An earworm from the time of Covid: the sound of Connell and Marianne having breathless sex, bedsprings squeaking. I’m talking not about 2020’s hit TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling second novel, Normal People but about the relentless piss-take featured on BBC Radio 4’s Dead Ringers. After every few skits the show would cut to an audio clip of the two undergraduates going hard at it. The joke was in the repetition – an exaggeration of the extraordinary density of earnest sex scenes in Rooney’s writing. It was crude, cruel and very funny.
There is a wider than usual gulf between the writer Rooney wants to be and the writer she actually is
It’s all too easy to mock this serious- minded writer who dazzled the book world, aged just 26, with her single comic novel, Conversations with Friends (2017). Three novels later, that deliciously deadpan debut is starting to look like an outlier.
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