ParadeRachel Cusk
FaberJun 2024 £14.99 198 S.
IntermezzoSally Rooney
FaberSep 2024 £18 448 S.

There are certain authors that one reads because they define a standard. For me, Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney are prime examples of such authors, and I would not hesitate to say that I am always enthusiastic to read their novels. Just in the same way that I would unabashedly visit the Eiffel Tower in Paris or eat a slice of Linzer Torte in Linz. Notwithstanding the obvious quality of these things, there are certain contingencies that may well affect how much I end up enjoying them on any given occasion: long queues, for instance—not uncommon for a new Rooney release. Still, I do not question the fact that I will purchase and read every new publication by these two writers, and I will probably find some satisfaction in doing so.

Nevertheless, the relationship to a standard does tend to be fraught, not least when it concerns a body of work as intellectually absorbing as that of Rachel Cusk or the meticulous machinations of Sally Rooney’s love-polygons. On the one hand, because both writers exceed the specific standards they set and thus become; and on the other, because they must necessarily fall short of standards in other regards. This impasse of the standard, the unresolved dialectic of too much and too little, is recognisable in the reception of the latest novels by these two authors. If I’m going to write about Rachel Cusk’s Parade some four months after its release in June 2024 and two months after the release of Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, I could use this time lag to say something about the way the works have been received so far. The reviews of both novels–in both English- and German-language media—have been lukewarm, to say the least, usually referring to the authors’ previous work as a benchmark that has not been reached by their present offerings.

The standard serves as a shared point of reference for varied positions—from the snappy Süddeutsche Zeitung or Guardian journalists with their hot takes to the more detailed, literary contextualisation of an author contributing to the New York Magazine or the London Review of Books. All of these place an emphasis on Rooney’s «voice of a generation» status and Cusk’s intellectual trajectory, traced across their whole oeuvre. Rooney writes exceptional sex scenes and razor-sharp dialogues; Cusk lays out the «truth» about «art» against the struggles of women’s lived experience. Both authors write eminently readable books; books that tell us what it is that we’re supposed to expect from novels these days.

We shall see about all that. In any case, this recourse to a standard often prevents critics from accepting a novel’s basic premise, committing to the endeavour it sets out for readers and taking seriously every decision made by the author as an integral aspect of the work and the universe it seeks to imagine. These are the details that, in both Cusk’s and Rooney’s latest novels, show us a deviation from the status quo that both writers established in their previous work. They are also the details that we as critics are tasked with reviewing, if we are not to let the standard breed a sub-standard form of criticism.

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«I See Where You’re Coming From»

Intermezzo is the fourth novel by Sally Rooney, who must have been around 26 when her first, Conversations with Friends was published to substantial acclaim in 2017. I was working in a large, independent bookshop in London in 2018 when her next, Normal People, came out. It felt like I only sold copies of that one book for the six months that followed. This was the basis of the 2020 television series of the same name, starring Daisy Edgar Jones as Marianne and Paul Mescal as Connell. Conversations with Friends and Normal People were both tender, well-balanced and monumentally successful novels about unnecessarily, yet inevitably overcomplicated romantic relationships, replete with a materialist slant and a scattering of zeitgeisty issues. Rooney is, as all the critics will constantly remind you, an avowed Marxist, pro-Palestinian stance included, and there’s usually some socioeconomic power imbalance between the lovers in her stories to get us thinking about the class struggle in our hearts.