[all_factz]

Because Rooney writes dressed-up romance novels. They’re mediocre. But to the author’s point, at least they’re readable and touch on real emotion, even if I find them a bit trite. Some balance could be struck between Rooney and the more highbrow experiments the author bemoans. Elena Ferrante is a decent example here, and she does get sales. But even then, I do think the author understates the competition reading faces from new forms of media - yes, there are more people, but the amount of distraction has scaled disproportionately to the number of new people. Massively.