How real should fiction be?

The air of reality is not a question of endings.

I spoke to the marvellous Cal Flynn at Five Books about the best intellectual biographies.

In December I am hosting a salon with Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Philips about Freud, Shakespeare, and Second Chances.

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One of the criticisms made of Intermezzo was that Rooney doesn’t write about the really hard things in life. Her characters are always accomplished, attractive, and ambitious. She always ends with a neat(ish) comic resolution. It’s time, some reviewers said, for Rooney’s characters to grow up. Let’s see them actually in the middle of a relationship, dealing with real life. Let’s see them with some real problems.

This was unfair on its own terms. Rooney’s characters do have real problems. I wouldn’t switch places with any of them! And we might notice that many of the people making this criticism are approximately the age of Rooney and her characters. She used to be the novelist of their generation; now she’s showing them things they would rather not see.

But it is not unusual for critics to hold it a fault in novelists when their work makes too easy a picture of difficult realities. Genre romance novels are derided by literati, in part, because it is all too straightforward. And then they lived happily ever afterwards isn’t what actually happens. Many superior minds have held that tragedy is serious work and that comedy is crowd-pleasing. One of the dullest debates about literature is whether “happiness writes white”.

The idea that pulls the strings of these critiques is mimesis—art must reflect life. By showing us the happy ending, and no more, Rooney is failing to reflect life properly.