But in failing to look for the nation in these books, we fail to see Rooney’s stories in all their richness. Rooney, we have all agreed at some point, is not doing anything like this. Next to Sally Rooney on the English-language bookshelves of Europe and America, you might see women like Lucy Ellman, Ali Smith, Anna Burns: women who are in one way or another known to be writing about the nation, the divisions and categories it produces, the dark avenues down which contesting claims to nationhood can lead us. Ireland - hers, and her characters’ - is usually bereft of any significance. Irishness has remained mostly incidental to these readings, often nothing more than a factoid tying her together with other Irish women writers like Megan Nolan and Naoise Dolan. She is “a portraitist of her Millennial generation,” a chronicler of gender, authorship, debating clubs, bisexuality, wannabe-Marxism, class: of all the subjectivities which govern our relationships with one another. Rooney’s books have been picked over like no other crossover literary fiction of the past decade. The curious thing is that, at least in the Anglo-American reception of her novels, these small acknowledgments are typically as far as any analysis goes. Some even note that she is from Mayo, in its more remote West, or that lots of her work takes place at Trinity College Dublin. Most of the people who like to talk about her books acknowledge this fact. Sally Rooney is from Ireland, and she writes almost entirely about the lives of Irish people there. Then, as the scene comes into focus, a waitress asks a man named Felix how he’s “getting on” as he orders a vodka tonic and a lager. After all, Rooney’s previous novel closed with the upwardly-mobile Connell pondering an MFA in New York. You could think for a moment that we are on Cape Cod, or in the Hamptons. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the BDS National Committee, said in a tweet it “warmly welcome acclaimed Irish author Sally Rooney’s decision to refuse a deal with Modan Publishing House.At the beginning of Sally Rooney’s striking new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, we are in a hotel overlooking the Atlantic sunset at the beginning of a Tinder date. Rooney also received support from proponents of boycotts. The Trump administration used similar language in November 2020 when Mike Pompeo described BDS as “a cancer.”

Israel’s Diaspora Minister Nachman Shai called the BDS movement “anti-Semitism in a new guise” in a tweet, in Hebrew, criticizing Rooney’s decision. “The very essence of literature,” Levy-Paz wrote, “is negated by Rooney’s choice to exclude a group of readers because of their national identity.” Gerard Howlin, a columnist for the U.K.’s Sunday Times, compared Rooney’s actions to “book burning in another way.”

Political scientist Gitit Levy-Paz described cultural boycotts as a “slippery slope” in an op-ed for Jewish news outlet Forward. Rooney’s decision sparked a debate on cultural and economic boycotts. In 2012, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker decided against publishing The Color Purple in Hebrew, because she believed Israel to be “guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people.”

Rooney is also not the only author to decline to collaborate with an Israeli publisher.

Sally rooney