Full of friends and lovers and heady conversations on contemporary life’s many woes and injustices, Sally Rooney’s novels have made her a generational novelist: Hers are the stories of millennials, set to sea, in a world of uncertainty, economic and political upheaval, and interpersonal confusion. Her new novel, Intermezzo, centered around two brothers, grieving a lost parents, and struggling to form families of their own, picks up on many of these themes. But as Jess Bergman writes in an essay for the October issue of The Nation, it takes a different approach. Formalistically more experimental, focused far more on action than on ideas, Intermezzo follows these brothers as they attempt to put their principles into practice. “Rooney’s previous novels,” Bergman observes, “were often criticized for the way her characters spent almost all of their time hand-wringing over the gap between their passion for equality, justice, and redistributive economic policies and their comfortable bourgeois lives.” But in Intermezzo, “this dilemma is mostly put to the side, and instead we get characters acting out their political commitments.” Read “Sally Rooney’s Open Question”
Over the last two decades, the politics of debt have come to the fore—and with good reason: Americans are carrying a collective $17 trillion in household debt. Organizations and movements have emerged to represent the interests of debtors and even to release them from the shackles of exploitative loans, often acquired early in life, that hinder their ability to have families, to buy and even rent homes, and to live life. Reviewing a new history of debtor politics that goes back to the founding of the United States, Astra Taylor notes that the struggle against debt today has many resonances with those resisting it in the past. “Despite the seeming novelty of our approach,” she writes, “our efforts are not as original as we might like to think. The relatively recent emergence of debtor organizing is, in fact, a reemergence—a revival of a long-standing American tradition” that goes back to the emergence of the American republic and that has shaped much of American politics ever since. Read “The Deep Roots of Debt Resistance in the United States”
