I Have No Opinion at All about Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney has a book out this fall, and for a few weeks it was absolutely unavoidable for bookish types. The marketing machine was turned up to eleven.

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I realized that I have no opinion whatsoever on Rooney’s work, and I may be the only person in the country—maybe in several countries—who is completely neutral on this topic.

It reminded me of my husband and playing spades.

When we were in college, my friends and I got hooked on spades. That is not some cool ’90s street drug you’ve never heard of; that is a card game that your great-grandparents probably played. It’s a trick-taking game with two sets of partners. We drank cheap liquor, as college students do, and took tricks for hours.

But not my boyfriend, who would become and still is my husband. He was not interested in playing spades at all. The more we proselytized the Church of Spades, the less interested he became. Like, from zero interest to negative interest. The more we begged, pleaded, cajoled, teased, the more resistant he became. But not angrily so, just sighingly so. This seems like the correct response to our insistence that it was the greatest game ever invented and that he was being uselessly stubborn. Lucky for all of us, he had other friends playing other games, and he would go hang out with them while we drank and played spades as if we were mid-century salesmen blowing off steam on a Friday night.

How my boyfriend-now-husband felt about spades is how I feel about Sally Rooney.

I am not ignorant of Rooney’s oeuvre. I have read reviews of her books and interviews with the author, plus hot takes and cool critiques. I see how her work contributes to the geist of this zeit. I have other books to read just as my husband had other friends. I haven’t read Rooney’s work, I don’t know that I will read her work, and from what I’ve read of her, I don’t think she really cares about that either way, which I do kind of admire. So I do have one opinion of Rooney after all.

My husband, for the record, has never played spades.

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