Actually, it’s 2026, so, with respect to the culture, we can say everything’s mid. The word had one of its early literary breakthroughs in the Winter 2023 pages of n+1, where it helped answer the editors’ title question, “Why Is Everything So Ugly?” There, they use the word ugly less to mean conspicuously busted and more just to refer to a pervasive and insipid monotony, a “new ugliness” that, using the techniques of both mass production shoddiness and “Apple’s slick industrial-design hegemon,” has pincered us into a middle ground where “all that is solid melts into sameness.” Neither good nor bad, then, things that are mid are fungible: if we had a mid novel, say, we could replace it with any other mid novel and have what feels like the same experience, something people who like to read about the state of the novel have known for at least fifteen years, as, in the September 2010 pages of London Review of Books, Elif Batuman, reviewing Mark McGurl’s 2009 book The Program Era, wrote:
The continual production of ‘more excellent fiction … than anyone has time to read’ is the essence of the problem. That’s the torture of walking into a bookshop these days: it’s not that you think the books will all be terrible; it’s that you know they’ll all have a certain degree of competent workmanship, that most will have about three genuinely beautiful or interesting sentences and no really bad ones, that many will have at least one convincing, well-observed character, and that nearly all will be bound up in a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about. All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! Who, indeed, has time to read them?
Batuman’s essay dropped at roughly the same time as n+1’s own inquiry into the state of the novel, “MFA vs. NYC,” and with the literary world remembering how sick it is to have a named system to get mad at, to say nothing of two, so exploded a thrilling critical universe where even only tangentially related three letter acronyms could get their own spinoffs: the USA’s CIA, Amazon’s KDP, MTFs’ and FTMs’ HRT, PhDs, GPTs, GLPs, WFH, and all that fourth wave stuff — it’s a diverse cast, and everyone can pick their favorite: I’m partial to CFCs, those once ozone-destroying organic compounds now used mainly as a metonym for the environmental destruction still being wrought by MCM′, a Marxist thing I’ll soon try to explain, but unfortunately, at this juncture, can’t, as it is a convenient time to fulfill some outstanding contractual obligations: mid is originally stoner slang, after all, and unlike in the world of high art, where everything seems to be mid, the problem in our community is that nothing is: they made the weed too strong — we hear, from those still green smokers — too much of that damn THC! what happened to the mids that I could smoke with my friends when I wanted to get kind of dumb and watch videos and make jokes and stuff? now, whenever I get high and put on a generic romantic or even situational comedy, I’m fighting for my life in a thunderdome of Lynchian horrors, which is bad! the TV’s not supposed to be scary! this is supposed to be fun! Well, playing it fast and loose with the fine print of the DFW contract, what to do here but smile kindly and ask, annoyingly: have y’all tried smoking less of it?
Art, like weed, is not something you need to relate to passively: you get to decide how you do things, and getting lit and making different -coms into psychological horror thrillers on purpose is just one way to go about exercising your hard-earned humanist autonomy. In our contemporary era, in which constructing an identity out of appreciating high art offers negligible social and financial benefits, everyone’s free to relate to art however they please, so, if you decide you want to engage narrative art using, e.g., the hermeneutics offered by Sally Rooney in her essay about rereading James Joyce’s Ulysses — “indeed, past a certain point I do begin to feel like a little girl who has been allowed to play for too long with her brothers’ toys, and is now surreptitiously making the action figures kiss” — that’s cool, being a fujoshi’s chill, and if that’s not your vibe, you can always try being a critic: websites like Goodreads, Letterboxd, and Rate Your Music let you “go long” on all your favorite shit with whatever ekphrastic maneuvers you’ve got, or, if too busy, using a 0–5 rating, surely cleaner, and also easier to funge. It’s nothing unprecedented: like every other commodity, art commodities, like books, have a qualitative use-value and a quantitative exchange-value, the use-value being the concrete thing a commodity does to satisfy a human need — where the “nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination,” says Karl Marx, “makes no difference” — and the exchange-value being the “quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind.” The latter lets books and weed and smart mobile telephones all be exchanged for one another, in different proportions, and even better, we can have a special thing, money, that we can use to exchange for every other kind of thing — what’s better than trading a Commodity for Money, and then trading that for a new Commodity? If, for whatever reason, your need in life is to make more money than you could ever possibly need, it turns out a lot of Marxism starts with looking at things backwards, and if you started with Money, paid some people to add value to a Commodity with their labor, and then sold it for even more Money than you spent, i.e., Money′ . . . holy moly . . .
Let’s limit our scope to books for now, though, which can satisfy lots of different imaginary needs, and also tend to have standardish prices, which makes an internal system for comparing them useful when you’re shopping around. When the main thing you want out of a book is a satisfactory consumer experience, and you think that meaning, and thus literary worth, is somehow inherent in the abstract shapes of ink printed on a page — that is, objective — and not something found in the contingent human social relations those pages mediate — that is, historical — then a rating system, and all the commodity-like fungibility it entails, makes sense. As a translation back into the qualitative, mid’s mostly fine, making it a good example of what Sianne Ngai, in her 2015 book Our Aesthetic Categories, calls an “aesthetic category,” something that “indexes[] economic processes” and “gives[] us insight into the major problems in aesthetic theory that continue to inform the making, dissemination, and reception of culture in the present.”
We don’t even need to do any real retconning to point out the foreshadowing, as, even back in 1947, when Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer were publishing their book Dialectic of the Enlightenment, they saw that
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities
and
Representation gives way to universal fungibility
and
The identity of everything with everything is bought at the cost that nothing can at the same time be identical to itself
which is true for art, surely, and when applied to human beings, those
human beings are forced into real conformity . . . Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all others, so that it could all the more surely be made the same
meaning, generally,
Abstraction, the instrument of enlightenment, stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation
something easily observable when we got the Holocaust, the real historical event that the real Adorno and Horkheimer managed to really escape, and yet, were still, literally, really, pretty much always thinking about.
Please just be normal, we say, reacting to a left turn in our internet essay, as if our idea of normality weren’t just fungibility, socially applied. The “normal life” many desire is one that’s been pre-lived, vetted, and, of course, widely recommended, and, if just as in Adorno and Horkheimer’s time, “the regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped,” today, there’s a hole in the market for things that let you experience genuinely novel life, even if just for however long it takes you to read through someone else’s. Anyone with an internet connection can easily read anything they want, given that that thing already exists, of course, but this comes with the added challenge of not having the writing delivered preread: publishers generously provide all sorts of paratexts — blurbs, back cover copy, Amazon A+ content — to supplement the magazine reviews, essays, thinkpieces, and mentions that critics provide so that they themselves can supplement the amateur discourse you can find on Goodreads, Twitter, Hinge, Grindr, Feeld, or, really, any other part of your phone, which you can also take outside, into that beautiful world full of normal people and conversations with friends and . . . you know what, now that I write it all out, what the hell: it sounds nice! Maybe it’s good to do what everyone else does?
Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist who has written four novels and sold millions. Two of these novels have been turned into TV shows. Another was turned into a bucket hat. Early on in her career, the New York Times called her the “first great millennial author” while she described herself as “Marxist,” a combo that has confused some:
How could a Marxist writer be popular, says the anti-Marxist, when Marxism is bad.
Marxism’s good, actually, and I can stand this on its head, says the Marxist, who admittedly still needs to finish their onboarding, it’s just being popular that’s bad.
And what can the Marxist who wants to win say besides, scoreboard! It’s the 4th quarter, divas, and we’re getting our collective ass beat — some easy Ws are worth claiming: Sally Rooney is a Marxist novelist who uses the form of the novel as a way to investigate, in her words, “attractive young people in their twenties and thirties hanging around Dublin, doing no work, and thinking about sex,” as well as the city of Dublin, as well as other places Dubliners might come from or go to; she even uses some self-reflexivity to look into the practice of writing novels about all this, which is to say, Rooney is a worker who thinks about her work, a combo that clearly hits for many people, in part because she’s artistic, in part because she’s Marxist, but mostly just because she’s Sally Rooney: she has figured out how to do what György Lukács says Aristotle says “poetry (fiction)” is all about, that being being something that in its “characters, situations and plots not merely imitates individual characters, situations and actions but expresses simultaneously the regular, the universal and the typical.” Rooney is good at working with the “unity of the particular and the universal,” which is one reason that people who are not themselves attractive, young, and fucking their way through Dublin still like reading her work.
It’s also why others can always find an angle. Regarding Rooney’s particular interest in skinny women, Emma Spector, in a September 24th, 2024 Vogue article, writes “[t]here is, of course, no mandate that Rooney populate the landscape of her fiction with fat bodies as some kind of feint toward inclusion, even if those bodies do happen to comprise almost half of the U.S. population,” leaving us to wonder what the relevance of a U.S. population not currently comprising Sally Rooney could be to her work, before Spector goes on to ask us to “consider a reversal: if another writer, even one of Rooney’s stature, populated her novels with a similar number of fat characters, that stylistic choice would be interrogated in a way that Rooney is not,” leaving us sure that if part of being a great novelist is going to mean obligations to a population large enough to include both Americans and the hypothetical, it’s good someone else is handling it. Rooney isn’t the only novelist in the peculiar double bind of having to be both the exception and the example, but she is paid exceptionally well to be, hence The Sally Rooney Question: how did a local author, concerned mainly with the world immediately around her, become the Anglophone literary world’s youngest international rockstar? Surely, we could indulge in a little publishing industry insider baseball — they put a lot of money behind her — but really, this just explains how the Anglophone literary world has an international rockstar; it doesn’t explain why it’s her.
Something about Rooney’s different, and if you make the mistake of conflating Rooney’s thoughts with those voiced by her apparently autofictional avatars — like the very successful but still fundamentally dissatisfied novelist Alice, featured in Rooney’s third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) — you’d be forgiven for thinking she looks at “normal life” as something she doesn’t have: “[t]hings matter to me more than they do to normal people,” thinks Frances, the protagonist of Rooney’s first novel, Conversations With Friends (2017); “I don’t know what’s wrong with me . . . I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people,” says Marianne, one of the protagonists of Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (2018); “normal is not a word I often hear in connection with myself, but thank you,” says the aforementioned Alice; and Ivan, one of the protagonists of Rooney’s fourth novel Intermezzo (2024), abnormal type dude, so often feels like “a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand” that “it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him.” This repurposing of “normal” just goes to show something Rooney herself said once, in an interview with the critic Merve Emre, that normal’s contextual and “normality is a way of belonging to a particular community, in a particular place and time.” Indeed, those who have cracked open Normality: A Critical Genealogy, a 2017 book by Elizabeth Stephens and Peter Cryle, know that at least two people in the world have argued that even the very “concept of the normal as we know it today dates from no earlier than the mid-twentieth century.”
One of the virtues of thinking historically is you know things can change, often because people want them to: if Sally Rooney really wanted a normal life, she’d retire; instead, she’s toughing it out as a professional novelist, a job her character Alice describes like so:
Complaining about the most boring things in the world – not enough publicity, or bad reviews, or someone else making more money. Who cares? And then they go away and write their sensitive little novels about ‘ordinary life’. The truth is they know nothing about ordinary life. Most of them haven’t so much as glanced up against the real world in decades. These people have been sitting with white linen tablecloths laid out in front of them and complaining about bad reviews since 1983. I just don’t care what they think about ordinary people. As far as I’m concerned they’re speaking from a false position when they speak about that. Why don’t they write about the kind of lives they really lead, and the kind of things that really obsess them? Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism – when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times? Oh, and many of them come from normal backgrounds like mine, by the way. They’re not all children of the bourgeoisie. The point is just that they stepped right out of ordinary life – maybe not when their first book came out, maybe it was the third or fourth, but anyway it was a long time ago – and now when they look behind them, trying to remember what ordinary life used to be like, it’s so far away they have to squint. If novelists wrote honestly about their own lives, no one would read novels – and quite rightly! Maybe then we would finally have to confront how wrong, how deeply philosophically wrong, the current system of literary production really is – how it takes writers away from normal life, shuts the door behind them, and tells them again and again how special they are and how important their opinions must be.
Tea . . . one thinks, but with the impulse to gently remind Alice that there are many people who move through the world in a professionalized flume, living lives in which the vast majority of things they need to do are done for them, something which the recipient of the above quoted email, Alice’s Rooneyesque friend Eileen, actually more or less said to Alice some pages earlier, in an equally blockquotable email:
I was in the local shop today, getting something to eat for lunch, when I suddenly had the strangest sensation – a spontaneous awareness of the unlikeliness of this life. I mean, I thought of all the rest of the human population – most of whom live in what you and I would consider abject poverty – who have never seen or entered such a shop. And this, this, is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle, for people like us! All the various brands of soft drinks in plastic bottles and all the pre-packaged lunch deals and confectionery in sealed bags and store-baked pastries – this is it, the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations. All for this! This convenience shop! I felt dizzy thinking about it. I mean I really felt ill. It was as if I suddenly remembered that my life was all part of a television show – and every day people died making the show, were ground to death in the most horrific ways, children, women, and all so that I could choose from various lunch options, each packaged in multiple layers of single-use plastic. That was what they died for – that was the great experiment. I thought I would throw up. Of course, a feeling like that can’t last. Maybe for the rest of the day I feel bad, even for the rest of the week – so what? I still have to buy lunch.
And ain’t that also . . . tea: no matter how humanity decides to organize itself, its individuals will still have to eat and, if we want to keep things going as a species, also fuck. This, it’s been noted, is one social practice that Rooney has investigated at length, so much so that in the eyes of a critic like Becca Rothfeld, in Winter 2020’s Issue 21 of The Point, Rooney’s novels belong to the tradition of “commercial romances that specialize in a certain sort of fantasy fulfillment,” a comment Rothfeld makes with regards to the way Rooney’s first two novels end, which Lauren Oyler, writing in the APR/MAY 2019 pages of Bookforum, has concurred is “really cheesy.” To this, what can one say besides, she’s a Marxist! What could be a cheesier ending to the history of class struggle than communism?
In his 1981 book The Political Unconscious, the Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson takes up some longstanding attempts to discredit Marxism via its association with the narrative structure of romance, and then, looking backwards: “The association of Marxism and romance therefore does not discredit the former so much as it explains the persistence and vitality of the latter.” If normal readers want a happy ending for Normal People, it’s because they know, in their own lives, the only way they’ll get one is if they go out and do stuff, and if they continue to read novels or political theory in which the real contradictions they encounter in their real lives are neatly resolved on the level of content or form, it’s not their desire to live in a world without these contradictions that’s the problem, nor is the writing that resonates with that desire responsible for ensuring they act on it: they just have to go out and do stuff, something only they can decide to do. But how could they? Everyone’s too busy to volunteer, it’s said, and no job site I know of has any listings for “professional revolutionaries,” a phrase used by noted go-out-and-do-stuff guy Vladimir Lenin in his 1902 work What Is To Be Done?, a book I won’t spoil, except to say, it involves a group project.
Certainly, if the group is to encompass a global population no longer divided by classes or states, then it might need more than just one type of worker involved. The question of whether novelists should be Marxists or not — which Rooney and her work tend to prompt — is very simple to answer when you think literally everyone should be their own flavor of Marxist, their Marxism being seasoned by, among other things, the type of work they do, which is why the follow-up question of How Should a Marxist Novel Be is impossible to answer with anything besides a novel. Anti-Marxists tend to bristle at ideas like this, sometimes on account of a strong, abstract desire for “a diversity of opinion,” though, if that resonates, please just find some time to go to a meeting with at least like four Marxists there, and you may find that it’s worth thinking about the dialectical relationship between your eyes and your stomach. There are much better reasons to be anti-Marxist, but one of Marxism’s virtues is that you can struggle to change things together, including Marxism — maybe, with strength in numbers, we can pass a motion to finally change the name to “Materialism,” which is more accurate, and also comes with the important convenience of letting us keep some of the acronyms.
It is true, however, that no allegation has trailed Marxist writers as persistently as that of dogma: we know from our pre-class reading that Marxists are supposed to be self-serious, unthinking conformists whose intellectual monotony is matched only by their monochromatic outfits, a stereotype which, sometimes, for sure, but the Marxist tradition is itself an eclectic synthesis of other intellectual traditions, and it’s been flexible, as it’s adapted; not all flexibility has been good, but neither have all situations, and when it comes to the goal of ending class struggle and not just giving up on it, it’s a little too rigid to totally break, a fairly spine-like quality many have had opinions about, historically. Some of its more notable theorists, like Lenin and Lukács, have claimed that this spine is animated by Marxism’s soul, “the concrete analysis of a concrete situation,” and it is precisely this spirit that is why, along with a lot of the obviously terrible dogmatic bullshit Marxists often do, the tradition is, like many of its rivals, home to incredibly creative and surely diverse attempts by its various thinkers to think about their concrete realities using abstract intellectual tools they picked up from people who lived in totally different times and places, something evident in the fact that the vast majority of the world’s Marxists are not attractive young writers fucking their way through bourgeois Western social circles, but workers of all types in communist parties throughout the Global South. In our era of rampant abstraction, concrete analysis is a skill you do have to practice, but most people tend to already default to thinking out from the concrete world they already live in, which is why bourgeois intellectuals in the West tend to only think about the Marxists they meet in their worlds, or maybe the dissident writers who never got there, those that actually existing socialist countries have censored or even executed, which was both bad and not their only literary contribution: these same bourgeois intellectuals never seem to mention what those AES countries did for their general populations’ literacy rates, and the millions of readers and writers, their peers, who would have otherwise never existed: ideally, Marxist literary production doesn’t need to be scarce; the “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” as Marx once put it, is also a group project, thankfully, what with what’s known about many hands and light work and their dialectical relationship and so forth.
Maybe we’ll even meet some baddies? The abstract world of midness, in which every thing is fungible, and every person is a thing, is better known, in the Marxist tradition, by the word reification, and one way to feel less reified is to think about your love life: attempts to replace one genuine lover with another never really seem to work because love is a concrete social relationship that exists between two concrete people, and when you can’t get over someone, what you can’t get over isn’t the abstract feelings of loving someone and having them love you, things you can surely find elsewhere, but the particular, concrete shape those feelings took, and could only take, with the particular, concrete person you’re still in love with — this is why the on-again, off-again lovers Connell and Marianne, the protagonists of Normal People, are like that. A funny thing about Rooney’s novels is that while the sex is often bad — full of misunderstandings, miscommunications, and disconnections — the banter is exquisite, the kind of seamless, intersubjectively interpenetrative back and forth that reminds you of the sheer joy of human sociality as such, particularly flirting. More than the commercial romance novel, a literary tradition I haven’t investigated enough to speak on, the way Rooney’s dialogue chains together, linking its otherwise atomized speakers, always reminds me of Samuel Beckett: what do you and the rest of the reified do while you stand in the void, waiting for Godot? Chop it up, queen out, maybe . . . kiss . . . ? It’s something humans can always do, after all: we did it in the past; we do it now, in our “late-stage capitalist” present; and if humanity manages to finally overcome its long history of violent class struggle to usher in a new long history of something else, its contours, though impossible to detail concretely, I’m pretty sure will also involve shooting the shit — as Jameson once said, gossip’s “the proper activity of a human world from which nature and economic contradiction have been eliminated, so that our fundamental preoccupation can become that which concerns our own species and its peculiarities.” A world suffused with free speech does sound pretty beautiful, and while we debate whether or not we should wait for communist Godot to take us there, in Rooney’s novels, with their characteristic mix of lively dialogue and surgical narration, words can still be pretty free, especially when unquoted.
I don’t understand why you’d use literary criticism to give a grade, as art’s fairly pass/fail: either you want to keep it in your life or you don’t. Rooney’s work has stayed with me, in part because she’s appropriately romantic about the work of being a writer: she understands as well as anyone else that as much as going into a grocery store and extracting the totality of global economic social relations from any commodity you pick up is something you can do in real life, it’s also something you can do in a bookstore, even an online one, where cover thumbnail after cover thumbnail may only temporarily obscure the vast array of social worlds, organizations, and personal relations — and their problems — that, over what may or may not have been grueling years of hard labor, have become part of the book you’re thinking it’d be nice to read. Beautiful World, Where Are You is a novel whose otherwise conventional romantic narrative is formally ruptured by self-reflexive email correspondences in which the autofictional avatar characters go back and forth talking about and around all the contradictions of being a writer, and even person, in the contemporary moment: the inability to reconcile a life of contemplation and one of practice, the desire to have both bourgeois comforts and Marxist values, and so on, none of which are resolved at the level of the text, more so just by the fact of its existence: in the final analysis, its author — despite the many quandaries and difficulties its content suggests she encountered — still chose to write it. This is why, for Jameson, “for Lukács the most basic image of human freedom is not the hero of the novel, for he can never succeed in his quest for ultimate meaning, but rather the novelist himself, who in telling the story of failure succeeds — whose very creation stands as that momentary reconciliation of matter and spirit toward which his hero strives in vain.”
It makes sense for Marxists to care as much about the novelist behind the novel as the novel itself; the novel’s just the work, at the end of the day, and all work is done by workers. The “death of the author,” and the era of criticism that slogan inaugurated, wherein criticism seems to be largely about ignoring whatever the art-workers were trying to do in favor of what the critic-workers want them to be doing, has resulted in more bucket cancricide than revolutionary solidarity. It’s true that some of the novelists who lived in worlds structured by the idea that they were very important people ended up being cunts in need of humbling, but those worlds don’t really exist anymore, and being a cunt can be situationally useful — more to the point, those cunts were right that novelists are different from every other kind of worker, if only because every kind of worker is different from every other kind of worker, which is why they’re kinds of workers. Inhabiting your exceptionality with some amount of grace is mostly just about limiting its scope: unlike Rothfeld, I found Sally Rooney’s claim that “I feel pretty much like everyone else” both endearing and believable, as I am choosing to read that “pretty much” as encompassing most every sphere of human activity in which Rooney takes part, many of which I suspect she is, like anyone else, mid at; it just doesn’t encompass writing, which happens to be the only sphere of activity in which most people encounter her. But if a lot of time reading and thinking about Sally Rooney has taught me anything, it’s that if even a life spent inside a sphere of activity as stupidly professionalized, autonomized, and inaccessible as that of the professional contemporary novelist is a life from which one can extract the totality of global economic social relations, something someone’d probably only chose to do if they wanted to unautononize themselves back into it, then, it stands to reason, yours too, no?