The Girl Boss Era in Literature

Rooney, Cline, Moshfegh

Sally Rooney tote bag (Etsy)

What is literature?

Literature is meant to encode the collective unconscious at a given time and to provide something of a model or prediction of what society will be like moving forward — somewhat in the way that a quarterback throws a pass slightly downfield of their receiver.

I regard it as a fundamentally different activity from writing. Writing can be anything so long as it’s honest. Literature is more of a group think and collective act — more urban planning than architecture. Its shape often isn’t clear until much later when it emerges as something like the fossil record of a particular moment in time.

So what is the literature of our time — let’s say the last five or ten years — shaping up to be? The clearest signature I can see in the emergent fossil record is the three-headed monster of Sally Rooney, Emma Cline, and Ottessa Moshfegh. All of them are real writers in the sense of having serious talent and having tapped into their own psyches enough to have something distinctive to say — and they have found a response among readers that goes beyond marketing fluff and speaks to something that’s vital in the collective and likely to be enduring.

And what the Rooney/Cline/Moshfegh trifecta seems to stand for is two-fold. First, there is the persona of the girl-boss. As

Ross Barkan

has astutely noted, there is no appetite whatsoever in publishing world for young male novelists. In part, that’s because there is no very clear narrative for how males are supposed to navigate the contemporary world; and in part that’s because the publishing world prefers to lionize female stars. It’s cool (to some) to have a Sally Rooney tote bag. It would be — as the kids are saying — cringe to have one for some edgy male writer.

But curiously juxtaposed to the girl-boss persona of the Rooney/Cline/Moshfegh trio is what they are saying in their fiction. And what they are saying, at least in what I’ve read (I haven’t read everything), is to extol the joys of submission. Moshfegh, the most radical of the three, does this is in the most drastic way — creating in My Year of Rest and Relaxation an upside-down world in which the high-status yet deeply depressed protagonist robs herself of her own free will and lets herself be exploited by her therapist Dr. Tuttle and the artist Ping and brings to the maximum the cold exploitation that underscores everything in her everyday existence.

Cline deals with submission as just a steady background drumbeat, a fact of being. That’s what the plot is of The Guest. Tucked within the ostensibly liberal society is the real beating heart of it — the gilded rich in The Hamptons and then the women-for-hire (however direct or indirect the payment) who make that system function. There is no question for Alex, the prostitute heroine of The Guest, of charging the structure of the system. All that matters is maintaining her shaky place in it — being careful that the person exploiting her at the moment can continue to pay her bills and is worthy of her subservience.

For Rooney, the dynamic is slightly different. The background is the egalitarian, co-ed society, in which everyone is an autonomous agent with commendable control over their sexuality — but, in practice, everybody finds themselves tipping over into dynamics of imbalance and old-fashioned submission. That’s the guiding thread of Conversations With Friends — that Frances is hyper-articulate, hyper-tolerant but gives over everything else in her identity for the sake of the somewhat sad older actor who makes “the inside of her body hot like oil.” In Rooney’s recently-published story ‘Opening Theory,’ the structure is about sex inevitably creating imbalances. Ivan and Margaret are in an absolutely drab social situation — she’s the events manager of an arts center where he’s giving a simultaneous chess exhibition. Everything between them — their chatter, including their mild flirting, her having a post-event drink with him, her giving him a ride to the cottage where he’s staying — is socially and professionally condoned, right up until the moment they sleep together. At that point imbalance is inevitable. Margaret runs through a series of mental scenarios — all of them in which she is in a sense on the losing end; and all of which she finds somehow pleasurable — in which she is either a one-night stand for a much younger man who will brag about it to his friends or else she is being drawn into the force field of a man who is absolutely inappropriate for her but demands to be taken seriously.

All of the works I am discussing are strong and they are strong largely because of how they hit on this central, resonant tension — of a world that is steeped in feminism, with female characters who are strong and independent and yet who find their sexuality at odds with their broader identity. As Lillian Fishman — less well known than the others but participatory in the same dynamic — writes in Acts of Service of her narrator’s pursuit of a maximally-fulfilled life, “I was meant to have sex — probably with some wild number of people. Maybe it was more savage than that, that I was meant not to fuck but to get fucked.”

If I am right that the literature of a given era is a distillation of the society’s underlying psychic turbulence, then this is fundamentally what the society is dealing with — how to align female empowerment with female sexuality. There is no other competing narrative. On the male side of the ledger, the writers who have broken through are those like Garth Greenwell narrating their own version of the joys of submission — “Do you see? You don’t have to be like this, you can be like this?” says a pick-up at the receiving end of a BDSM session — or, like Ben Lerner, exploring anomie and the sensation of invisibility. I do think there are other things to write about and to wrestle with but at the moment everybody who is hitting is in this one narrative, which is telling although sort of unfortunate. I respect the writers who are working on this theme — and it obviously taps deep into the collective psyche — but at the same time I am a bit tired of it. I would love, sooner or later, to read about something else.

Sam Kahn writes

Castalia

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