Hip bones — bones of all kinds — are clearly visible in Sally Rooney’s fiction. Frances, the disaffected poet of “Conversations With Friends,” looks in the mirror and sees that her “bones still stick out unattractively on either side of her pelvis,” while the talented but misunderstood Marianne in “Ordinary People” wears a dress with the front cut too low, making her pale collarbones look like two white hyphens.
Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, is published today. Intermezzo mentions that the supporting character has a “short, plump” body and a “full, handsome” face. But the real action, as usual, is directed toward the thin characters. This time it was a young, thin, quivering man! Although Intermezzo broadens Rooney’s understanding of the body, as in the previous three novels, thinness is ultimately a factor in the narrative framework.
Rooney repeatedly describes a particular body, what message is he sending? Rooney’s female protagonists frown, faint with hunger and tremble during sex, while the male protagonists react almost erotically to their fragile bodies and feelings of weakness. In Normal People Connell marvels at how Marianne’s body feels “so small… and so open” during sex, and in Beautiful World the bisexual gangster Felix, confesses to his love Alice: “Every time a girl asks me to open a jam jar, I fall in love with her.”
Thinness is not explicitly glorified, but its ubiquity makes it feel like a prerequisite for sexuality. Rooney is justly praised for his precise and concise enunciation, which focuses on “[Francis’s] firm, upturned stomach,” Marianne’s “narrow and delicate” body, and Eileen’s “slim white arms were like reeds, like branches.” (Meanwhile, the thighs of a female character who appears in “Conversations with Friends” are described as “bulging like whipped cream.”) Intermezzo’s 20-something Naomi, a student and occasional sex worker, is a tough, less airy protagonist whose lover considers her a “carnivore” who stuffs herself into “family-sized bags of Doritos.” As she ate, we noted the “smooth bulge” of her prominent ankle bones.
Most writers tend toward some degree of stylistic repetition, but these characters are not only thin, but often hungry. Francis drinks black coffee and makes a habit of working through lunch, while Marianne subsists on “an orange and a piece of unbuttered toast” all day. “Body” immediately evokes sympathy. But in Rooney’s world, is it possible for an obese — or even extremely thin — protagonist to suffer without reliving the pain of being small? If a woman’s appetite doesn’t wane and her bones don’t show, does her pain matter?
Of course, there’s no requirement that Rooney populate her novels with fat bodies as a sham of inclusivity, even though those bodies make up nearly half of the US population. But consider a reversal: if another writer, even one as well-known as Rooney, included the same number of fat characters in her novel, the stylistic choice would be questioned, but Rooney has not. Rooney’s slender character is able to disassociate from her body in a way that fat people are often deemed incapable of, solely because our physical size has always meant a lack of discipline to which thin people are immune.
“Thin” has long been an underused notion in literary fiction. As novelist and journalist Emma Copley Eisenberg wrote in The New Republic, thinness “is often associated with morality, fatness with immorality,” and “characters are often fat, which, in essence, tells the reader that they are vulgar, weak, evil, cruel, stupid, unimportant, or mentally ill. You weren’t there in the first place.”
Finding yourself outside the narrow space Rooney creates for her protagonists, depending on your biography or identity, is not unique. In a 2021 article in Electronic Literature entitled “I love Sally Rooney’s novels, but they’re not written for me,” Malavika Kannan said Rooney’s focus was on “white, thin elites — well-educated women and magically attractive lovers.” She wonders, “Where are the normal people of color?” Still, the emphasis on physicality in Rooney’s characters makes you wonder if there is such a thing as a Rooney heroine. After all, one of the hallmarks of Rooney’s protagonists is the deliberate disappearance — into an affair, into BDSM, into friendship, or, indeed, into the emptiness of one’s own body — which fat people can hardly afford. The world clearly wants us to shrink or disappear, and we ourselves may want the same, but we are almost always visible.
Novels certainly don’t need to reflect their readership, and as a fat reader I no longer crave empathetic, mature representation as I did a few years ago. But when I met another protagonist who dreamed of a better, more principled world, I wondered where fat people fit in, or more importantly, where we don’t fit in.
