Literary Novels Are Using Romance to Talk About Politics
Books like ‘Normal People’ and ‘Immigrant, Montana’ are mixing love and Marxism to interrogate global politics
In the middle of Sally Rooney’s new novel Normal People, one of the protagonists, a young Irish college student named Connell, finds himself “in a state of strange emotional agitation” over a moment of romantic drama in Jane Austen’s Emma. His knee-jerk response is self-deprecating: “He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another.” But still, Connell feels drawn to the intimacy of these novels, akin to the intimacy he shares with his lover, Marianne. Their postcoital conversations move seamlessly “back and forth from the conceptual to the personal,” the political to the private. For Connell, raised by his single mother with “good socialist values,” that mostly means struggling to reconcile his affinity for Marxist theory with the bewildering realities of life under global capitalism.
Contemporary literary fiction has long tried to distance itself from romance, even to define itself by that distance, consigning the drama of “fictional people marrying one another” to its own disreputable genre. But in recent years…
