There’s a scene in the film ‘Death of Stalin’, where three senior government ministers are sitting in a car planning to kill Beria. One of them has bought a yapping dog, because they’re so fearful they’ll be overheard, even though the car is parked in a forest.

One of the characters says, “I’ve had nightmares that made more sense than this.”

I feel that way about Jessie Tu having a crack at Irish writer, Sally Rooney in The Age. I’ve heard of Rooney but I’ve not read either woman’s works. My neice loves Rooney’s books.

Tu can’t understand – and even questions her own sanity – why Rooney is receiving such high praise for her novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People.

To quote Tu, “… her stories merely celebrate privileged white people doing privileged white things including going to elite colleges, voluntarily sleeping with bad men, having hang-ups about those bad men, and, if you’re a woman, asking to be hit by them during sex (and making that seem cool, or “grown-up”). Her female characters are depressed, starving, diligently maintaining extremely thin bodies, but oh, they’re also neurotic geniuses.”

Sounds like Rooney is aiming for the American market. Tu’s main compliant, (I think), is that Rooney’s books are full of young white rich people doing what young white rich kids do. There’s hardly a black person in sight and Asians are described as tourists. We’re all tourists.

Rooney is an Irish writer and as there are less than 2 per cent of black people in Ireland who identify as black, it’s possible that the notion of including a person of colour never occurred to her.

Tu goes on to say that, “It’s no coincidence that the praise for Rooney has been spearheaded by liberal white women who might have attended elite private schools and had an elite college education, probably drink tea as excessively as Rooney’s characters…”

That pretty much sums up the literary fiction buying public in America, Britain and Australia. Have you ever been to a writer’s festival? It’s a sea of ‘darling’ this and ‘darling’ that and many still pine for a return of Gough Whitlam (without the stagflation), although their banker husbands might baulk at that.

PC orthodoxy will only allow Rooney to write anglo-white characters. Include coloured folk, Eskimos, Aborigines, Muslims, etc, etc, and you’re guilty of cultural and religious appropriation and you’re fucked.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing because when people like Tu write news stories about people like Rooney, the latter’s sales go up another 10,000.