A Lover’s Theory of Marxism in Sally Rooney’s Romance Novels

It's that time again: Sally Rooney has written a novel. Her books are spoken of in such epochal terms — " the first great millennial novelist ," the New York Times has called her — that one forgets that, until this week, she had written only three: Conversations With Friends , Normal People , and Beautiful World, Where Are You . These are thoughtful, well-written books about young people falling in love, and they have attracted, with the logic of a lightning strike, a degree of mass popularity that is rarely achieved by what is marketed to consumers as "literary fiction." This feat appears to baffle even the author, a self-described Marxist who believes human existence is being eroded at every level by the "transactional framework of capitalism." Somewhat unwillingly, Rooney has become an emblem of a (perhaps imaginary) millennial ethos, one in which that generation's anticapitalist beliefs sit uneasily alongside its quiet but determined pursuit of a conventional life (traditional marriage, income stability, affordable housing) that appears to be vanishing. This tension seems to be exemplified by Rooney's own commercial success. The industry will not soon forget the yellow bucket hats that Rooney's publishers doled out to influencers in 2021 during the publicity campaign for Beautiful World, which also stationed a coffee truck bearing the novel's cover art outside select New York bookstores.

Unsurprisingly, with the hype has come criticism: that Rooney is writing the same novel over and over; that she is writing the upmarket equivalent of a romance novel ; that her prose is too accessible to be the stuff of serious literature; and, above all, that her professed Marxist values, much dwelt on in the press, are at odds with a theme as transparently bourgeois as romantic love .

Now, it is simply untrue that Rooney's prose resembles that of a commercial romance; her sentences are spare, exact, and disarming. Normal People, about a pair of lovers who cannot quit each other, frequently exhibits Rooney's ability to draw marrow from bare bones: "He looked up at her, directly, with total attention. She knew he was going to kiss her, and he did." As for the putatively oxymoronic character of a "Marxist romance novel," it is worth pointing out that Rooney has never claimed to be writing Marxist novels, only to hold Marxist beliefs. If anything, her belief in class as the structuring principle of society makes her more pessimistic about the role of the novel in socialist struggle. "If the book is turning a profit for shareholders, then the book cannot meaningfully be critiquing the system by which that profit is turned," she said during press for Normal People , whose U.S. sales hit 1 million copies this year. "Even if the book is full of Marxist propaganda, it's still sealed off from any real political potential."

What Rooney has defended, quite vigorously, is what she sees as the novel's primordial connection to love, locating its origins in the early-modern tradition of "amatory fiction" that reached a higher synthesis in the work of Jane Austen. "If the stakes of the Greek epic are war and peace, and the stakes of the Renaissance tragedy are life and death," she argues in a 2022 lecture on James Joyce , "then we might say that, at least since Austen, the stakes of the English-language novel are love and marriage." Even Ulysses, for all its formal chaos, is ultimately for Rooney a low-stakes novel about the romantic lives of some young people in Dublin. Of course, Rooney is aware a novel may be about all sorts of things besides love (technology, agrarian reform, whales); her point, I think, is that by engaging the reader's personal sympathies, the novel is always on the side of love, even when it has little of note to say about sex or marriage. "This, to me, is the beauty — we might even say the magic — of the novel as a literary tradition: its ability to involve us emotionally in the relationships of its protagonists," Rooney concludes. "I think we have to admit that the feeling itself is important."

So we may safely assume that Rooney would have no problem being called a romance novelist — after all, she believes the novel is an "almost intrinsically erotic narrative form." But when critics say Rooney "merely" writes romance novels, they are not just accusing these novels of unseriousness. They are also accusing them of being commodities. Romance accounts for something like a quarter of all fiction sales in the U.S.; Colleen Hoover, author of the recently adapted It Ends With Us , outsold the Bible in 2022 . Indeed, the novel may owe an unpayable debt to the marriage plot, but it was also arguably the first kind of fiction to undergo what Marx called "real subsumption" — the remaking of the labor process to suit capital's purposes. For instance, we might think of the centuries-long consolidation of literary conventions into easily identifiable genres — thrillers, mysteries, that latter-day chimera known as romantasy — as a way of automating the creative labor of novel writing in accordance with the demands of the market. This is one reason why, in our less generous moods, we write off the romance novelist as a hack, that is, an unskilled laborer whose job consists of pressing buttons and pulling levers: Our impression is that the millions of romance novels that are sold every year have basically "written themselves."

So in this criticism — that Rooney writes about love because readers love that sort of thing — we find an important, if largely unconscious, observation about the intersection of literature and capitalism: that the novel form and the commodity form are dialectically entwined, to the point that a given novel's literary qualities may be impossible to distinguish from its economic ones. The funny thing is that this is precisely what Rooney writes novels about. Her young lovers are painfully aware that love, like the novel itself, may traffic in stock characters and exhausted tropes; that love, also like the novel, may easily be reduced to a source of private profit within a punishing system of exploitation and domination. Over and over, Rooney's characters put their faith in love as a means of escape from the conventional roles assigned to them by society and by each other; no sooner have they achieved this than they are rudely confronted with inequalities of wealth, status, and power that are clearly fatal to their idealism — but not to love itself. I take this to be the modest provocation of Rooney's novels: the idea that love is real precisely because it is a product, one created by social conventions, by market forces, by systems of violence, and, behind all of this, by human beings themselves. This is not, I admit, a Marxist theory of love. It is something more unexpected: a lover's theory of Marxism.

Rooney's new novel, Intermezzo, is not her best work — that honor still belongs to Normal People — though it is a marked improvement on Beautiful World, whose experiments with autofiction can feel dull and moralistic in the way that autofiction so often does. (That book features a best-selling Irish novelist named Alice who is ambivalent about being rich and famous.) Intermezzo is a pleasant return to form: the free indirect style at which Rooney generally excels cycles among three characters, one of whom stumbles about Dublin in a Joycean haze of grammatical fragments. Plotwise, it is closest to Conversations With Friends, Rooney's 2017 debut about a 21-year-old bisexual communist who has a torrid affair with a married actor ten years her senior. Intermezzo reimagines this dynamic several times over, such that one is forced to use the shorthand of a dating site to describe it: Peter Koubek (32m), a human-rights lawyer, finds himself in a love triangle with Naomi (23f), a college student and sometime sex worker, and Sylvia (32f), a chronically ill English professor who broke his heart years ago. Meanwhile, Peter's younger brother, Ivan (22m), a possibly autistic chess prodigy, strikes up an improbable relationship with Margaret (36f), a program director at an arts center who is separated from her alcoholic husband.

As in Rooney's previous novels, very little happens. The drama is largely relational, as the Koubek brothers and their paramours wrestle with the conventions that pervade their lives. The awkward Ivan, who feels as if he has been created "with something other than life in mind," wonders how to express his sexual interest in Margaret without offending her. The unwritten rules of social interaction, it seems to Ivan, have always been more transparent to Peter, who can deliver legal arguments just as easily as he can chat up a woman at a bar. Margaret, meanwhile, spends most of Intermezzo concealing her relationship with Ivan from her mother and neighbors, fearing what her small town will think if they learn she is seeing a 22-year-old — a "desperately embarrassing situation" that seems to negate her career, her previous marriage, and her own personal values. "And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn't it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person?" Margaret asks herself as Ivan kisses her. "Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?"

This question lies at the heart of the novel itself. In his 1914 study The Theory of the Novel, the Marxist literary theorist György Lukács argues that the bourgeois novel as it emerged in modern Europe featured a critical split between the hero's interior life, which contained their moral ideals and unspeakable desires, and the "world of convention," a system of arbitrary rules that gave the hero's life objective meaning but was itself inherently meaningless. It is not, after all, a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife; at best, this only happened to be true among the landed gentry of Regencyera England, whose irrational customs Austen so carefully reproduced. Everything that drives the Bennet sisters to marry in Pride and Prejudice — the etiquette of courtship, the laws of inheritance, class relations between landowners and tenant farmers — all of these are what Lukács calls "recognized but senseless necessities," not organic expressions of human nature. It horrifies Elizabeth, for instance, when she learns that her prudent best friend intends to marry for "worldly advantage" rather than for love. "The more I see of the world the more am I dissatisfied with it," Elizabeth laments, "and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters."

What this theory suggests is that, by showing us people trying to reconcile themselves with an arbitrary system, the novel is constantly dramatizing its own struggle with the formal conventions that make it a novel. In Intermezzo, the first time Margaret sleeps with Ivan, the very inconceivability of the act fills her with a queasy elation. "Life has slipped free of its netting," Rooney writes. "She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person." Like Elizabeth Bennet, Margaret sees love as her best chance — maybe her only chance — to break free of the world of convention, to abscond from the collective fiction that is society and emerge into what Margaret, letting her young lover caress her hand at a restaurant outside of town, perceives as "the borderless all-enveloping reality of life." Yet convention has a way of reasserting itself. In her more sober moments, Margaret reminds herself that "life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence." Sure enough, learning that Ivan has told his brother about their relationship, Margaret cannot help but imagine with horror the kind of person Peter must think she is: "a middle-aged woman taking advantage of a naive grieving boy, and for what, for her own gratification, her own pleasure."

It is as if, on some level, Margaret grasps that she is a character in a novel, bound by its specific laws and customs (the requirements of the marriage plot, the classic romantic archetypes, the flattening effect of Rooney's prose), and all these strike her as an alien imposition on her very being. Love, in this sense, is the lover's name for the desire not to be fictional: It is a tunnel out of the novel that, being part of a novel, is always bound to collapse. Even the casual reader of Pride and Prejudice, for instance, knows that Elizabeth will fail to escape her circumstances, that she will get married precisely because she says she will not, and that she will fall in love with Darcy precisely because he is the "last man" she would ever choose . In accepting his proposal, she merely superimposes her vibrant inner life onto the dead world of convention, acting out of pure feeling while, as if by happy accident, making the most advantageous match in the entire book. This, I think, is what Lukács means when he writes that the novel's characters are "compelled by irony." In attempting to assert their freedom, they come face-to-face with their existence as characters; the senseless mass of conventions that looms overhead is ultimately the novel itself. It is no accident that Pride and Prejudice, however groundbreaking in its day, is now the comp of all comps in the romance industry, which is hell-bent on supplying readers with an abundance of mass-produced and utterly fungible Darcies.

For Austen, sexual desire formed the unspeakable outside of their intricate social conventions, whereas Rooney's characters, young and modern, feel the pressures of conventionality nowhere more acutely than in their sex lives. Rooney is known for the quiet urgency of her sex scenes, which are both genuinely erotic and, as one character puts it, "aggressively heterosexual" — that is, vanilla, domestic, and almost universally concluding in the bathos of male ejaculation. (No man orgasms in a Sally Rooney novel without apologizing.) Much has been written about the persistent ambivalence directed by her characters at any sexual habits they regard as "very strange things," to borrow Margaret's phrase. In Beautiful World, Alice reproaches Felix for watching "rough anal" porn on his phone, and the only lesbian relationship of any substance, encountered in Conversations With Friends, after pages and pages of straight sex, is chaste enough to satisfy Regency sensibilities. Sadomasochism is particularly suspect. Marianne's desire for her boyfriends to hit her during sex is repeatedly depicted in Normal People as a pathological response to her trauma, one that Connell's more innocent love will eventually cure her of.

But if Rooney's novels really are against kink — an open question, to my mind — this is only because they are generally against role-playing of all kinds. "I didn't need to play any games with you. It was real," Marianne tells the purehearted Connell, whereas with her sadistic boyfriends, "it's like I'm acting a part." The problem with kink in Rooney's novels is not its deviation from normative sexuality; it is the way it takes the living reality of love and handcuffs it to an artificial frame. "Look, it's different for your generation. You're all going around getting strangled and spitting in each other's mouths or whatever," Peter teases Naomi after she points out his dominant streak. "I'm thirty-two, okay, we're normal." But Peter is not condemning the eroticization of submission as such; he is objecting to the genericness of the sex acts in question, which he accuses Naomi's generation of adopting en masse like a new bit of slang — and which Peter himself has adopted with great, albeit guilty, pleasure. Real-life BDSM is more like a game of chess than a fight in the alley: a quirky subculture of enthusiasts acting out mutually pleasurable fictions. "We were both playing games," Naomi admits to Peter at the end of Intermezzo. "And yeah, I wanted to win, and so did you."

​​What really distinguishes kink is that it makes no attempt to conceal the formal conventions that structure it — unlike vanilla sex, whose tropes tend to be partially submerged in the fantasy of something natural, normal, or true to life. But they can always rise to the surface. When Marianne asks Connell to hit her during sex, the request disturbs him. Filled with shame, she flees to her family home, where she receives the desired act of violence from her older brother in the form of a broken nose — only to be rescued by Connell, who threatens to kill her brother if he ever touches Marianne. "I'm not going to let anything like that happen to you again," Connell tells her. Marianne lets herself become the shivering female victim of domestic abuse, while Connell strides easily into the role of the selectively violent male protector, and together they adopt a virtuous new sexual dynamic: "He understood that it wasn't necessary to hurt her. He could let her submit willingly, without violence." But the artificiality of these roles is not lost on Marianne herself, who despite settling into a "normal" sexual relationship with Connell cannot unsee the trappings of genre that contain them. "Was it just a game, or a favour he was doing her? Did he feel it, the way she did?" she asks herself. "Did he love her?"

In becoming "normal," Marianne has been forced to give up the illusion of having transcended the tropes and archetypes that have, in truth, been quietly sustaining her all along — in a word, her literariness. The literary novel is, as it were, the missionary position of literature: In order to pass itself off as a representation of "real life," it must deny the inherent conventionality common to all novels, whether "literary" or not. Compare genre fiction, where the same conventions may be used as selling points in marketing campaigns and openly consumed by fans.

The critic Sarah Brouillette has smartly pointed out that Rooney's novels are essentially competing with erotica for readers — something Rooney herself appears to toy with in Beautiful World. There, Eileen initiates phone sex with Simon by inventing a fictional encounter between him and his "little wife," a character she conjures for his enjoyment. Simon's little wife is sweet, naïve, and classically submissive; she and Simon have utterly conventional sex in their marital bed. At the last moment, however, the story takes an unexpected turn: "Just for a second or two when you're inside her, and she's trembling and shivering and saying your name, you're thinking about me, about things we did together when we were younger, like in Paris when I let you finish in my mouth, and you're remembering how good it felt." This sudden glimpse of Eileen's consciousness through the blinds of fiction is what makes Simon come. Of course, the reader knows the truth: Eileen is a fiction too.

This burst of reality, this precious flash of mutual awareness, is something of a holy grail for Rooney's characters. They prefer to communicate through looks and pregnant pauses, as if they were trying to overwhelm the seawall of language with a wave of private meaning: Later in Beautiful World, a stunning six-page flood of memories passes silently between Eileen and Simon when he catches her eye. Yet such "total communication," as Rooney puts it in Normal People, seems always to involve a disturbingly lopsided relation of vulnerability. Power, rather than language, becomes the medium through which the message is communicated. This is nicely illustrated by Ivan's exhibition match against the captain of the local chess club, which ends with the latter's silent agreement that his defeat is inevitable: "Ollie looks up at Ivan now and gives a little nod, and Ivan nods back." A nearly identical look will be shared by Peter and Naomi. After she is arrested for resisting her eviction, he bails her out and lets her stay in his flat, where they desperately make love. "Just use me," Naomi tells him over and over. Afterward, sensing that a "long pretence" has been dropped, Peter offers to lend her some cash: "She lifts her gaze finally to meet his. The feeling however futile and senseless is in its own way mutual."

This raises an unsettling question. Is the reality of love nothing more than one person's power over another? Ivan acknowledges that material things — money, sex, housing — have an objective reality that feelings of love or affection clearly lack: "Of course, whether or not there is a beautiful woman in his life who enjoys being kissed by him, he still has to pay rent: he accepts this." He tells Margaret about his stint working as a driver for a food-delivery app, when his interactions, however grueling, seemed to reflect a rational relation of use value to exchange value: "Someone wanted a Big Mac, and I brought it to them, and the amount I got paid was like, what it was worth to that person not to have to collect their own burger." The delivery service had no value outside its material context; its cost, Ivan understood, concealed a complex of social relations among himself, the customer, the delivery company, the workers at McDonald's, and so forth. "At least," he tells Margaret, "I knew what I was doing." Marx's name for this phenomenon was commodity fetishism: the way the products of human labor assume a "phantomlike objectivity" that obscures the productive forces churning beneath them. For the Marxist, the commodity is in fact a dynamic relationship between people that is only pretending to be a self-contained thing — a hamburger, for instance.

Rooney's protagonists discover that the same is true of many actual relationships. "Someone just seems like they have to be exploiting someone here," Peter thinks of Naomi and himself. "He her, financially, sexually. Or she him, financially, emotionally. It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it." After all, love is easily deconstructed from a Marxist perspective: It is ideology par excellence, an obvious means of inducing people to willingly reproduce the inequalities on which capitalist society depends. Who is more delusional than Elizabeth Bennet, who uses love to justify an economic system that treats her physical body as a means of production and will also entitle her to enjoy, without lifting a finger, the rent that Darcy charges his tenant farmers? In Conversations With Friends, Frances and her ex-girlfriend, both self-identified communists, text each other performatively about the contradictions of love, which promotes selflessness but more often results in the uncompensated transfer of goods or services. "Love is the discursive practice, and unpaid labor is the result," Frances texts. "I'm anti-love as such." Yet she is more than happy to accept the groceries bought by her wealthier lover, whose affection she pursues to the point of self-destruction. "You don't like to be reminded how powerful you like to feel," she tells him. Neither does she.

I suspect this is why Rooney's characters often try to imagine a totally disinterested kind of love, one that would sidestep the quagmire of material relations altogether. "Maybe we both thought we could get away with it," Peter thinks. "To be loved, yes, for no reason, with no imaginable reward." Ivan seems to experience a version of this with Margaret, who at first hopes that the pair might find a way to "show each other affection and understanding" while promising each other nothing. But Ivan realizes he cannot even speak the words I love you without introducing his own needs and wishes into the situation. Then again, what is a relationship other than these needs and wishes? "Christ commands us universally to love one another," Peter reminds himself, but this feeble call to agape is just a half-hearted way of trying to rationalize the fact that he loves two women at once. Marx, as it happens, had little patience for the idea of universal love. "Love is an uncritical, un-Christian materialist," he wrote in 1845, shortly after marrying his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen. What he meant was that one falls in love not with the abstract idea of humanity but with a particular person, and that this person will always belong to the same material world where labor, money, and all manner of contingent and highly specific desires hold sway.

The lover thus shares with the Marxist a certain drive to demystify, to push past the curtain of ideas and uncover the real forces at work — to discover "the rational kernel within the mystical shell," as Marx put it. This discovery comes at a risk: There is no guarantee one's desires will align with those of the beloved. When Marianne asks Connell to hit her during sex, she is effectively reneging on the promise, made only moments before, that he can do "anything" he wants with her. Her general willingness has narrowed into a particular will, and this burst of Marianne's reality — the reality of her desire as the complex expression of the class guilt she feels toward Connell, her alienation from her body, her history of childhood abuse — forces Connell to reckon with the conflicting reality of his own desires. In short, the young lovers realize something important: They possess at all times the capacity to want different things. Love boasts no inherent magic by which these differences may be neatly expunged; each one must be resolved, or left open, in the total concretion of experience.

That is the heart of it: To be loved for no reason is not to be loved at all. In recent years, Rooney has flirted with the idea that the novel, by asking us to love fictional people that will "never love us in return," provides readers with a unique opportunity to practice a kind of love for one's fellow man. "When I read books, I do experience desire: I want Isabel Archer to be happy, I want things to work out for Anna and Vronsky," Alice writes in an email to Eileen. There is something to this. At university, Connell finds himself strangely agitated when he is forced to leave off at the awful moment in Emma when Mr. Knightley appears on the brink of confessing his love for another woman: "It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him." Yet Connell of all people, whose pretentious classmates use novels to seem superior, should know that the love of literature is hardly disinterested. One can certainly convince oneself, as Elizabeth does with Darcy, that one loves Pride and Prejudice for itself and not because loving it can make for an appealing personality trait. Rooney's own career gladly testifies to the novel's uses as a marker of status or generator of profit. One loves her novels, if one loves them at all, with no greater selflessness than Naomi, broke and homeless, loves Peter — or vice versa.

Is it even true that the novel cannot love us back? I am not so sure. We will certainly have a hard time defending this idea to the thousands of readers who will wait in line for hours to tell Colleen Hoover that her novels have "changed their lives." Rooney has lamented a literary culture that fetishizes the author's "real" life over the substance of the work. "What do the books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralising specificity?" Alice asks Eileen. "Nothing." But the reader who searches for the author within or behind the work is also doing precisely what the characters in a Sally Rooney novel learn to do: She is refusing to see the novel as an abstract quantity. She is insisting that it is a relationship between people.

This may strike you as a surprisingly rosy account of mass consumption under capitalism, especially from a critic who keeps quoting Karl Marx. And it's true: The fact that love consists of nothing but real relations between real people who all inhabit the same real world means that love, for a person or for a novel, will never be an escape from conventions or a relief from power. But this fact about love, what we might call its demoralizing specificity, is also the best evidence we have that love exists. I do not think we will ever be able to imagine love outside of capitalism unless we are first able to imagine love within it. Then again, I just got engaged.