I don't read what you might call "contemporary fiction," and not for any particular reason. So this is my first foray into this world. And I couldn't even finish it; made it about three-quarters of the way through before deciding, Marie-Kondo-like, that it did not spark joy.

It's awful and depressing. The first thing that strikes me is how little of a "novel" this is. Descriptions read like they're pulled from a film script, things like "she scratched her chin" to show that the character is thinking. This is the movie language, like the stick of celery in the brown paper bag to show someone's come back from the market, or messy hair to show someone's just had sex. But this is a novel! You have a much more developed language and medium for expressing the inner life of people, a benefit the written word has over movies.

And that is perhaps the most depressing part of this book: These people have no inner lives. They are utterly void. Someone said Tolstoi wrote huge historical figures as small people, while Dostoyevski wrote insignificant people as giants. This is the bad diagonal of that square: Insignificant people with insignificant souls.

Is it supposed to be a droll satire on these people? I don't think so. I love satires, and I was sooooo bored by this; I trust my base pleasure and pain receptors on these matters. No, you're actually supposed to be interested in these dingbats' thoughts on the Bronze age collapse and global warming and, ugh, socialism. These are the worst people you have ever met, and---bully for you---you get to spend several hundred pages inside their heads. Go to a local college bar and just sit next to a loquacious undergraduate for an hour for a similar effect.

My theory about Rooney is pretty simple. This is simply erotica for a certain class of women. There's a lot of sex in this book, and it is clearly written to titillate. Literature is a niche market these days. My impression is that the marketing people call the shots. Somewhere an ambitious MBA found a gap in the market: selling smut to young, educated, professional women. They simply could not be seen on the subway reading a book with a shirtless pirate on the cover. After all, those are the kind of books that fat Walmart shoppers read; I mean, they sell them right next to the Christian self-help books for God's sakes! So they found a "millennial intellectual" from one of the safe countries, Ireland, and now you can read your erotica in front of your fellow academics without judgment. There's even some dalliance with Catholicism, which is all the rage these days.

And don't get me wrong: I've got nothing against smut! Smut's great. But this smut is not great. I'm definitely not the audience, but it's so weirdly sexless and depressing. Does anyone actually have good sex in this book? Is it somewhere in the latter quarter? Say what you will about that creep Houellebecq, but it does seem that some of his characters genuinely do enjoy themselves while having sex.

What a horrible and depressing world Sally Rooney inhabits. Read this to stare into the void.