Snide people will comment on the irony of a Marxist millionaire who writes bourgeois novels about angsty love affairs and chess speaking like this. I can confidently predict that a lot of the right will comment in that manner.
I’d rather take her at her word. What is art for? Personally, I’m with the fin-de-sieclistes who argued art for art’s sake, with perhaps a small unintended side order of educating and edifying.
There’s a well-established and flawed metaphor of one’s books being like one’s children. It holds insofar that books will make their own way in the world, becoming something else in the mind of readers just as children grow up to become adults in the lives of others.
I’m a fan of Chingiz Aitmatov, but I don’t think anyone reads him, or any Soviet realist fiction any more. I’ve met graduates in Russian literature who’d never heard of him. I think efforts to write ideologically sit uneasily within the confines of fiction itself, not merely the industry surrounding it.
One might argue that the emergence of self-publishing, albeit under the sweatshop confines of Jeff Bezos’s billions, has gone some way to addressing Rooney’s concerns. But of course it’s hardly ideal, especially for those whose skills extend as far as writing and not to other tasks like self-marketing.
If as she diagnoses it, the problem is that reading itself has become an elite pursuit, then the issue is with education itself and not with the publishing industry, which like many others including education, is on the retreat nowadays.
Thankfully research tells us the solution to this: read to your children and keep books in your home.