Sally Rooney, wildly successful author, is facing a backlash. Maybe I don't understand literary review format, but I understand a little about argumentation, and the basic claims involved seem pretty weak.
A thread of some examples (and welcome others, both pro and con). 1/
A thread of some examples (and welcome others, both pro and con). 1/
First a lot of the reviews are less about her book, then about Rooney as a literary phenomena, and what that represents. Which seems like a fine topic, but maybe better to separate from the actual book review. 2/
So for example, this Sally Rooney sounds like a complete narcissist. Complaining about winning awards! Oh wait, this isn't actually a quote from Sally Rooney, from from a fictional protagonist in her new book. That, uh, might be worthy clarifying. 3/ lithub.com/winning-the-ga… 
Claim: Sally Rooney is very overrated because of her whiteness and possibly racist. One of her characters says something derogatory about Asian tourists. Thus, a quote intended to underline a fictional character's odiousness is used as ammo against the real author. 4/
This was a positive review in the NY Times: "I found the novel’s defensiveness about the moral dubiousness of its aesthetic project kind of charming, but also frustrating." Uh, ok. 5/ nytimes.com/2021/09/07/boo…
Sally Rooney is a young writer from the West of Ireland who moved to a city, and writes about characters with a similar background. Reasonable to ask about why her work resonates, less so to critique that she writes about the world she knows. 6/ gawker.com/culture/sally-…
I should add I don't know the scale of the Rooney backlash, or if my examples are representative. Just pointing out that it seems problematic that the cited critiques of her writing would likely be very different if she was obscure rather than successful. 7/
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