Unfortunately, I Like It Too

Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, published in 2017, has been one of the great literary success stories of the Brexit and Trump eras, especially among readers who, like her main characters, are in their teens and twenties. Its popularity owes much to how incisively Rooney has updated the coming-of-age novel, or bildungsroman, for the current moment, when late, late capitalism finds itself entering a twilight phase.

In its classic form, the bildungsroman tied its protagonists’ dramas to questions of class status: Will Jane Eyre live in sin or marry and inherit a fortune? Will David Copperfield acquire a profession? Will the hero of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education become a revolutionary or a lawyer? Typically, the protagonists of nineteenth-century coming-of-age novels join the bourgeoisie, but that choice is less important than the fact that they have one to make at all. The coming-of-age novel itself came of age alongside capitalism, at a moment when white people with the money and time to write and read novels found it easy to imagine white people from all classes ending up on the winning side of life. 

As capitalism changed, so did the bildungsroman. Rooney’s publications to date, which have coincided with the Great Recession and a rapidly shrinking middle class, offer good case studies of this change. What happens to coming-of-age tales when young people who have been assigned little value beyond their capacity for labor no longer have any labor to perform? And how have changes to capitalism affected how the bildungsroman treats one of its key themes: generational conflict?

Answering these questions requires taking a detour through the twentieth century via a comparison between Rooney’s work and another classic coming-of-age tale published a little over sixty years ago: Bonjour Tristesse, by Françoise Sagan. Though marketers in the US were quick to dub Conversations with Friends the new The Catcher in the Rye, and Rooney a “Salinger for the Snapchat generation,” Rooney, who was born in 1991, is an Irish citizen, which makes her a European writer, whose influences include Colette, Marcel Proust, and Françoise Sagan. 

Bonjour Tristesse, Sagan’s own debut novel, offers a far better comparison point than Catcher in the Rye for understanding how Rooney’s and Sagan’s novels address the effect of capitalism’s shifting fortunes...