Rob Madole

Brammer . . . was not always an unknown legend. Indeed, as Daugherty points out, the year Brammer’s debut novel was published, 1961, also saw the debuts of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer—and yet, for many critics, The Gay Place was the most promising of the bunch.

What marks the writing as particularly unusual, though, is Rooney’s approach to characterization: one receives the impression that Rooney has a programmatic disinterest in depicting her characters’ inner lives. Or rather—and this, perhaps, is what makes her style feel so distinct—Rooney seems allergic to the leveling that’s entailed in consigning an emotional life to language.