‘The Lady on a Horse and Other Secrets’: A wise departure from the author’s trademark styles

When your debut novel is a commercial success, you might find yourself leafing through it while writing the second one. Sally Rooney has published three novels, all of which assemble to tell one kind of diaristic story: a white woman who writes, and has a tenuous relationship with a man she can’t quite have (yet), concurrently remaining impossibly waifish even while scarfing down an entire cake by herself and getting publishing without so much as reading her work over before sending it into an editor.

If that sentence is heady, imagine what I described happening more or less in three different books. Under the Goodreads page of Rooney’s latest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, a commentor asks, “So this is basically a copy-paste of Conversations with Friends, but with slightly older characters and an even weaker plot?” The only thing that changes in Rooney’s novels are the ages of her characters, who are almost always the same age as she was when she wrote them. Rooney, undoubtedly, is the Millennial Writer, and the equivalent closer to home is Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan.

Madhavan cannot be accused of succumbing to the calls of “Encore!” that I suspect comes from publishers and agents caught in the merry-go-round we call...

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