2023-10-16 | Mr. Salary (or, love won't save you)
I recently read Sally Rooney’s first ever short story, published 2016 - Mr. Salary.
Smart, vaguely troubled woman in care of / correspondence with self-posessed somewhat older man.
Understated gestures about inner screaming. Happy ends, sort of.
Like many people Sally Rooney’s age (and, to some extent, general situation),
I very much enjoyed Normal People, and in almost equal measure
Conversations With Friends and Beautiful World, Where Are You.
She has a solid eye for interpersonal and societal structures and a sparsely conveyed electricity in correspondence (and sex).
She’s clever as hell and manages to be only sort of annoying about it, and at the same time manages to convey foundational, thoroughly unironic emotion,
which I think is extremely difficult to do. Normal People is the last book in recent memory that made me sob unexpectedly.
And so it was only while reading Rooney’s first, maybe more direct, effort that I
realized what frustrates me about the whole thing - despite the clever social commentary and style,
despite the well-sketched will-they-won’t-they, despite emotional resonance,
there is an underlying premise of resolution and sublimation in all-absolving romantic love.
I am cheering for love, thoroughly, in all forms (I am, when it comes down to it, at points nigh-on irritatingly romantic after all;
it’s one of many reasons I can’t stand Milan Kundera).
Love in all forms creates the world, and anyone who tried to come up with a better overarching framework has failed as yet to convince me and moreover was typically a tech bro.
Partnership is a deeply meaningful project to me; so are friendship and kinship and many forms of fellow-wandering.
It’s specifically the idea of love as deus ex machina that bugs me: love of all forms is the point and simultaneously
it will not magically solve things or absolve them and any piece of art that ends on that note falls short - of what exactly, I’m not sure.
(I recently had a conversation with a close friend of close friends whom I hadn’t met before and who lives in a different city,
which created a remarkable combination of trust and distance, and we talked over tea about intersubjectivity
and came to the conclusion that love won’t save you, and that that was a good thing.
The chat was a welcome safe pocket in an otherwise dreary, tense day).
(Of course Rooney’s books are more complicated, and have brilliant parts. There’s a point in
BWWAY when most tensions, romantic or otherwise, have been resolved and various people have
gotten their act together and one woman writes to the other something along the lines
of my partner seems to be generally content, he helps old people with their groceries these days,
which lets him complain about old people, and makes compost at the community garden, which lets him complain about compost. Relatable, and hopeful.)
Rooney’s essays about things other than love are brilliant, by the way.
Like her sharp, well researched, sensitive indictment of
landlordism in Ireland
(nicely taglined “The nice thing about being a landlord is you never run out of other people’s money”).
Or her essay, even if you beat me about competitive debate,
about the weirdness and hypocrisy dissonance of that world and also about what it actually means to pursue excellence.
(I once had a car named Mackie, short for Deus ex Machina. One of the cylinders of his boxer engine started failing on the
highway outside of Portland which was very far from where we had to go and my partner and
I learned a lot about boxer engines on wikipedia that trip. Mackie survived, barely, and was shortly thereafter sold to a retired airplane mechanic for parts.)