ON THE SAD WHITE WOMAN GENRE
There’s a certain subset of contemporary books I’ve branded the ‘Sad White Woman’ novel - the archetypal purveyor of this style is, to me, Sally Rooney. The characteristics of this genre are: general plotlessness, a fetishisation of intense interiority coupled with a contradictory (or perhaps, co-constitutive) recognition of the collapsing ‘I’ in late-stage capitalism, the self who is hyper-aware of the fragility of selfhood. The Sad White Woman checks her privilege, she knows the world is collapsing because of human greed - but she isn’t moralistic about it, she’s vaguely ironic, she’s politically aware but she would never be passé enough to engage in earnestness. If the ‘end of history’ has already happened, the Sad White Woman emphasises this by engaging in the end of narrative - nothing happens, and nothing keeps happening, some people fuck, and then the book ends.
Contrary to everything I’ve just said, I genuinely enjoyed all the books I’ve read by Rooney. They’re frustrating, but the writing is imaginative, and the dialogue is always crisp and precise - almost as if it has a glossy sheen, sparkling on the page, since actual emotions can’t be articulated by the Sad White Woman protagonists it’s replaced with an abstract, aesthetic wit. This is why my favourite Rooney novel was Beautiful World, Where Are You - I loved the emails, the snippets of self-awareness and the way they talked about art, and the world. Like when Rooney wrote: “And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?” - I actually physically snapped my fingers like a turtle-neck wearing, menthol smoking, art student at a dimly lit spoken word poetry event. This is what I mean by dialogue that is engineered with precision - it is surgical, it cuts to the heart of the matter with no concern for the surrounding tissue. But, this is perhaps also the source of my frustration with the Sad White Woman crew - the ceaseless first-person-ness of life, death and everything in between. Any relationship or landscape or conversation is refracted in spiralling lines through the disconsolate self - which might be an honest interpretation of how interpersonal dynamics work, but it’s also so boring to me. Where’s the catharsis? Where’s the moment when you move outside of yourself, when you look at a person or a tree or a palm in yours and understand that life is more than all your thoughts about life? Where’s the moment when you feel something that might not be coherent, but is good and clean and complete? What’s with all this fucking ambivalence? Be sure about something! Cry loudly in restaurants! Even the first-person has to be a fucking person in the world! Why are you so endlessly, Freudian-ly inside yourself?
I just think I fundamentally disagree with the Sad White Women on the messiness of human emotion. For me, it is beautiful and unrestrained, the haunting realisation of the largeness of us all, all our various multitudes. For the Sad White Woman, it is an isolating thing, facilitated by a constant projection of what you feel onto the people you love. The core of the self is a decadent, vaguely empty ground upon which no trespassing is permitted. I think this is also very Western - echoing the collapse of any kind of community, the relationships in these novels function under a strict logic of separation, always him-and-I or her-and-I or her-and-him, there is a lack of any kind of us-ness. Virginia Woolf wrote a brilliant and scathing and bitchy critique of G. Lowes Dickinson in her diary that I return to obsessively - she said of his writing that it was: “Always live in the whole, life in the one: always Shelley and Goethe, and then he loses his hot-water bottle; and never notices a face or a cat or a dog or a flower, except in the flow of the universal.” This is my problem with the Sad White Woman genre: everything is in the flow of the fragmented self, there is no outside, it’s all in, in, in. Like, in Conversations with Friends, there’s a scene where Melissa finds out Frances is sleeping with her husband - so she sends her an extended, intellectual, condescending email. That’s it. No screaming match, no accusations, no actual moment of release, just endless tension that ends with a slow fizzle rather than any kind of bang. Personally, it made me want to light shit on fire. It’s so dramatic when the characters are in their own minds, but on the outside it is so veneer-like, so superficial that you just want to shake these people and demand that they act like they’re fucking alive.
Of-course - this is the point. This is the disease of modernity. Nothing real exists on the surface, to the point where it makes you feel that nothing under the surface is real either. There are two responses to this condition. The Sad White Woman genre is the first response. The second response, I can locate in a very specific poem by Maggie Smith - ‘Good Bones,’ about introducing the world to her children. It goes:
“…I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.”
Another poem, along similar lines, is Kim Addonzio’s ‘To The Woman Crying Uncontrollably In The Next Stall’ - which ends with the phrase: “listen I love you joy is coming.” There is here, an acknowledgement of general civilisational collapse, but it is met with a renewed insistence on the radical capacities of joy, connection, love, care. The critique I have of Sad White Woman novels is not just an aesthetic one, it is a political one - if the self is the product of some weird mathematical formula multiplying capitalism, gender, race, and family trauma, and there is no outside the self, then we are claustrophobically, inescapably, trapped in the systems which oppress us. Sad White Woman novels are like scribblings on the wall inside the cage of modernity, like existential angst graffiti - the poems I quote insist on an outside, on love and joy which are complicated and messy but possible, always possible. Katie Faris wrote a poem that stuck with me, also - it ends with the lines:
“Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself, in the midst of a burning world,
to offer poems of love to a burning world.”
This is coming, I believe, from a place of liminality - an inside/outsideness - a burning world but a loving self - my capacity for joy exceeds the joyless world - it is another universe, a poem about itself, a site of radical force in which I am the center of possibility. The Sad White Woman novel is not about late stage capitalism, so much as it exists limply within it - it is the limpness, the absence of any resistance, or even any acknowledgment of the possibility of resistance, which makes this genre the exclusive domain of the white woman. The Sad White Woman genre is living inside the master’s house, looking at all the master’s tools and going - oh, there’s no way to fix this, fuck it let’s be ironic. Showing a mirror to the world might be important, but it is not as interesting to me as taking a hammer to it, or a lighter - breaking this shit down, lighting it on fire, being happy and devastated and in love and grieving and outside, outside, outside. There is more to the world than ennui. There is the flower, or the face, or the cat, or the dog, or the hot water bottle - and that has to mean something to us, something wilder than we can imagine, something where we can be messy and human without being symptoms of diseased society, or a disintegrating self. I am aching for novels that are expansive, resistant, untamed, in tune with selfhood enough to break its shackles - I want to go outside, outside all of it, cosmically and socially and lovingly outside. I want to exist with the second-person, the third-person, the fourth, the fifth, always within reach.