Opinion | Sally Rooney Is the Least Interesting Thing About Her Novels

Sally Rooney is not an interesting person.She’ll tell you this herself — recently, in an interview with The New York Times for her new novel, “Intermezzo,” she replied to a question about her hobbies with: “What do I like to do? I feel like I’m so uninteresting.” In another interview, with The Guardian, she expressed the wish not to be “the focal point” for conversation about the role of “young women in our culture.”She’s come to understand herself as having been selected for the role of the voice of a generation by a capricious literary establishment, a role she has neither encouraged nor enjoyed.

She believes this has a lot to do with how young women are catapulted to positions of hypervisibility and not anything in particular to do with her books.She’s right.Not right about being boring — I love reading these interviews in part because of Ms.Rooney’s flat commitment to not talking about herself.

But she’s absolutely correct about the way in which her gender has created a particular mania around her and her writing.And I think something has been lost in all the noise.One magazine proclaims that there will never be another Sally Rooney; another feverishly announces that to have a galley of her latest book is to be anointed a “literary It Girl.” No male writer today is able to summon so much attention, much as no male pop star can monopolize the conversation like Taylor Swift.

Buzzy debuts have come and gone, but Ms.Rooney has remained supreme, and if other female writers have briefly emerged as potential successors — Kristen Roupenian, Emma Cline, Raven Leilani, Ottessa Moshfegh — few have challenged her popularity.As a result, “Sally Rooney” has become an abstraction more than a writer — a representative either of our deepest selves or of all we culturally loathe.

Too many readers have come to treat her as synonymous with her characters and with the circus atmosphere that surrounds each new book.One critic suggeste...