The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Thrusday, April 18, 2019 — 5

In the short span of three 
years, Sally Rooney has evolved 
from essayist to fiction writer 
to “the first great millennial 
novelist.” 
Sally 
Rooney 
got 
a New Yorker interview in 
January, told The Guardian 
that she “do(esn’t) respond to 
authority very well” and has a 
10-minute YouTube video on 
writing and Marxism. She’s 
a 
veritable 
cultural 
event, 
heralded 
for 
her 
bare prose, biting 
irony and slow burn 
of love in the time 
of late capitalism. 
Just 
check 
out 
what 
happens 
when you search 
#normalpeople on 
Instagram.
“Normal People” 
drops in the States 
on Tuesday, Apr. 16, 
and The Michigan 
Daily Book Review 
is 
celebrating 
by 
reviewing Rooney’s 
fiction 
career, 
last to first. Catch 
“Normal 
People” 
on 
the 
16th, 
“Conversations 
with Friends” on 
the 17th and “Mr 
Salary” on the 18th.
At 
a 
slim 
48 
pages, 
Rooney’s 
“Mr 
Salary” 
delivers 
a 
deliciously illicit and poignant 
love story. This is done in 
a fraction of the pages of 
her 
full-length 
novels 
like 
“Conversation with Friends” 
and “Normal People.”
In the story, Sukie returns 
home to Dublin from Boston to 
visit her dying father, Frank. 
She’s greeted at the airport 
by Nathan, her closest friend. 
Their interaction is heady with 
unfulfilled 
sexual 
tension. 
Sukie moved in with Nathan 
years ago after her mother 
died and her father lost all 
their savings to prescription 
drugs. Sukie was 19 at the time, 
finishing up her exams. Nathan 
was 34.

Due to the precarious nature 
of their relationship and the 
15-year age gap, there was 
nothing sordid about their 
time spent living together. 
Nathan 
even 
jokes 
about 
their living arrangement. He 
says, “I’m not really getting 
my money’s worth, am I?” 
Despite this, Sukie falls deeply 
and irrevocably in love with 
Nathan.
“My love for him felt so total 
and annihilating that it was 
often impossible for me to see 
him clearly at all,” Sukie said.

He was there for her when 
no one else was. Now, they’re 
on the edge of the inevitable.
As 
a 
Marxist, 
Rooney 
explores class tension through 
character 
relationships 
in 
“Conversation with Friends” 
and “Normal People.” The 
socio-economic stratification 
serves to magnify the power 
imbalance 
between 
her 
characters, 
adding 
another 
conflict to her already tension-
packed stories. Rooney doesn’t 
deviate 
from 
this 
theme 
in “Mr Salary,” weaving a 
deeply layered and complex 
relationship in under 50 pages.
“Mr Salary” has a simple 
plot, but it’s Rooney’s realistic 

writing and profound themes 
that elevate the book into 
a work of art. It’s not often 
that I find myself laughing 
and crying in the span of a 
single paragraph. It would’ve 
been easy for Nathan and 
Sukie’s relationship to fall into 
perversity, but it’s balanced 
by 
a 
fated 
tragedy. 
Their 
uncertain romance — will they 
or won’t they? — is framed with 
the pervasive atmosphere of 
death.
“Nothing inside my body 
was trying to kill me. Death 
was, 
of 
course, 
the most ordinary 
thing that could 
happen, at some 
level I knew that. 
Still, I had stood 
there waiting to 
see the body in the 
river, ignoring the 
real living bodies 
all around me, as if 
death was more of 
a miracle than life 
was,” Sukie said.
 Rooney’s “Mr 
Salary” is dense 
with 
metaphors, 
picturesque scenes 
and 
passages 
worthy 
of 
being 
mounted against a 
living-room 
wall. 
“Mr Salary” does 
more than touch 
on the intricacies 
of 
a 
forbidden 
relationship: 
It 
adds 
substance 
to 
innermost 
thoughts of new adult living 
in the 21st century. It’s easy 
to relate to “Mr Salary” as a 
junior in college, worrying 
about my future but still tightly 
holding on the optimism of my 
childhood.
Like “Conversations with 
Friends” and “Normal People,” 
Rooney leaves “Mr Salary” 
open-ended. There are elements 
of melancholy juxtaposed with 
sentimentality. 
Rooney, 
at 
just 27 years old, manages to 
masterfully convey these two 
sentiments. Weeks later, my 
thoughts still circulate back 
to this story as if Nathan and 
Sukie are my own friends. It’s 
the best short story I’ve read.

Rooney’s ‘Mr Salary’ is 
more than ordinary love

UNIVERSAL PICTURES

SARAH SALMAN
Daily Arts Writer

BOOK REVIEW: SALLY ROONEY WEEK

Mr Salary

Sally Rooney

Faber & Faber

Jan. 3, 2019

Patty Griffin is an unsung hero 
for blues, folk and soul music in the 
modern age. She’s run the gamut 
of every possible genre, picking 
up influences from jazz to classic 
folk and even, as she laughed at 
The Ark on Friday, characters like 
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Griffin is 
a tiny woman, her size countered 
by a cloud of strawberry blonde 
curls and a loud guffaw 
between songs. But the 
biggest thing about her, is, 
of course, her voice.
Last 
Friday 
night, 
Ann 
Arbor’s 
beloved 
folk 
venue 
sold 
out 
completely, 
audiences 
rushing to see Griffin 
in the intimate space of 
Main Street’s listening 
room. The songwriter has 
played at the Michigan 
Theater 
several 
times, 
but her appearance at 
The Ark marked a special 
opportunity for fans to join 
her in closer quarters, no 
more than 50 feet from the 
stage at the farthest seats. 
Opening for Griffin was 
Lucy Wainwright Roche, 
a fantastic songwriter in 
her own right and part of 
the famous Wainwright and Roche 
lineages of music. Wainwright 
Roche’s smooth voice and hilarious 
banter with the audience prepared 
them for a night of laughter and 
good music, and that they got.
As 
Wainwright 
Roche 
left 
the stage, all seated within the 
wooden walls of the venue buzzed 
in anticipation. It was a full house, 
saturated with excited new fans 
and longtime patrons of Griffin 
alike. Though the venue was filled 

with silver-haired listeners, there 
was also a surprising number of 
young members of the audience, a 
fact that proves Griffin’s universal 
appeal. She can do no wrong when 
it comes to live performance, 
given that her songs are often 
centered on the things we all have 
in common; grief, struggle, love. 
Through her raspy, soulful voice, 
Griffin has established a solid niche 
in the songwriting community, one 
that extends from her own projects 
into those of the Dixie Chicks and 

several other artists.
Griffin took the stage in a 
long black dress, her wild hair 
illuminated by the yellow stage 
lights in a sort of halo. She was 
joined by only a guitarist and 
drummer (who also played bass), 
incredible 
musicians 
in 
their 
own right. They both played 
piano during the performance at 
different times, handing guitars 
and tambourines across the stage 
in order to build Griffin’s clear voice 

into a woven landscape of sound. 
Just the three of them created an 
ambience that was equal parts 
intimate and perfectly produced. 
It seemed as if every wavering note 
in Griffin’s singing was put there 
on purpose, adding to the air of 
raw intensity that each of her songs 
evokes. She didn’t hit every high 
pitch, didn’t flip her voice around 
in acrobatics as most modern pop 
artists do, but in that restraint was 
Griffin’s power. By holding back 
at the right moments, the singer 
laid down a foundation of 
suspense that always broke 
at the right times, letting the 
floodgates open with sound at 
the right point during a bridge 
or chorus.
You could say that Griffin’s 
performance was careful in 
these ways, but it would be 
a lie. In her eyes throughout 
the night, the audience was 
well aware of a fire beneath 
the surface of Griffin’s petite 
frame, boiling out in her 
inimitable soul. No matter 
which song she sang, some 
from her new self-titled tenth 
album and some old favorites, 
this intensity laid comfortable 
underneath her voice. It’s the 
thing that strings all of her 
music together, despite the 
variety of genres and styles 
she chooses to adopt. In The 
Ark that night, this fire warmed 
the room easily, making each 
person sitting there feel a part of 
something bigger. If you have never 
listened to Griffin, it is a spiritual 
experience in the most simple of 
ways: She sings for the world, for 
all of us and none of us at the same 
time. Hearing someone’s soul come 
out of their mouth in beautiful 
harmony is an incredible thing 
to witness. And that is the thing 
Griffin is best at.

Patty Griffin brings her 
inimitable soul to The Ark

CLARA SCOTT
Senior Arts Editor

SHOW REVIEW

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

I wish I would have taken 
a look at the poster for “The 
Public” before I decided to see 
it. If you haven’t seen the poster, 
try to recall “Love Actually’”s, 
swap in “The Public”’s cast, 
substitute a book stack for 
ribbon and you’ve got it. Can 
you see it? I hope so. This poster 
telegraphs all due warnings 
about the shortcomings of this 
film: It has more characters 
than it knows what to do with, it 
thinks passing references to the 

power of literature suffice and 
Emilio Estevez (“The Breakfast 
Club”) is in the middle of the 
confusion.
“The Public” has Estevez 
written all over it. He wrote, 
directed and starred in this 
confused tale of a librarian at 
the Cincinnati Public Library 
who, in an out-of-character 
move, 
takes 
a 
stand 
and 
occupies the library with its 
homeless patrons who have 
no other place to stay for the 
excruciating 
winter 
night. 
Unfortunately, Estevez strikes 
out on all three counts, and 
the movie that could have 

been a timely statement about 
the continued importance of 
activism and civil disobedience, 
of refusing to remain silent 
in the face of governmental 
neglect, is a dud. 
First, 
Estevez’s 
direction 
leads us nowhere compelling. 
At best, it’s as disorienting as 
his overwhelming number of 
characters and subplots. At 
worst, it’s laughable. Take, 
for example, his montages: 
He randomly inserts two in 
which people make various 
idiosyncratic requests at the 
library help desk, set to a 
nondescript, upbeat score that 

sounds like it might have been 
borrowed from iMovie.
His 
direction 
is 
nothing 
compared to his script, however. 
The dialogue is awkwardly 
expository, 
painfully 
stilted 
and often guilty of sapping even 
important, culturally relevant 
conversations 
of 
all 
their 
poignance.
Then comes his acting. Simply 
put, Estevez cannot 
bear the weight of this 
story. He delivers the 
stilted lines he wrote 
without any notable 
charisma. Librarians, 
notoriously 
underappreciated and 
mistaken 
for 
being 
uncool, 
are 
owed 
an apology, because 
Estevez 
convinces 
us 
of 
nothing 
but 
his 
uncoolness. 
Worse than that, his 
lack of charisma is 
contagious. It grieves 
me to say that even 
commanding “Wire” 
alumnus 
Michael 
K. 
Williams’s 
star 
dulls in scenes with 
Estevez. Same goes 
for 
Jenna 
Malone. 
The only one who 
seems 
immune 
to 
Estevez’s 
dullness 
is 
Taylor 
Schilling 
(“Orange Is the New 
Black”); her character, 
however, is written 
inexplicably into a relationship 
with Estevez’s character, so I 
suppose she falls victim to him 
in another way.

To 
top 
it 
all 
off, 
the 
film, 
overextended 
by 
its 
multiplicity of characters and 
incongruous 
subplots, 
ends 
up creating more ambiguities 
than anything else, many of 
which are just as troubling as 
they are puzzling. The most 
troubling of these ambiguities 
was 
Estevez’s 
treatment 
of 
mental illness. In a film like 

“The Public,” too confusing to 
be dark or pessimistic, comic 
relief was not a necessity, yet 
Estevez wove it in, often at the 

expense of homeless library 
patrons with mental illnesses. 
In 
fact, 
Che 
“Rhymefest” 
Smith’s character, Big George, 
operated exclusively as the 
butt of insensitive jokes about 
his delusion that his eyes 
having laser beams that kill 
people upon eye contact. The 
ambiguity 
surfaces 
when 
Estevez’s 
character 
gives 
George his glasses, 
claiming 
it 
will 
impede 
the 
laser 
beams. Does Estevez 
want to check off 
another 
box 
on 
his 
Christ 
figure 
checklist (feeding the 
hungry, 
sheltering 
the 
homeless 
and 
returning 
sight 
to 
the 
blind)? 
Does 
that make him an 
ally, 
after 
having 
manipulated George 
throughout the film, 
for humor’s sake or 
otherwise? 
Does 
Estevez even know 
what he wants?

I’m 
still 

wondering. 
For 
a 
challenging, complex 
debate about forms 
of activism, tune in 
to “On the Basis of 
Sex.” For a rallying 
cry in favor of civil 
disobedience 
and 
a blunt exposé of 
false allyship, watch 
(or read) “The Hate U Give.” 
Watch any number of films I’m 
missing, but don’t bother with 
“The Public.”

Estevez does not hit the 
mark with ‘The Public’

FILM REVIEW

JULIANNA MORANO
Daily Arts Writer

The Public

Universal Pictures

Michigan Theater

In her eyes throughout 
the night, the audience 
was well aware of a fire 
beneath the surface of 
Griffin’s petite frame, 
boiling out in her 
inimitable soul.

