Pat Kane: This book has given me back my lost appetite for the novel

After a recent mass unpacking, I realised that my library (or my sections of it) is rooted in political anxiety. Given inequality, exterminism, polarisation, destructive reactions of all kinds, my question to myself has obviously been: how can I materially know and grasp this dangerous world, the better to shift it towards peace and flourishing?

And if so, where do I have time for these imagined characters and dreamed-up worlds? In a time where the dreams and imaginings of despots and moguls are being concretely realised, by means of money and sci-tech?

Particularly in terms of the canon of novels that my brilliant teachers fed me at Glasgow, I fear I’ve been asking this question, as my shelves fill up. What use might hundreds of thousands of words, mapping endlessly subtle human relationships, have for any of these urgent crises?

READ MORE: Janey Godley's daughter calls for 'compassion' as mum enters end-of-life care

Truth be told, I do sneak in the occasional work of science fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future was a reasonably recent immersion.

But even that’s rooted in political needs. How could one envision a victory scenario for climate crisis, where global institutions actually got their act together? Robinson’s emotional relationships in this novel are decidedly in service of bringing about a carbon tax, or the refreezing of the Arctic. And this is very far from extensible fans fluttering over décolletages in Jane Austen’s drawing rooms.

In a way, they educated me too well at the uni. Histories such as Ian Watt’s The Rise Of The Novel made it clear how functional the classic realist novel was to the rise of the bourgeoisie in modern Western society. What better device to confirm their supremacy than a textual world surveyed by an isolated reader, placed in a commanding position over everything and everyone in that world?

So the novels that stayed with me from my education were those that blew the whistle on the classic novel – shattering the satisfactions of realism for readers, unsettling their overly-orderly view of the world.

(Image: Pixabay)

For me, that meant John Dos Passos’s USA, William Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury, and most of all James Joyce’s Ulysses. Instead of one commanding viewpoint, you get a polyphony of viewpoints and registers of language.

Instead of a prose style that aims to be a sheet of glass on reality, both inner and outer, you’re reading shattered and falling mirrors – closer to the actual turbulence of our modern experience.

(For what it’s worth, that was for me the great joy of the second Scottish literary renaissance of the 1980s and 90s. That a cohort of novelists – like Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, James Kelman and others – reached for these “modernist” techniques, in order to voice their vision of a complex contemporary Scotland.)

So beyond the utility of sci-fi, any new novel can only grab me if it’s formally ambitious in these ways. That’s why I was intrigued by the Irish novelist Sally Rooney’s interview with Fintan O’Toole in the New Statesman, promoting her latest novel Intermezzo.

Rooney comments: “In a way, this book came out of partly my reading of Ulysses, my love for that book, and also my sense that it demanded a response: it was like, ‘Oh, this is such a gigantic question mark over the form of the novel; how do I come up with some kind of provisional answer to that question?’ Not a definitive one, but here’s my attempt.”

READ MORE: Just Stop Oil throw soup over Van Gogh painting after protesters jailed

In this interview, Rooney intrigues me because she’s clearly operating with a theory of the novel.

“[Are we] putting on the costume of the 18th-century novel, but we’re making our characters send text messages and stuff, so that we know it’s supposed to be contemporary?

“The novel emerged to accommodate subjectivity under the extreme changes brought about by the capitalist system, and perhaps it can still do that for us today.”

SO I downloaded Intermezzo a few days ago. I’m well aware of Rooney’s millennial mystique – whether it’s the label “JD Salinger of the Snapchat generation”, or the binge-watch pleasures of the TV adaptations of Normal People and Conversations With Friends.

Rooney’s answers to her own literary challenges in Intermezzo are both dazzling and moving.

Her response to Ulysses is to create two distinct “streams of consciousness” for the leading antagonists, brothers Peter the lawyer and Ivan the chess player.

The former is slowly disassembling his high-flying career, in a haze of stimulants and sex: the style is Leopold Bloom on 5G. The latter, clearly on the spectrum and seemingly more fragile, shows himself to be capable of the most intricate forms of love.

Rooney renders Ivan in great sheets of inner argumentation – hyperrational on the surface, but shot through with an upwelling compassion and empathy.

These grief-stricken brothers are mourning, in a muffled way, the death of their Polish immigrant father. Around them, Rooney’s sociological acuity about modern Ireland is impressive.

Margaret, in her late 30s, is a manager in a state-subsidised arts centre: she becomes the lover of early 20s Ivan. The intensity and richness of her passion burns away the remnants of Irish small-town respectability.

Naomi, in her early 20s, is a financially dependent occasional lover of Peter (also in his late 30s). In an interview with The New York Times, Rooney explicitly defines herself and her peers by the financial crash of 2007-8.

READ MORE: Glaswegians furious as adverts appear on Duke of Wellington statue

Naomi’s chaotic lifestyle – involving eviction, addictiveness (if not addiction), and exploitable poverty – is a startling expression of the precarious status of her generation.

There is more than enough awareness, as expressed by these characters, of the structural issues which shape and define their lives.

All four of them can name capitalism, ecology and feminism as and when required, arising from their daily conversational flow.

But it’s difficult to read this novel and not concede that its pleasures are, to some degree, recognisably romantic. It’s love – or the mobius loop of sex and love, love and sex – that seems to be the basic weaponry to fight the lack of meaning in their late modern lives.

As a romantic, Rooney is as eloquent as any of her novelistic forebears. Margaret notes that her “life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person” in her relationship with Ivan.

Sally Rooney has said she was inspired by Ulysses by James Joyce

Intriguingly, Rooney talks in interviews that she is writing about “relationships that can’t smoothly be integrated into social life, so they remain beyond the parameters of language”.

Instead, she calls them “situationships … a lot of the relationships I’m really interested in seem to be lacking any fixed terminology: they can’t quite be pinned down by any definition, and that makes the people in them very uncomfortable”.

No spoilers as to the fate of these characters in their “situationships”, of course. But reading Intermezzo is to encounter a novel that is acutely aware of what it’s doing to, and for, the generation it’s swimming with.

Which is hardly the forging of a class ready to shape the world.

Instead, it’s a cohort that both acknowledges its systemic powerlessness, and reaches down to the most elemental resources of empowerment.

That is, the ability of humans to construct emotional worlds with and for each other. Call it capital “L” Love, if you like. And who knows if it points to a new politics?

In any case, I’m thanking Sally Rooney’s skill and ambition. She’s put an appetite for novels back in my life again.