DeWitt, Rooney, Tolstoy and Gary Kemp, Is Culture Dying?, Against Re-reading, The New Sincerity, Death, World Literature 1600, Cecil the beagle, Totoro, Good Bad Taste

The irregular review of reviews vol. IX

YOUR NAME HERE BY HELEN DE WITT IS BEING PUBLISHED NEXT YEAR

Such good news.

Rooney

There are three basic errors in Ann Manov’s TLS review of Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. First is not Naomi who wears the lambswool sweater and tortoiseshell hair clip but Sylvia. This seems trivial but there is quite a distinct aesthetic between the two women which relates not only to their socio-economic status and cultural capital but which is a standard method for identifying and distinguishing romantic characters, as in Midsummer Night’s Dream and innumerable other works. Why should Rooney not use this technique?

Second a human rights lawyer would feasibly teach basic EU competition law and contract law. Peter explains that his legal practice includes equality and employment rights but also has a commercial side. From his conversations, he seems to practice judicial review, also. This is quite normal! Look at some profiles of Dublin lawyers and you’ll see human rights listed alongside other disciplines like regulation, employment, personal injury, and so on. Some human rights lawyers are former corporate lawyers. Some combine corporate law and asylum law.

Finally, and most importantly, Ivan is not a “fascist” or “incel” those are outdated misperceptions that other characters have of him. Manov is trying to expose some glaring inconsistencies in the fact that Ivan is described as a “creep” and a loser but is also seen as handsome and has girlfriends. The gross irony here is that Ivan is clearly autistic—or has autistic cognitive traits—and is often misunderstood by the normies around him who think he is “weird”. Manov has failed to read the character and has reacted to him as the normies do. Once you see this, Rooney’s narrative techniques make much more sense as well. Alas, all Manov has to say about that is to make a pointedly lame joke about it being more Yoda than Joyce. (I will be writing about this soon.)

Manov complains that Rooney’s characters make “juvenile confessions of affection” and “it will be seen as some sort of accomplishment that she writes about characters who are not literature students at, or graduates of, Trinity College.” Ordinary people do make juvenile confessions of affections! Why shouldn’t that come into literary fiction? And what obligation does Rooney have to get beyond literature graduates at Trinity College?

Manov complains about the “generic dirty talk” of the sex scenes without noting that they derive from the amatory fiction in which Sylvia is said to be a specialist (she is a literary academic). Rather than being merely cliched or trite, Rooney is writing in a mode that Manov isn’t interested in. It is perfectly acceptable to dislike that mode, but it is a weak and mean-spirited form of criticism—in theTLS!—to be so dismissive without even noting what it is you are dismissing.

Manov says Intermezzo has the form, but not the content, of a novel of ideas. A neat remark. But in truth all novels are novels of ideas, as Penelope Fitzgerald said. I would prefer to read serious criticism about that.

Is Culture Dying?

I found Olivier Roy’s book The Crisis of Culture vague and unprepossessing but

Ian Leslie

’s review was quite the opposite. Ian agrees with Roy and summarises him neatly.

Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another — say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.

I think that rather than de-culturing we are culture-shifting. I was in Oxford when I read Ian’s piece. Plenty of culture there! Try going to Lichfield or Dorset. Indeed, the more un-London the place you visit in the UK, the more you feel like deculturation has been resisted.