Conversations with Sally Rooney: the 27-year-old novelist defining a generation

‘Salinger for the Snapchat generation’. Oh god...that's enough to keep me away right there. And these days, given some of the recent winners, I'm not sure the Man Booker is much of an endorsement of quality lit. anymore, more a barometer of what's hip to the terminally PC generation.

If that quote wasn't enough to make me just say no, this one from New Yorker reviewer Alexandra Schwartz put the hatchet in it:

“She writes with a rare, thrilling confidence, in a lucid and exacting style uncluttered with the sort of steroidal imagery and strobe flashes of figurative language that so many dutifully literary novelists employ.”

Help me jesus...I guess I shouldn't blame writers for the sort of reviewers they attract, but when the piece goes on to quote this passage from Rooney's novel:

She comes to sit down with him and he touches her cheek. He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him. The idea frightens him so badly that he pulls his chair back and stands up. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know why he thought about it. Maybe he wants to do it. But it makes him feel sick. What’s wrong? she says.

I'm sort of hard put to know what you might call that other than 'steroidal'. And as dull as every other contemporary novel of  the usual fraught personal interactions between the male and female comes across as being these days.