MixedVultureBeyond her spare, online-savvy, Tao Lin–esque emotionally distant prose, what’s crucial to Rooney’s generational role is that she mostly lets previous generations off the hook. The fact that her characters also speak the language of millennial socialism and Marxism while employing it as more put-on social identity than character motivator is, for their more fiscally conservative forebears, an added bonus ... The politics of Rooney’s novels are ultimately in service to her characters’ eccentricities. The emotional distance of her style applies equally to the books’ politics, making her more of a sociologist than a novelist ... the events that transpire in Conversations With Friends and Normal People don’t feel like lived experiences, exactly. They feel as though they happened in the past and a clever person is describing why and how they happened. It’s like a term paper on tropes turned into a novel ... The result is a hyperflatness, a hypersmoothness. There is relatively little agency at play, relatively few decisions being made ... None of this is meant to dismiss the novels because, in a way, Rooney has this all precisely right. The truest expression of what it feels like to live in the modern, postcapitalist political sphere is this oppressive feeling of lacking agency ... there is little revolutionary about Rooney’s politics, no scent of revolt — only oppression. Which is, I suppose, exactly why she’s so attractive to a generation that established the politics under which we all now live.
Adam Gopnik
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksGopnik is not insulating himself so much as he is protecting himself. And his latest memoir, At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York, shows how that attitude first came into play ...an important book for understanding both Gopnik the Man and Gopnik the Writer ...in standard Gopnik style, a memoir with a near-universal narrative; but it is also about how that experience allowed him to access — and to explain — meaning in high culture ...also a critical analysis of critical analysis ... Gopnik’s cultural criticism is a weapon against domination and against drudgery; and, if he seems pretentious because he focuses almost exclusively on highbrow culture, one need only look at how refinement better stakes itself as authoritarianism’s enemy.
