‘Mr Salary’ by Sally Rooney

This early Sally Rooney story is as sardonically funny as the title promises. It follows the complex relationship between Sukie and Nathan, who are sort of friends, sort of family and, by the end, a little bit lovers. Nathan is older and wealthier than Sukie; she is vulnerable and desperately in love with him. Their relationship, uncategorisable but deeply caring and affectionate, is used as a lens through which Rooney explores family, class and power dynamics. Sukie presents a very cool, funny and unaffected persona when she is with Nathan, but throughout the story we get glimpses of an emotional life bubbling just beneath the surface. Throughout, we wonder: is this love, or something more transactional?

First published by the Irish Times in 2017 and available to read here. Published as a paperback by Faber in 2019

‘Colour and Light’ by Sally Rooney

How can we connect with another? How do we relate to ourselves? To what extent can our conversations communicate what we mean, how we feel?

In ‘Colour and Light’, we follow hotel worker Aidan, his business-orientated, hard-to-relate-to brother, Declan, and the mysterious screenwriter, new-to-town, Pauline. Before the present of the story, the boy’s mother has died, a person Aidan deeply related to, “the person on earth who loved him most”. When he thinks of her, “the thought creates a feeling – the thought might be only an abstract idea or memory, but the feeling follows on from it helplessly”. This proximity to her characters’ inner turmoil and complex psychology often draws me into Rooney’s stories. Aidan is self-reflective and hyperaware of how he inhabits the world, of how he sees others and how he is seen; he yearns to understand what things mean and how he can relate to the ‘social’ world of adults and expectations. Meeting Pauline is a hot flash of colour in the grey of his daily existence. People hang on her every word and desire to be with her, while, conversely, he feels utterly alone: “If I dropped dead the only people who would care are the people who would have to cover my shifts”.

Through a series of chance meetings, Aidan and Pauline’s lives intersect. Their conversations are lively, playful and almost reach an honesty that Aidan yearns for. In an interview with The New Yorker, Rooney explains, “I tend to write characters who are roughly as articulate and insightful as I am about what they think and feel. In other words, they are sometimes perceptive but more often crushingly unable to describe or explain what is going on in their lives”. Aidan and Pauline epitomise this idea; the two attempt to voice their similar feelings of alienation and loneliness, but there is a barrier to their intimacy. Their own selves getting in the way. They speak of sex, but it seems this isn’t exactly what they desire; the root, it feels, is connection. Ultimately, they part, and like Aidan, we are left to wonder what it all meant.

First published by The New Yorker, 2019, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Being Various, Faber, 2019

‘Mr Salary’ by Sally Rooney

Earlier this year, in an interview with the TLS, novelist Bret Easton Ellis ruminated on why there isn’t a “Great Millennial Novelist or a Great Millennial Short Story Writer.” He’s wrong: there is a Great Millennial Novelist and a Great Millennial Short Story Writer, and they are one and the same: Sally Rooney, author of Conversations with Friends and the Booker-shortlisted Normal People.

‘Mr Salary’ was published by Granta in 2016, shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award in 2017 and will be published as a stand-alone volume by Faber & Faber in 2019. It features four things that I think of as intrinsic to Rooney’s work: Ireland, a relationship in limbo, a young woman who doesn’t quite know how to get what she wants, and characters that feel real enough to buy you a pint.

I read ‘Mr Salary’ in bed one Sunday morning, deep in my hangover, and I suggest you do the same. It introduces 24-year-old Sukie as she returns home to Dublin from university in Boston. She’s met by a family friend, Nathan, who she has lived with on and off since she was 19. Sukie has a hole in her leggings, unwashed hair and a suitcase that’s so naff, Nathan asks if it’s “a joke suitcase”. The unlikely nature of this pseudo-platonic pairing carries the story from Dublin airport to a hospital bed, dipping its toes into Sukie’s past just frequently enough to contextualise the present. ‘Mr Salary’ is really quite an incredible read and the perfect intro to Sally Rooney’s work.

First published in Granta 135: New Irish Writing, April 2016. Available online here to subscribers, and also for free here. Also published as a standalone Faber Story January 2019.

Chosen by Alice Slater. Alice is a writer from London. She’s co-host of literary podcast What Page Are You On? and writes about short stories for Mslexia.