it sufficiently to appreciate the interactions. And the better a play is, the less it needs a set — Shakespeare plays just peachily on the radio.

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So past simply staging, then, in his responsibility to the audience, how might the director (ex-stage manager) be of use to the actor? In one thing: a subtle alteration of the actor’s intention. The fellow playing Iago understands that he is going to avenge himself on his boss by falsely accusing Desdemona. The actor might play a scene revealing the false clues to Othello as “conveying a favour”; the director might suggest, rather, that he play it to “refute a false claim”. The words are the same, but the intention (known as the objective) is somewhat different, and the change will influence the performance subtly.

Note that in neither case is the actor asked to “feel” anything, or to “believe” anything, he is simply asked to reimagine the objective.

The Crispian speech in Henry V is the greatest in our language, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” It can be played as an exhortation to a crowd, or as a quiet pledge to fellow warriors. The determination of intention can influence performance. Inversely, when baffled by performance in human interactions we can seek clarity by determining intention. For example, Obama’s stated goal was “Hope and Change”; Harris’s seems to be “Joy”. The only intentions inferable from the slogans was obfuscation and the desire to seduce.

Our objective in the Second World War was the destruction of fascism. In Vietnam it was “to win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people — a task for which the Armed Forces were horribly ill-suited; and no one has creditably explained why we invaded Iraq to find “weapons of mass destruction”, which, even if they had existed, posed no threat to the United States.

Our Middle East objective, under the direction of Obama, Biden and Harris, has been opposition to the Jewish state, under the heading of adjudication of the conflict. But a conflict on which external rules are imposed is not a war, it is a duel — ultimate power, thus, displayed by neither party but by the referee. The very term “The Peace Process” indicates an acceptably interminable engagement. Peace is never brought about by a process, but through breaking one side’s will to continue fighting.

After our administration’s abandonment of Israel, the Netanyahu government has, correctly, decided to cease not only its subservience but its acknowledgement of “world opinion”, destroy its enemies, and, so, bring peace to Israel. For “he who dictates the terms of the battle dictates the terms of the peace,” as Napoleon said.

The Terms of the Battle, in stage language, are the Objective. Determined here not by a director, but by an interested referee. Those in the Middle East were dictated to Israel by America, in service to Iran, a criminal folly which led to October 7, and the ebullition of world antisemitism.

Now, various of the good-willed are calling for bookstores to boycott the works of Jewish authors who do not denounce the Jewish state. I was approached to sign a petition decrying this brutality, and to supply a quote. My heart sank, not at the savagery of Sally Rooney and the woke mob, but at the notion that a list of names could decrease savagery.

I, of course, signed the petition to fight antisemitism, but washed up short and queasy thinking of a quote.

I’ve always bragged that I could write in a car crash, but was unable to add my wisdom to this good cause. I wondered why, and determined this: it is pointless to “fight” antisemitism — it presupposes an ongoing (thus extendable) process.

Our objective should be to stop antisemitism.

As Jew hatred is a delusion, it cannot be stopped by any appeal to reason. No exhortation will convince, only the application of dissuasive force to those enamoured of brutality.

My responses have included visiting Israel, to show the flag, and voting for Republicans who will defund institutions permitting the violation of Jews’ civil rights, remove the institutions’ tax-exempt status, and prosecute those threatening and assaulting Jews.

But this time around, as many reviewers have already pointed out, we are presented with a maturer version of Rooney’s concerns — and a longer book with it. Gone are the characters who write for a living. Gone, too, are the earnest disquisitions on capitalism and inequality. Her characters are now more likely to discuss logic puzzles, or Christianity.

There is Ivan, and there is Peter. The brothers Koubek, who have just lost their father. The much younger Ivan is a brilliant chess player, who could have ended up as an incel but is instead having an affair with Margaret, a woman 14 years older than him. The older Peter is a lawyer and one-time debate champion. He’s also something of a Zhivago, with one woman to suit his heart’s deeper yearning, his former girlfriend Sylvia, and another to suit his needs, his sort-of-girlfriend Naomi, a younger collegiate OnlyFans type, who is such a cliched self-destructive beauty, she seems to have wandered in from Rooney’s first two books.

It’s not, then, all that new. But there is the injection of something, which marks a real divergence from her other novels: an attempt at self-conscious prose style. Rooney has never been much of a stylist, confessing to relative indifference to the language itself. When writing about Ivan or Margaret, Rooney works in her traditional third-person present-tense narration — a partial return to the mode of Normal People. But when writing about Peter, Rooney adopts an internal monologue generally broken up into terse, subjectless fragments.

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This monologue will probably get Intermezzo called Rooney’s most Joycean novel. Though other than her essential Irishness, the charge doesn’t properly stick. There’s nothing like Stephen Dedalus or the toddering Leopold Bloom, ordering the whole cosmos in his head, as if he were both God and Falstaff. Not even if the conspicuously educated Peter Koubeck is constantly referring to Hamlet, or the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, the most interesting writing in the book is often here, in the certain wandering monologues of Peter Koubek:

Says she’s staying with Max for the month, good old Max.
See him sometimes at Sylvia’s still. Useless he was too in
competition. Too nice, not ruthless enough, always seeing both
sides. Funny though. All her friends are. Lightly she has to hold
the world, lovingly but lightly…

It’s the first time I’ve read Rooney and felt the excitement of the writer at work with words. After reading those lines, it’s hard to say that Rooney is a writer uninterested in language. Even if it’s sometimes laboured, the freer syntax is a welcome change — it made me realise just how bare and overly-crafted her writing could be before. And as her former embarrassment with the artier side of the equation evaporates from many of the novel’s best pages, Rooney can now write something like that last sentence: “Lightly she has to hold the world, lovingly but lightly.” It’s among the most musical, most balanced phrases in her oeuvre.

Unfortunately, she cannot really sustain such a musical construction. Perhaps this isn’t entirely fair on Rooney: chess, logic, and debate are more clearly the organising themes of the book. And they’re especially good metaphors for all of her books, which have featured tight units of desperate people, engaged in romance as if it were a game they somehow had to win. Intermezzo is much the same, reading like nothing so much as Rooney’s account of a chess match. The way characters manoeuvre to get what they want, while poring over their own motives. These character dyads are very much opponents, and Rooney writes them as though forced to chronicle every last rhetorical move.

This makes the novel absolutely infuriating. And it brings me to the crux of Rooney’s wild success: that Rooney is indeed the perfect writer for our times, but that this may be a very sad thing for our times. For as good a writer as she often is, Rooney’s novels are stubbornly, even obsessively, about constructing ultra-realistic accounts of social behaviour between individuals in the 21st century. Rooney is consumed with psychology. So are her characters. Margaret, Sylvia, Naomi, and Ivan and Peter Koubeck are only the most recent in a long line of Rooney characters who are constantly musing about their own psychology, constantly searching for breakthroughs and finding that their insights don’t always bring them the peace and confidence they’re looking for.

This is wisdom on the part of Rooney, I must admit. She’s too smart and fine a writer to allow a character to have a revelation and then wrap it up, pat, in a nice truthy ribbon. She’s too cunning a psychological portraitist to let her characters off the hook. All are to blame, all are selfish, yet all need grace and compassion. One of the reasons people adore her books is, I imagine, because they would very much like to reach out and cradle these characters the way they, too, wish they could be cradled. I feel it when reading her books: an immense tenderness for these poor lonely people, the desire to help them because they remind me so much of me.

In this way Rooney is the great portraitist of the age — and that is precisely what depresses me. Because ours is an age so dreadfully and myopically concerned with its own psychology, often at the expense of everything else. What else but a self-obsessed culture would be so consumed with therapy as a substitute for life? The trouble with Intermezzo is just how little there ends up being in it besides this exhaustive play-by-play of human behaviour. In the narcissistic jail of contemporary life, Rooney is hardly a Prison Warden, yet neither is she a true accomplice in the escape. More like a priest on the eve of execution, there to dispense forgiveness but incapable of intervening in our ultimate doom. This is not to say she must intervene: there’s nothing Rooney ought to be doing, if we’re to regard literature as free in any meaningful way.

But there is, I think, a failure to interrogate the deeper myths which her books have all come up against, and skated over. This isn’t unique to Rooney — she’s merely in the position of most exemplifying it, because she’s become so adept at realising the minutiae of our contemporary psyches. The first of these myths is the most contemporary one. Our culture is fundamentally still reeling from the introduction of the idea of the Blank Slate, somewhere during the Enlightenment, after aeons of belief in essential nature. It’s there in contemporary gender theory, just as much as it is in the Silicon Valley techno-utopians transforming themselves into efficiency-machines. It’s the myth that at bottom we are infinitely changeable — that there is no bottom, really. Only the infinite input of senses, into an empty box.

Early in Intermezzo this rears its head in Peter’s monologue, as he muses about “classical conditioning”. It haunts the rest of the book. Isn’t it all just conditioning? Isn’t it all just bodies cajoling, persuading, conforming to other bodies, atoms colliding blindly in the dark? Yet in our world, this myth has become inseparable from another: that of the passing away of Nature. Just as we are watching a planet slowly dying because of our technological progress, so we’re trying to choke ourselves of any sense that there is a similar Human Nature — any set of instincts, beauties, or talents which are mysteriously inherent, or inheritable. We’re not sure which to hate more: the idea that there is something inherent in us, or the idea that there is not.

However, what lingers at the edge of Rooney’s fictions, and of all our contemporary fictions, is something deeper and stranger. Something we can’t quite seem to give ourselves up to. In Rooney’s work, it’s generally there in her allusions to the Catholicism of her native Ireland, and it buzzes around the boundaries of her work. In Beautiful World, Where are You, it was Alice and Eleanor’s conversations about Jesus, their wonderment at their perfect and pious friend Simon. In Intermezzo it resurfaces: Ivan or Margaret or Peter will think briefly about Jesus, about God, about bigger plans. But they will, like Rooney does, come just shy of admitting that there’s some more transcendent thing at play. This is the predicament of so much mundane fiction today: it insists that we must be concerned with the real world of practical socio-political problems, yet largely exiles the imagination, the capacity of fiction to open up the world for play.

There’s a logical paradox to the Blank Slate, which I’m sure Rooney herself would appreciate. If all we are is what our senses take in, then where does the capacity to compare things come from? How do we choose what to focus on? There must be something innate that can tell one sense from another. But this is a hard thing to accept. Rooney’s best quality is that she wants to take the confusing questions of nature vs. nurture head on. The issue is that she has chosen a very predictable form of fiction, all about the question of whether characters can change or not. Her project is to map out the webs of motives and reasons that drive her characters’ psychologies, but this only ends up reproducing the worst patterns of our contemporary self-absorption.

As in real life, her characters’ psychological revelations are Russian nesting dolls: self-discovery is ultimately as good as repression for continuing to lie to oneself, which is what her characters are continually doing, even as they confess their sins to one another. As a portraitist of our age, Rooney is at least wise enough not to say that this is the end of the story. Her books always wrap up at the moment her characters finally collapse and admit their problems. And this is a fine and ancient project for a book, to take characters from alienation to reconciliation. But in Rooney’s language, in the language of behaviour alone, it ends up looking conspicuously like therapy. And to paraphrase something the great prophet of modern narcissism, Christopher Lasch, once said: a narcissist is someone who can survive infinite therapy.

We are all feminists until we read a book by another feminist, and then we’re bitchy schoolgirls, treading on each other’s necks. It does not escape me that this is an article by a woman about a book by a woman whose readership is famously female. With this fact comes a knot of pressures, a higher, colder standard to which Rooney is held: can she write from the perspective of men? Can she capture their feelings about sex? Does she only write about sex? Is this really a soap opera?

The few times I have rolled my eyes in the long and generally pleasurable experience of reading Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, have been in the moments of apparent pretentiousness. There’s a briefly mentioned character who is “always sneezing into a handkerchief and talking about Karl Marx”. A minor sin. But the moment that really flung me into orbit was when we met our Madonna, our nude poetry reader, our character embodying feminine academic seriousness, Sylvia, and she is described as a “Slender woman at the top of the room talking about eighteenth-century prose forms”. Resisting ridiculing this line — and I feel saintly for doing that — I want to ask instead why I find it so offensive. And I think it’s because I am assuming, quite wrongly, that Rooney is incapable of writing herself out of novels. I am assuming that, like the other waifish Trinity graduates of Rooney’s literary world, this is a model of herself, or of myself, or is something to do with us as female readers.

It is a suspicion Rooney has confronted, as in a recent interview with The Guardian. But this image, the one of Sylvia at the “top of the room”, of being thin, of being clever, has been damaging to Rooney’s early career because it crystallises the uncomfortable girliness, the languorous intensity, of her fans. I still remember a parodical tweet from four years ago which has followed Rooney around ever since: “Skinnily, I sadly and hotly forgot to eat for 7 days and I only realised when I fell over in front of trinity college and everyone was worried about me. Then a horrible man fed me something and we had sex. It felt good, and bad.” This tweeter is not like other girls, you understand; she has triumphantly determined that the novel those less discerning other girls like is, in fact, little more than wet-wipe fanfiction – the most hateful and superficial kind of contrarianism. But is this why I’m so quick to rag on it?

In other words, I find myself scoffing at the centre of a maze constructed of my own self-consciousness, my own snobberies and feelings of having to prove myself. This suggests an uncomfortable possibility: that Rooney is not in fact, as I have heard from my peers many times, a bad writer — I really think she’s quite good — but that the toxicity of the discourse around her means that some of us become bad readers. We fall more readily into the traps Rooney has laid out for us, particularly, in Intermezzo, by giving us two love objects — the superficial, OnlyFans-model student Naomi and the wounded, beatific intellectual Sylvia — both of whose thoughts are, unusually, concealed from us. Instead they are seen, primarily, through the gaze of the chaotic brute Peter, who is an alcoholic, suicidal human rights lawyer involved with them both. It is a conceit which deliberately draws us into arguments with ourselves about how we want to be represented, and traps us in a game of self-identification which means that the wider critical world, one which embraces relativism and pure textual pleasures, will always evade us.

But avoiding affront at how young women exist inside and outside this text, how they talk, speak, smell — is an excruciating task. At one point, our Gen Z wastrel Naomi, who is forever enveloped in sensory lusciousness, “fragrance of perfume, sweat and cannabis”, says of Peter: “Honestly, very dilf-coded.” I glance at the packet of paracetamol on my bedside table. Wouldn’t be enough. At the end of this same page, we get a string of impressive academic references, presumably to stop us from throwing the book across the room. “Toussaint Louverture. Bolívar, Garibaldi.” This perfectly sums up why Rooney is good, but also a bit cringe — it’s that combination of aggressive contemporariness and erudition, the archetypal English Student. If I’m uncomfortable with this, it’s because I was one.

Her prose, though, is so determinedly austere as to be at times inelegant. It is almost confrontationally simple — and at other times, frustratingly jumbled, primarily because of her allergy to punctuation. At one point, during a phone call, it is not clear who is speaking, nor is there much of a distinction between what is in the characters’ heads and what is said. Artful, I’m sure — but annoying.

To read Intermezzo is to read characters’ thoughts about romance, about possible romance, and then about birds or rain. God, there is so much rain. We resist, because of the relentlessly internal style of this novel, taking people at face value: Peter’s brother, Ivan, is a probably autistic chess nerd, his lover, Margaret, is a near-middle-aged woman in crisis — these things are externally true, but really much more complex. And the prose itself does sometimes slip into a jarring conventionality. I wince every time someone’s brows become “knitted”, or their breath “catches in their throat”. It happens a surprising amount.

But, then, I’m doing exactly what I shouldn’t be doing in sniggering at it. Rooney can see it all coming, can sense the snark on the air. In one scene, characters exchange uncharitable remarks about a new novel which everyone says is good. “Relish of mutual mean-spiritedness and high discernment.” She’s screening the backlash to her own hype, and in my head, I become sheepish. Sorry, Sally!

And I find myself feeling a little defensive of Rooney, while remaining hugely resentful of the cartoonish Rooney reader, the lover of “sad girl lit”, posing with a hardback and one of those stupidly big gingham scrunchies. Am I the biggest misogynist I know? Rooney’s male critics, though, can certainly piss off. After all, does difficulty, complexity, making the reader work their arse off to get it, make a novel good? Rooney’s plain-speaking, the way you can pleasurably whip through her novels, is value-neutral; and it is, perhaps, also a rebuke.

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This plain-speaking provides a good basis for Rooney’s many, and extended, sex scenes. She captures the awkwardness incredibly well. I find myself laughing out loud at points, identifying men I’ve known with the painfully ridiculous Ivan, the way they sweetly fumble around. The way we model desire: Margaret tries “to embody the kind of woman he believed he couldn’t have — to incorporate that woman into herself”. When he first kisses her, it is “of course, a desperately embarrassing situation — a situation which seems to render her entire life meaningless”. I think I gasped upon reading this, at the intense truth of how that feels, to be extinguished by the banality of male desire.

At other times, we see feminism through men’s eyes. We see their flashing thoughts of “Stupid bitch. No, I’m sorry”, and discussing sexual politics between themselves (the extent to which this is wishful thinking is something Rooney or I will never know). Whether Rooney herself is indeed a Marxist (often touted as such) or political (she has withheld translation rights from Israeli firms, and writes in this and other novels about the rental crisis and climate change) is less interesting than whether her writing is good. Interviews tend to focus on her biography — something she resists — and what she stands for, but I resent that because I’m not sure men would be subjected to that. I don’t really mind if we share similar views on landlords, I’m reading a bloody novel. Saying that, I did spill some of the sauce from a packet of Waitrose moules marinières on the keyboard as I was writing this, so it probably doesn’t matter what I think.

But this is all to say that the criticism that Rooney is not a good writer, or writes only about love, is not fair. Granted, there are times when you wonder whether the working title for Intermezzo might in fact have been The Thwarting, and want to shout through the text — as I remember doing at the screen when suffering through the BBC’s version of Normal People — just get over yourselves and get back together! And eat some fucking food! But it is at times very good, and at times very sweet, and that is okay. Go out and buy this, read it, and if you hate it, that’s alright — but hate it for the right reasons, and more than anything, try to get over yourself. I’m working on that.

Her novels — Normal People, Conversations with Friends and last summer’s Beautiful World, Where Are You — have helped to popularise a flat, affectless, prose. Novelists operating in this disenchanted style presuppose, like Rooney, that an unshakable feeling of worldly-alienation, together with an almost pathological degree of highly absorbed self-examination, constitutes the only fitting response to the conditions of millennial life and to the dilemmas forced on their protagonists by “late capitalism”. The temperament described — and probably shared — by these writers is one that veers unsettlingly between a familiar kind of cynicism about the social world (underpowered by any deep understanding of it) and embarrassing displays of earnestness.

The TV series (first Normal People in 2020, and now Conversations with Friends) are rather less annoying than the books. Because the alienated world-view is so much bound-up with prose style, it is difficult to reproduce on the screen. Both series are, needless to say, extremely handsome and expensively-produced. Everything — the shabby-chic interiors; the cute acoustic soundtrack; the long, stilted silences; the tiny corners of well-chosen novels allowed briefly to appear from between the protagonists’ hands; the carefully-choreographed sex between hairless Grecian bodies — all of it is just dreadfully, dreadfully tasteful.

More vividly than the books, the dramatisations indulge certain aspirational fantasies the viewer may have about her own life. They are also rather forgettable. Freed from Rooney’s reductive prose-style, the stories lose much of their distinctive atmosphere. First-personal detachment is difficult to convey in film; these series opt, sensibly, to be complacently beautiful rather than meet the challenge. One result is that the highly conventional quality of Rooney’s stories becomes more vivid to us: they are sentimental teenage romances, languidly extended over ten hours.

Still, in both Normal People and Conversations With Friends there are helpful clues that we remain in the Rooney-verse. Many scenes are given over to patience-testing depictions of the mundane business of the protagonists’ lives, which seem at moments to be unfolding before us in real time. (Characters brush their teeth, do the dishes, walk around… brush their teeth again). Rooney co-scripted Normal People, and in both series dialogue is often lifted directly from the books, which — when spoken aloud —reveals a strangely remedial quality, as if it is being translated from a foreign language off-the-cuff and by someone with a slightly limited vocabulary in English.

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“I don’t think it’s a bad thing that you’re feeling bad about this”, Connell’s mother tells him, profoundly. “I feel like our friendship would be a lot easier if certain things were different”, Connell later confesses to Marianne. ‘Nice’ is a near-universal term of approbation. Al dente pasta is ‘nice’; the university therapist is ‘nice’; doggystyle is ‘nice’; Christmas with grandma is ‘nice’. At times, the anti-naturalistic dialogue seems by its presence to reveal a nervousness about the actors’ abilities to communicate any unspoken feeling whatsoever to the viewer. “I want this so much’, Marianne is made to announce while she and Connell have sex. ‘It’s really nice to hear you say that’, he replies.

An underdiscussed fact about the books and their adaptations is how remarkably without humour they are. There is no hint in the books that the world might be a remotely funny place. Of course, we are given to understand that the characters themselves sometimes say funny things, more often than not of a cruel or misjudged sort  — that they occasionally cause one another physically to laugh — though we are not very often allowed to know what the funny thing at issue was. If they weren’t at least minimally funny, I suppose, the worry is we might start to question whether the characters were quite as attractive or intelligent as we are instructed to think they are.

For doubt to set in on that question would be fatal to the ideal on offer. The neurasthenic temperament, one exquisitely tuned to social nuance and psychic discomfort, is what admirers of Rooney’s work identify with and aspire to. They want to see themselves in this disfiguring generational portrait. Why? One ready explanation is that Rooney’s novels flatter the kind of reader already likely to be attracted to her work. They do this in one straightforward way by being sentimental fantasies of requited erotic love whose characters achieve their aims despite comparably little effort and much glamorous emotional anguish. The protagonists are everymen but also intensely special and distinctive. The stories are exercises in wish-fulfilment.

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Beyond this, I think the explanation has to do with the connection Rooney makes between alienated self-awareness and moral virtue. In Rooney’s works, a state of highly-analysed self-awareness in itself has a kind of redemptive quality. Marianne and Francis exist in a state of troubled grace. A neurotic and conflicted attitude is presented as somehow appropriate to the conditions of the contemporary world, its injustices, and the impossible options it places before us as individuals. Not only is the alienated condition admirable, then, it is, given the state of the world, cognitively reliable. Rooney’s protagonists see the world more clearly than the rest of us do, and their psychic unease is a testament to this epistemic achievement.

This combination of views accounts for much that irritates in the books. It explains for instance how the protagonists’ posturing and dogmatic political beliefs are combined by Rooney in such an apparently seamless way with a strangely smug quietism about politics itself. All that is required for personal absolution is to be painfully aware of one’s own horribly compromised position.

Early on in Conversations with Friends we watch Bobbi upbraiding Nick, an actor, for playing a gay role when he is a straight man. “Well, as long as you’re self-flagellating and having an awful time!” Bobbi reassures him, archly. It is a truer expression of the work’s political outlook than can have been intentional. “May the revolution be swift and brutal”, Marianne proclaims in Normal People — a mad prescription, issued to no one in particular, with no expectation that it should take effect.

Marianne and Francis, merely in virtue of being fascinated by their deficiencies of character – the gap between their lofty ideals and their shameful desires, their acts of unthinking selfishness – are shown not only to be better than people who do not have such perceptions about themselves, but also to understand the world more truthfully. The chief alternative to being an intelligent hypocrite in Rooney’s world is not, say, to be well-balanced or temperamentally sane, but to be stupid.

Rooney – a “lifelong Marxist” – thinks of her protagonists as having achieved a double-vision of the social reality of which they are a part. They see bourgeois social norms and sexual conventions for what they are. Unable to escape the analytical habit, Rooney’s protagonists also see through other people, even the ones they profess to love, and eventually, with no object remaining to detach themselves from, they see right through themselves.

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“I feel like I’m walking around trying on a hundred different versions of myself”, Connell tells us in Normal People. Aware that their preternatural intelligence allows them to justify, by casuistical lines of argument, any particular reading of the world they care to alight on, a kind of global alienation sets in, where the feeling of detachment itself is the only remaining fixed-point in psychological space, with little sense even of what it is detachment from. The result is the strangely Cartesian quality of Rooney’s picture of the agent — an internal ghost assailed by a stream of suspicious data from a hostile world.

Like Normal People, the adaptation of Conversations with Friends is over-long and emotionally laborious. For one thing, each of the show’s four lead characters attaches enormous importance to the question of whether each one of the other characters is feeling alright, and, at higher conversational iterations, whether they would tell them if they weren’t feeling alright. Such enquiries are pursued with limitless patience, and often whole episodes pass with little else discussed. Despite their indefatigable efforts to relate to one another, the characters misunderstand each other all the same, and cry themselves into dehydration. By the time the sans-serif credits began to crawl across the ending of the twelfth episode — reminding me of the names of the men and women responsible for doing this to me — I felt as if I would never be alright again.

Why is Rooney’s work so highly regarded as generation-defining commentary? Why do people think it definitively skewering of our social age and atmosphere? Rooney herself, by explicit allusion, encourages a comparison with Jane Austen within the pages of Normal People. (Reading Emma in the university library one night, Connell is put into “a state of strange emotional agitation” and concludes that “literature moves him”, indeed that it touches him in a way that is “not completely asexual”). As with Austen, Rooney’s novels do not adapt to the screen in a way that successfully preserves their character; in Austen’s case this is to the decided detriment of the dramatisations, in Rooney’s case less obviously so.

The allusion to Austen is strangely ill-advised. The picture of the world Rooney gives the reader is one entirely mediated by the protagonists’ neuroses and hang-ups. Austen relies on precise, puncturing ironies. The comparison also runs the risk —  hardly sensible under the circumstances — of reminding the reader that instead of watching Conversations with Friends or Normal People, she could be reading Emma.

This field of inquiry doesn’t just include behavioural science books such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and Ian Leslie’s Conflicted. James Graham’s new play Best of Enemies, currently running at the Young Vic, and Jon Ronson’s recent Radio 4 series about culture wars, Things Fell Apart, are in the same business. Both men are known for their empathy and even-handedness: Ronson has written thoughtful bestsellers about extremists and online shaming, while Graham’s work for stage and screen gravitates towards periods of disruption and division. Taken together, their latest projects shed light on the crucial distinction between debate and dialogue.

Best of Enemies is based on a 2015 documentary about a series of landmark televised debates. In the summer of 1968, the struggling ABC network decided to build its slim coverage of the national party conventions around 10 debates between William F Buckley Jr, the editor of The National Review and host of Firing Line, and Gore Vidal, the novelist and playwright. Born just a few weeks apart in 1925, both men were sons of dynastic privilege who had run for office and attained considerable celebrity, both on screen and in print, by being as combative as they were erudite. But as Buckley later remarked: “There is an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable and that which is highly illuminating.”

Casting Buckley and Vidal was a vote for viewability. For one thing, they represented not Republicans and Democrats but the most radical expressions of conservatism and progressivism: what we would now call culture warriors. Neither, for example, cared for the eventual Democratic nominee, the cheerful moderate Hubert Humphrey. Electoral strategy and policy platforms interested them less than a battle for the soul of America.

For another, they displayed mutual disgust. Each man considered the other not just dangerous but obscene. Even before the vicious exchange of slurs that made their penultimate meeting notorious, the debates were a gruesome display of smirks and sneers, sly digs and barbed crosstalk. The host, Howard K. Smith, often seemed taken aback by the heat of their animosity. Vidal dubbed Buckley “the leading warmonger of the United States”; Buckley branded Vidal “an agent for the end of democratic government”.

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The debates shot ABC from the bottom of the ratings heap to the top. In 1968, the spectacle of two very clever, eloquent men tearing chunks out of each other was a delicious novelty. Even today, in the play, many of the biggest laughs come from verbatim re-enactments of their showdowns, which Graham structures like the bouts in a boxing movie.

In hindsight, the two men’s ideas and rhetoric seem impressively hifalutin but viewers tuned in for the sizzle not the steak, and that became their legacy. To this day, broadcasters like to frame debates as a spicy clash between two irreconcilable points of view. I’m not the only journalist to have lost a radio booking by admitting that they don’t entirely disagree with the other guest; the disappointment in the booker’s voice is palpable.

On YouTube, meanwhile, the likes of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are billed as rhetorical gladiators who DESTROY and CRUSH their opponents. Vidal had it right in the final 1968 debate: “I think these great debates are absolutely nonsense. The way they’re set up, there’s almost no interchange of ideas, very little even of personality. There’s also the terrible thing about this medium that hardly anyone listens.”

Some would say that the Vidal/Buckley clash was a crass corruption of the noble art of debate; but perhaps they merely tore the mask off. The value of adversarial debate is vastly overstated by politicians and journalists who belonged to the tiny of minority of students who participated in them at university (and are rarely sound advertisements for their educational benefit) because it is ultimately a sport rather than an exchange of ideas — and a bloodsport at that.

“Competitive debating takes argument’s essential features and reimagines them as a game,” wrote Sally Rooney about her time as a star college debater. “For the purposes of this game, the emotional or relational aspects of argument are superfluous, and at the end there are winners. Everyone tacitly understands that it’s not a real argument.”

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The American novelist Ben Lerner came to similar conclusions about his own prowess as a competitive debater in high school: “The speeches required decisiveness: clear rather than complex answers won rounds, and you learned to stud a speech with sources the way a politician reaches for statistics — to provide the affect of authority more than to illuminate an issue or settle a point of fact.” Although this experience appears to have done neither novelist any harm in the long run, Lerner did not like what the game did to him: “I became a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the smallest provocation; I dominated; I made other debaters cry.”

Debates have a place in election campaigns because the goal of both is to win and to leave your opponent, as Vidal said of Buckley, a “bleeding corpse”. More often, though, the challenge of politics is to resolve painful disagreements through dialogue and compromise. There is no perfect quip or killer statistic, flourished like a duellist’s blade, that will deliver an enduring piece of legislation. Law-making is not good television because it requires listening. Even the politicians who are most adept at Prime Minister’s Questions resent the time it consumes because its theatrical aggression has so little to do with the rest of their job.

There are better ways to talk about the issues that divide us. In Things Fell Apart, Jon Ronson tells eight stories about formative moments in the culture war which still influence how we argue today. The most popular episode is also the most uplifting. ‘A Miracle’ revisits the 1985 conversation between the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker and a gay priest with Aids named Steve Pieters. As Peters, still alive today, relates, Bakker’s unexpected compassion built a bridge between evangelical Christians and gay men at a time of rampant homophobia and demonisation of those with Aids: “People in that audience got to see a real live human being.” Their conversation is the polar opposite of Buckley vs Vidal because Bakker really listened. (Fittingly, she is the subject of a stage musical that James Graham is currently writing with Elton John and Jake Shears.)

‘A Miracle’ chimes with ‘Many Different Lives’, which describes how a transwoman called Nancy Burkholder managed to foster a respectful (albeit short-lived) dialogue in the Nineties between the women’s festival Michfest and her fringe gathering Camp Trans. Burkholder’s guidelines for fruitful debate are so self-evidently helpful yet so rarely followed that they are worth quoting in full: “Listen carefully and remain calm and patient. Do not call anyone names or belittle their point of view or imply that they are irrational. An atmosphere of love and joy will attract people to us. Anger and hostility will turn them away. We are all on this planet trying to figure out a lot of complex stuff together.” In these episodes you can hear Ronson, a culture war pacifist, exhilarated by the possibility of breaking a deadlock.

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Like any war, a culture war is a failure of diplomacy. Unlike most wars, it can never be won, whatever the noisiest and most passionate combatants would like to believe. Polls consistently show that most people don’t want to participate in culture wars, if indeed they even know what they are. They want compromise and settlement, without which a democratic society cannot function.

Binary extremism may reap viewers, clicks, followers and donations but it is also brutalising and corrupting. The more we have of debate as a game rather than debate as dialogue, the worse things get. As the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg lamented in a recent piece about January 6: “The addiction to good-versus-evil narratives pitting the honourable and decent ‘us’ against the villainous and sinister ‘them’ is as strong as ever — and there is little appetite for the kind of argument and persuasion that sustains democracy.”

Towards the end of Best of Enemies, Graham imagines the kind of honest, vulnerable conversation that Buckley and Vidal might have had when the cameras weren’t rolling: “no performing, just talking,” as another character says. It’s an instinctive bridge-builder’s fantasy of good-faith disagreement, where the goal is understanding rather than victory. Ronson’s series closes with a more explicit plea: “I think people are just exhausted by how things have fallen apart and what they’re longing for instead is connection.”

Buckley died in 2008 and Vidal in 2012. Neither sought a significant online presence. Yet it is on the internet where their 1968 desire to fight and win at any cost, to generate heat and damn the light, has become overwhelming. In the 2015 documentary, former ABC executive Richard Wald sadly observes: “Argument is sugar and the rest of us are flies.” What he doesn’t say is that the sugar is poisoned.

Rooney has written another novel about comfortable young westerners overthinking their love-lives. The Israeli state would welcome an edition, but she is withholding it from Israeli readers as a political gesture. Had she written a novel about the suffering of young Palestinians in the occupied territories, and the Israeli state sought to ban it, I imagine she would join all right-minded folk in pressing for a Hebrew edition to be produced.

Sally Rooney has not decided to boycott an entire language. Her decision to refuse the Israeli publisher Modan to publish a Hebrew edition of her latest novel is the refusal of a specific Israeli publisher rather than the refusal of a Jewish language. You may argue the two will add up to the same thing – which non-Israeli publisher is likely to want to produce a Hebrew edition? — but the distinction in principle is not meaningless, and it’s the distinction that she herself makes.

In a statement she said she refused to work with a publisher “that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”, adding: “The Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available, and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement’s institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so.”

I think this is a silly move, but it’s not so obviously silly and/or malign as to be slam-dunked in 280 characters. We need to keep this a manageable length, though, so rather than start from 1967, or 1948, or 19th-century pogroms and the birth of Zionism, let’s start from Rooney’s position — which is that Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian population, and its illegal settlements, are illegitimate and deplorable. Let’s take that as a given, whether or not we agree with it. And let’s shelve, too, the argument that you’re only allowed to boycott Israel if you also boycott Russia, Saudi, China and any other countries whose human rights records bear similar challenge. It’s not necessarily a trivial objection — a key part of the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism is holding Israel to a double standard by “requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” — but it would be, if we’re to approach this issue (as I’m trying to) on Rooney’s terms, to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Let’s take Rooney’s decision on its own terms. She sees Israel as a baddy. She supports the BDS movement, which holds it legitimate to punish Israel for its badness by economic sanctions and cultural boycotts – on an analogy with the isolation of apartheid-era South Africa. (Is Israel an “apartheid state”? Let’s shelve that one also.) So she won’t let Israel have Beautiful World, Where Are You? because, essentially, they are a baddy and so they Can’t Have Nice Things.

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I’m trying to get to the nub of this, which is the question of what her decision achieves — or hopes to. Sanctions and boycotts are intended to strike a blow against a regime, not against its people. (I can’t speak for Rooney, but I’m presuming she deplores the Israeli state rather than its Jewish inhabitants.) The most powerful arguments against them have always been that in seeking to do the former, they achieve the latter. And, indeed, you can argue that thanks to the backfire effect, they sometimes help the regime by uniting its people in being pissed off about the sanctions.

Still, in economic terms, a successful boycott will seek to hurt a country’s GDP; it will discourage international investment; it may specifically prevent it buying weapons, energy and the other things that a regime needs to thrive. And in cultural terms, it will seek to damage its soft power, and the regime’s internal claim to legitimacy, by signalling its isolation from the international community.

So to take the example of apartheid South Africa, you could make a case for refusing to play international cricket there, or disapproving when major rock stars played Sun City. There’s propaganda value to hosting an international sporting tournament — those who blether on about sport being “above politics” haven’t been paying attention — or having Dolly Parton play your national stadium. It signals, soft-power-wise, that your country, and by extension its government, is a legitimate member of the great family of nations. Bad luck on innocent cricket fans of all ethnic and political stripes; but more infuriating, you’d hope, to the cricket-loving white supremacists in charge of the country who felt humiliated by the snub.

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But books, I submit, are a totally different type of good from weapons, financial instruments, petroleum, sporting events or Dolly Parton concerts. They are no use to a regime; and they can sometimes be a nuisance to it. Reading is a private, rather than a communal event. Governments, as a rule, couldn’t give two hoots about what its citizens are reading at bedtime. You can’t hoist the flag over a scattered population of readers losing half an hour here or there, on a timetable of their own devising, in an imaginary world.

The reason that when states do take an interest in books it’s to ban them is precisely that they don’t fit into an authoritarian order (Israel, I should add, is not in that sense anything like an authoritarian regime). The widespread liberal enthusiasm for the free circulation of books links to this — as well as to the idea, though we shouldn’t push it too far, that fiction is in some way a moral agent. Here we get to George Eliot’s old line that “if Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally”. Books can change minds, spread ideas and, yes, enlarge sympathies.

So, to repeat, what does Rooney intend to achieve? She’s a bestseller, sure; but not to the extent, I imagine, that missing out on her new paperback will damage the Israeli economy. The publishing house is a private rather than a state concern. There’s no soft-power blow that withdrawing her book strikes to the prestige of the Israeli regime, either. As I say, they couldn’t give a toss which of their citizens get to read about the tangled love-lives and troubled consciences of Rooney’s protagonists.

And in deciding that ordinary Israeli citizens should not get to read her book (my guess, for what it’s worth, is that most of her Israeli readers will be of a liberal internationalist bent in any case) Rooney seems to sell her own work short by indicating that there’s nothing in it that might do the private and disaggregated good of enlarging sympathies, changing minds, expanding sensibilities. That it’s just product, like the tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream that you also can’t buy in Israeli occupied territories.

Perhaps, as with Ben & Jerry’s, an Israeli boycott will be good branding for that product in the liberal west. But it’s hard to imagine it will do a damn thing for the Palestinians.

This is far from uncommon, for it’s increasingly common for critics to adopt the brace position before daring to dislike something that many people enjoy. Back in May, the Guardian’s Scott Tobias became Twitter’s baddie of the day for battering Shrek on the occasion of its 20^thanniversary: “Shrek is a terrible movie. It’s not funny. It looks awful.” I found the reaction extraordinary. Tobias was called, at best, a cynical, click-hungry contrarian; at worst a twisted, misanthropic snob. “Shrek Fans Diss ‘Joyless Chud’ Guardian Critic Who Called Film ‘Unfunny and Overrated,’” reported The Wrap. His crime, let’s say it again, was hating an old, animated movie about an implausibly Scottish ogre and his donkey friend.

Critics have never been the world’s most beloved people. Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Czech author and sometime critic Karel Čapek wrote about the consequences of a harsh review: “I’m reconciled in advance to the fact that [the author] considers me unfair, cliquey and incompetent. It’s definitely his right. I, too, use this right when an unfair, cliquey and incompetent critic, who gives my book a bad press, hurts me. To cut a long story short, there’s an eternal conflict between artist and critic. ‘Praise me, or I’ll hate you.’”

Nonetheless, there used to be an understanding among readers that any worthwhile critic, whether it be William Hazlitt, Kenneth Tynan or Pauline Kael, would need to hate as well as to love. As the late Clive James (who was skilled on both counts) wrote in a 2013 defence of hatchet jobs: “You can’t eliminate the negative. It accentuates the positive.”

Now critics are often up against readers who resist the very notion of criticism. A few popular lines of attack pop up regularly. There’s faux-objectivity: You said this movie wasn’t funny but I laughed, ergo it is you are factually wrong and unprofessional. Taking offence: How dare you imply that everyone who likes this movie is a tasteless dolt? Assumption of bad faith: You’re only saying this for clicks and notoriety.

Character assassination: You’re a vindictive killjoy who’s no fun at parties. Moral disapproval: Why would you waste your precious time being mean about something when you could be praising something else? Some people mix and match these accusations into strange hybrids like the schoolmarm-turned-troll: Why can’t you be more positive, you dumb piece of shit?

What these responses all have in common is not so much disagreement with the critique but fury that it was written at all. Thumper the rabbit’s famous maxim, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” might have been good advice for Bambi but it’s fatal for the appreciation of art. “Criticism is not nice,” writes AO Scott of the New York Times in Better Living Through Criticism. “To criticise is to find fault, to accentuate the negative, to spoil the fun and refuse to spare delicate feelings.”

For an entertaining reminder of a more knockabout era of criticism, I recommend the Ringer’s current podcast series Gene and Roger, presented by Brian Raftery. Between 1986 and 1999, when they hosted the half-hour TV show At the Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were the most (and perhaps only) famous film critics in America, appearing on David Letterman and Saturday Night Live as celebrities in their own right and introducing many viewers to the concept of film criticism itself.

Central to their appeal was the intensity of their opinions, which often clashed. The show turned disagreement into entertainment. While they were both important champions of overlooked or misunderstood movies, one of my favourite comfort reads is Ebert’s 2000 anthology of pans, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. It is an unfortunate truth that it is much easier to be funny when you’re being mean, but Ebert wasn’t just going for cheap laughs; he knew how wonderful cinema could be and was indignant when millions of dollars were squandered on crud.

Why has negative criticism become so contentious? One factor is the growing vulnerability of both journalists and the artists they cover. When there is less space for book coverage, it makes sense to foreground good work than cackle over the bad, except when a real stinker from a big name hoves into view and critics can take the gloves off with a sigh of relief. Smaller journals can be a little spicier, though: Becca Rothfeld’s masterly evisceration of Sally Rooney’s “riskless and conciliatory” novels in The Point last year was a bracing antidote to Rooneymania.

In the world of music, when most albums don’t make money, it is understandable for critics to pull their punches. The world of album reviewing now is so much more collegiate than the knives-out music-press culture that I grew up on. I’m glad that young critics no longer have to make their names with an act of ritual cruelty towards a soft target, but the really thoughtful takedown is an endangered species without which music journalism is merely PR. Older critics tend to lose their taste for blood while, as Clive James wrote, “among young writers, there seems a shortage of critics unhampered by excessive good manners.”

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I would suggest, though, that it’s as much a question of self-preservation as good manners, due to social media’s abolition of context. When Siskel and Ebert panned a movie, regular viewers knew that that was not all they did. In fact, the duo might well rave about another film in the same episode. But when a review goes viral now, most of the people reading it (provided that they do actually read beyond the headline) will have no idea who the writer is, so he or she is reduced to the status of an HM Bateman caricature: The Man Who Hates Shrek, The Woman Who Hates Ted Lasso. Scott Tobias, for example, has written dozens of anniversary pieces for the Guardian, the vast majority of which are celebratory. I suspect he would have been delighted if his ode to, say, Alan Pakula’s 1971 thriller Klute had gone viral and Klute had become a trending topic, but of course it didn’t, because nothing fuels virality like outrage. Thus a negative piece is damned as “clickbait” by the angry people who are clicking on it while ignoring all the positive pieces. Whose fault is that?

Social media has also given us the militarisation of fandom. Major artists and franchises attract armies of fans who demonstrate their fealty by mobbing naysayers. There are DC fans who genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that critics are secretly paid to praise Marvel movies and denigrate their DC rivals, but then Marvel fans are no more reasonable. No movie that Martin Scorsese has made in recent years has generated as much attention as his mild dismissal of the MCU two years ago. Fortunately, the world’s most profitable movie franchise has survived his lack of interest.

All of this makes criticism an increasingly hairy business. Woe betide the outlier who costs a film its 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. When the critic Ann Powers published an ambivalent essay about Lana Del Rey in 2019, it was denounced by Del Rey herself to her 9.5 million Twitter followers, thus sending an avalanche of abuse in Powers’ direction. Complaints to employers are common, as are death threats. It’s hard to imagine a review of a major artist as famously scathing as Greil Marcus’ take on Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait (first line: “What is this shit?”) in the age of Twitter. You want to take an axe to Korean boy band BTS and their ride-or-die followers? Lock your account first.

The instinct to abuse critics is justified by the idea that it is “punching up” at elitist gatekeepers. But unlike Siskel and Ebert, modern critics are neither famous nor wealthy nor powerful. They may have influence en masse, via review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (there is safety in numbers), but the days when one critic could make or break a movie, album or anything else are long gone. Yet fans still see them as dream-crushing monsters from which million-selling musicians and billion-dollar movies must be defended at all costs.

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Perhaps there is so much ambient hostility online that critics are too easily lumped in with the trolls and “haters” who plague your timeline. There are of course some contrarians, bullies and attention-seekers who have built a brand on performative contempt but they are not typical. The author Matt Haig is nonetheless adept at painting his detractors as bitter, shrunken souls whose arguments are therefore invalid. Last weekend, the Thumper of British publishing crystallised the Haigist theory of criticism in a tweet that was ostensibly about Sally Rooney’s sceptics but implicitly about his own: “There is so much jealousy of Sally Rooney. If you don’t like her books, don’t read them. The great thing about books is there are lots. There have literally never been more books. Why spend your time dissing authors other people like when you could be championing ones you do?” It’s all there: the unfounded assumption of jealousy; the nonsensical idea that you can know you don’t like a book before you’ve read it; the suggestion that negative criticism is simply a waste of time. To voice disappointment or antipathy, in Haig’s world, is a moral failing.

Similarly, anyone who resists the gentle charms of Ted Lasso, which received a Peabody Award for “offering the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity, both on-screen and off, in a moment when the nation truly needs inspiring models of kindness”, risks being accused of hating kindness itself. The success of the show, so unlike caustic 2000s sitcoms such as Extras or Curb Your Enthusiasm, is itself symptomatic of a general desire for more warmth and less cynicism.

But the Peabody citation acknowledges that the premise “has all the markings of a formulaic cornball dud,” so it is inconceivable that some people, not all of them unfeeling bastards, wouldn’t indeed find it a formulaic cornball dud. It’s particularly tricky right now for black critics who dislike politically well-intentioned work by black creators. After Angelica Jade Bastién caught flak for shredding the generally well-received new Candyman movie, another writer responded: “one of the frustrating things about this era of didactic capitol b Black art is the idea that serious criticism amounts to some kind of disloyalty.”

I suspect that this hypersensitivity to critical voices has been compounded first by the ugly intensity of politics and then by the pandemic. If you think Candyman was made by good people with timely things to say about racism in gentrification, then you might be inclined to forgive its didacticism. And if Ted Lasso or Shrek made your lockdown a little more cheerful, then you might overreact to someone stomping all over them. But I worry that enthusiasm is being mistaken for a moral virtue, and negative criticism for a character flaw: What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just like things?

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By Tanya Gold

We all know, in our own lives, that everything isn’t for everybody. Any night of the year there are heated disagreements in living rooms and cinema lobbies, and negative reactions are no less worthy of representation in public discourse than positive ones. Disliking certain things is not just normal but essential. Hate is the back of the mirror, without which you would just have a piece of glass. “It can be positive,” Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys wrote in a terrific 1992 polemic on the virtues of hate. “It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about… To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really caring about others. If you like everything, you deal with nothing.”

Personally, I find that the act of disagreeing with a sharp takedown sharpens my appreciation of the work in question. If I have to think a bit harder about what I like and why I like it, that’s fine by me, especially when it’s something that has been almost universally acclaimed. I was wowed by Jia Tolentino’s essay collection Trick Mirror but I got a kick out of Lauren Oyler’s brilliant demolition job in the London Review of Books last year, as did Tolentino, who gamely retweeted it. “I’ve been idly waiting since my book came out for a truly scathing review of my bullshit, which seemed inevitable given the rest of my good luck & also like it could be useful,” she wrote. “It finally came: a cleansing, illuminating experience to be read with such open disgust!”

Tolentino’s suggestion that negative criticism is not just valid but useful would have surprised Karel Čapek. In the current climate, it verges on the saintly. It’s not that I long for an epidemic of gleeful brutality but I will always cherish the right of critics to express their hate, hate, hate in the ultimate service of what they love, love, love.

Only open for three days, it is the ultimate immersion in Brand Rooney, a retail experience squarely targeting the millennial women who make up the majority of her audience. We (there is no point in pretending I’m not a Rooney fan, even if at 40 to her 30, I’m pushing the demographic) don’t just want to consume: we want to experience our values at the point of sale, whether we’re buying cosmetics or clothes or the latest book by the author who’s been labelled the “voice of her generation” for her mix of acutely observed realism and startlingly intense sex.

For your average midlist author — the kind of writer whose publicity campaigns tend to involve schlepping out to provincial arts festivals and hoping cheap red wine will take the edge off audience indifference — all this fuss over Rooney must spark a certain resentment. And one author in particular must resent it more than anyone. Rooney is, famously, a Marxist. She also despises the celebrity that has come with her success. Yet here she is, fronting up a lifestyle outlet as though she were a Love Island influencer.

It’s a strangely tortured position, and one that seems to preoccupy her, to the increasing detriment of her fiction. Beautiful World, Where Are You? is the story of two friends from Dublin: a successful novelist called Alice and an editor on a publicly funded literary magazine called Eileen, both approaching thirty. They fall in love with men, have enjoyably dirty sex which is described in enjoyably dirty detail, struggle to believe that they are worthy of love and write each other long emails about the decline of civilisation and (in Alice’s case) the horrors of having a public profile.

As in her first two novels, Rooney shows an unnerving ability to compact the world into a few shrewd observations. Take this description of the few months when everyone in Eileen’s social circle, including Alice, seemed to be moving out of town:

“It was April and several of Eileen’s friends had recently left or were in the process of leaving Dublin. She attended the leaving parties, wearing her dark-green dress with the buttons, or her yellow dress with the matching belt. In living rooms with low ceilings and paper lampshades, people talked to her about the property market.”

In fewer than 50 words, Rooney sketches a socioeconomic thesis. Those rooms with their provisional furnishings, designed to be lived in only until they could be fled; Eileen with her sparse wardrobe, feeling adulthood escape her as her friends move on.

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But the detail is also an act of deep affection. In chapter 17 of Adam Bede, George Eliot broke off from the story to deliver a short essay on the ethics of realism. Beauty, she wrote, is a fine thing, but should be sought in places besides pure aesthetics. The work of the novelist, in Eliot’s view, was “to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things”. The buttons, the belt, the lampshade — these are Rooney’s “commonplace things”, and she records them because she cares for them and for the people they belong to.

Her attention to the material grounds her incredibly sharp sense of the emotional exchanges between humans. When Eileen and her long-term on-off lover Simon make eye contact at a wedding, it summons a bravura flashback of their entire relationship: “their phone calls, the messages they wrote to one another, their jealousies, the years of looks, suppressed smiles, their dictionary of little touches.” This describes a certain kind of accumulated intimacy so precisely, there’s a shock to seeing it on the page — as though Rooney has stolen your life to offer it back to you.

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But despite these strengths, Beautiful World, Where Are You? is not a good novel, even if Rooney’s limpid style means it’s always a readable one. The problem is that, after two very fine novels of writing what she knows, she seems to have become a prisoner of her own perspective. Rooney is insistent that, even though Alice is also a novelist, she is not a self-portrait. Still, the similarities between the two are too glaring to be ignored.

For one thing, Alice’s output sounds an awful lot like Rooney’s: her boyfriend teasingly calls them “filthy books”, while Alice scathingly classifies them as “sensitive little novels about ‘real life’”. Alice’s success has been vertiginous, like Rooney’s. And her experience of fame has been scarring, like Rooney’s. In the long emails between Alice and Eileen which make up much of Beautiful World, Alice attacks what Rooney has called the “hell” of literary celebrity. “They never tire of giving me awards, do they?” complains Alice. “It’s a shame I’ve tired so quickly of receiving them…”

This is not a very sympathetic whine, and nor is it obvious that it’s supposed to be (Alice and Eileen are so close in character, they write with one voice, as though they are the competing parts of Rooney’s own self). But elsewhere, the nightmare quality of celebrity is vividly realised: when Alice writes about an online critic who “genuinely believes that because she has seen my photo and read my novels, she knows me personally” there’s a sickly sense of invasion.

There’s something about Rooney’s emotional register that probably does encourage over-identification. She is not, after all, writing postmodern wordplay epics. She’s writing about exactly how it feels to lock your gaze with someone you fancy and feel the weight of years of wanting behind it. It must be draining to be the conduit for such powerful private emotions: there’s a toddler logic that persists into adulthood which believes that if someone can see your heart, you must be able to see them too.

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In a Guardian interview to promote Beautiful World, Rooney presented the engagement with fame as a necessary evil, the precondition for anyone talented who wishes to exercise their talent. “Of course, that person could stop doing whatever it is they’re good at, in order to be allowed to retire from public life, but that seems to me like a big sacrifice on their part and an exercise in cultural self-destruction for the rest of us…” But there’s no binding contract saying that the successful novelist must also be relentlessly available.

Beautiful World isn’t just fixated on fame: it’s dependent on fame for its meaning. Without Rooney’s own celebrity to frame Alice’s experiences, this would be a far less intriguing novel. It’s impossible to care about these two couples the way you could care about Marianne and Connell in Normal People. The epistolary chunks hobble the story with unimpressive philosophising like “human beings lost [the instinct for beauty] when the Berlin Wall came down”. Beautiful World will interest you in exact proportion to your interest in the cultural phenomenon of the Great Millennial Novelist Sally Rooney.

“People who intentionally become famous — I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it — are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill,” says Alice, and she does have a point. So why doesn’t Rooney follow the example of Thomas Pynchon and embrace the mystique of life as a literary recluse? Why pose for the Guardian holding an owl? Why the pop-up shop? Rooney’s success is deserved. Her celebrity is optional, and — judging from the gulf between Beautiful World and her other novels — it’s the least interesting thing about her.

Yet how dull “the literary phenomenon of the decade” turned out to be — and what was stranger, how knowingly, coyly dull. I had assumed the almost insolently underwhelming name on the tin — Normal People — was an ironic joke, and that the contents would be abnormally original, with unusually vivacious, insightful writing.

I was wrong. Rooney isn’t into vivacity, as her dour expression and flat, understated style of writing might suggest. What she is into is sex, and most particularly the tears and apologies that seem to surround it for the young erotic adventurers of today. The result is a prose I found hypnotically low-pulse.

But with over a million copies sold worldwide, first prize in the Costa and Waterstones Book of the Year and plenty more accolades, Normal People clearly answered to a global appetite. The TV adaptation was inevitable, and lo, it was released last week to instant roaring success.

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Once again, a dutiful investigator, I found myself glued to the BBC’s version of Rooney’s coolly flat world while also bored. What is it about this story that has captured us so?

Most obviously, it is the sex, which manages to be both ‘hot’ and firmly didactic — just how we moderns like it. Most episodes — and there are 12 — contain what can only be described as great coitus between the lead characters, with emotional intensity driving on the obvious physical urgency and pleasure. At first, in school, the popular Connell (Paul Mescal) is too embarrassed to be associated with the weird and friendless Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones), and so their sexual relationship is secret. Though Rooney and now the directors work hard, and successfully, to render this relationship tense and meaningful, they obviously have a keen eye for the plainly arousing.

There is something unsettling, almost dishonest in this. Packaged as the sometimes difficult, vulnerable-making and above all authentic sexual experience of ‘normal people’ (i.e. ‘damaged’ people, of which more later) these are not the kind of sexual experiences I remember from school and university — and there were plenty of ‘normal’ (i.e. ‘damaged’) people in both places. In the first place, their looks and the calibre of their sensual experience for their age are exceptional.

Readers of the book had to infer from Connell’s thoughts that Marianne is in the essentially sexy category of unpopular girl, despite being bullied about her looks at school. By contrast, the makers of the TV programme settle the question of their universal sexual appeal immediately: Edgar-Jones is a knock-out — the sinewy, delicate, quiet and mysterious ying to the big handsome, blue-eyed athleticism of Mescal’s Connell. Both are equally libidinous, so that the production often feels more like high-end pornography than drama, even if the sex escapes gratuitousness by marking the waning and waxing of their relationship. Either way, their goings-on are hardly ‘normal’; nor are they ‘damaged’. They’re enviably perfect.

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I was discomfited to note the quiet but firm moral running through the production: great, truly hot sex is the reward for beautiful, and above all thin girls with stylish hair — Marianne’s fringe and charcoaled eyes, along with her delicately picked-out clavicles and hip-bones, quite often steal the limelight. The same moral is maintained in the sex scene between Connell and his college girlfriend Helen: here is another toned, fatless woman with long brown locks that sexily tousle with sweat as she enjoys Connell. Meanwhile Marianne’s less beautiful friend Peggy (India Mullen) is sexually invisible, and her best friend — a very overweight, sensible girl called Joanna (Eliot Salt) — is rendered entirely mumsy, a foil. Nothing happens to her.

If the sex in Normal People silently reaffirms the enduring gold standard of female slenderness and the kind of sultry mysteriousness evident in Marianne’s long, dark silences, then it is very explicitly didactic in other ways. All sexual exchanges are peppered with nervy utterances of ‘is that OK?’, ‘if that’s OK’, ‘if you want me to’ and so on. The sex between Marianne and Connell is as much about trumpeting the virtues of constant and enthusiastic consent-seeking — indeed of the softly softly feminist man’s approach to shagging — as it is about raw desire. “If you want to stop or anything we can obviously stop, if it hurts or anything we can stop, it won’t be awkward, just say,” says Connell in the first sex scene, when Marianne loses her virginity. This was an object lesson in smart sex for the woke age — take no steps without express permission, especially where women are concerned.

Marianne and Connell’s virtuous sex scenes gleam with a knowing, seductive touch because they were expertly choreographed, emotionally and physically, by an intimacy coordinator. Since MeToo, as sensitivities around consent have been heightened, intimacy coordinators have become mandatory on most major productions to ensure no liberties are taken filming sex scenes and that the actors feel ‘comfortable’.

For Normal People, the BBC hired the sought-after Ita O’Brien, a former dancer and actor who oversaw the action in fellow teen bonk fest Sex Education. Just as the characters constantly seek mutual assurance of emotional comfort, the intimacy coordinator ensures the actors feel just as comfortable.

The language of intimacy coordination, with its emphasis on constant emotional temperature checks, perfectly matches the ideology of the book and — at last — helps shed light on what is meant by ‘normal’. In a world obsessed with policing violated boundaries and outing emotional discomfort, ‘normal’ means either ‘weird’ or ‘damaged’ — which, therapeutic wisdom has it, are traits we should celebrate (unless they involve holding offensive political opinions). “How I act with [Marianne] is my normal personality,” Connell tells a jealous Helen in response to her question of why he is so ‘weird’ around Marianne. “Maybe I’m just a weird person,” he says, concluding a scene crafted to signify who he really belongs with (Marianne).

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Normal People has been hailed for its relatability, with the inference that we’re all weird, we’re all damaged, and we are all saved only by those who truly and authentically love us. Indeed love and damage go hand-in-hand, and emotional vulnerability has become the ultimate aphrodisiac. The scene in which Connell and Marianne’s love enters a new more serious phase revolves around her tearful musing: “I don’t know why I can’t make people love me.” Marianne hints for the first time at the abuse visited on her by her odious brother, confessing to a shocked Connell that she hadn’t told him yet because “I was afraid you’d think I was damaged”. Magic words. Connell’s love surges, as he tells her none of it is her fault and that she is loved. A rush of lust follows.

Later, following the suicide of a friend back in Sligo, and with frequent panic attacks, Connell himself seeks out counselling, and the therapeutic process lends the final episodes their dramatic thrust, winning plaudits from men’s mental health activists. Tick.

Normal People chimes with the growing consensus — even in Britain — that therapy wins all. Indeed, from Wanderlust to Sex Education, no contemporary British drama is complete now without an extended therapy scene. The therapeutic journey is also the dramatic heart of Dolly Alderton’s best-selling Everything I Know About Love, now being made into a TV series too (Alderton was runner-up to Rooney at the 2018 Waterstones Book of the Year Awards).

Neither the fascination with rendering the ‘true’ self fully transparent nor the belief that only through being vulnerable shall we be free are new. Freud unleashed on a mass scale the conviction that our ‘true’ drives lurk below external presentation, but it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that therapy culture and practices really began to suffuse approaches to everything from relationships to feminism to management. As observers noted at the time, this could yield a strangely closed-feeling, narcissistic system of interaction, in which self-discovery was the end point for all endeavours. By the mid-1980s, a series of new women’s magazines were targeting a readership that was, in magazine historian Anna Gough Yates’s words ‘vulnerable’, ‘self-critical’ and ‘insecure inside’. A fit description of the characters in Normal People.

Normal People is the perfect product for a generation taught to seek out and proudly lay claim to sexual and emotional vulnerability. In the past, sex scenes packed full of the considerate, careful hesitation we see here might have garnered laughter and shrieks of ‘get on with it!’. But today, virtue and the erotic go hand in hand. The message of MeToo seems to have won out: respecting boundaries is as hot as the sex itself.