Typically, this novel, by Rooney, focuses on a set of relationships between friends. Alice and Eileen have self-described disastrous lives, in their own unique ways, in which they commiserate and misunderstand one another by email exchanges, which Rooney intersperses amongst her chapters. “But this sense of the continuous present is no longer a feature of our lives. The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.”
All the while, both friends have an equally complicated relationship with their mutual friend, Simon. “Needless to say, the idea that Simon—who was already a grown man in his twenties when I was fifteen—is having regular sex with a woman six years my junior makes me want to crawl directly into my grave.” Felix, an Amazon warehouse worker and burgeoning love interest of Alice, adds to the knotty mix. “I fucking hate the place. But they wouldn’t be paying me to do something I liked, would they? That’s the thing about work, if it was any good you’d do it for free.” As always, for Rooney, it is quite the complicated web of relationships.
When the plot begins, Alice, a twice-successful novelist, has just come out of a mental hospital and moved to the Irish countryside, away from her friends in Dublin. She has met Felix on Tinder and their relationship teeters between confused, antagonistic, and passionate. “But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions. That’s a little like myself and Felix, I think. There is no obvious path forward by which any relation between us can proceed.” And as usual, Rooney intersperses into her plot critiques of capitalist culture, which bubble up again and again. Alice whines, “Whatever I can do, whatever insignificant talent I might have, people just expect me to sell it—I mean literally, sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left. And then that’s it, I’m finished, and the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along.”
The critique of modernity is another through-line in Rooney’s novels. The email exchanges between the two female friends often alternate between banal relationship gossip and big philosophical conundrums, within the same email, “Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life? I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day…. And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?” Sometimes, Rooney’s critique of nihilism even touches on the conservative. “But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing.” In the emails, there are also debates on aesthetics, relativism, and morality, “Even if we suppose that the beauty of ‘Kind of Blue’ is in some sense objectively superior to the beauty of a Chanel handbag, which philosophically speaking is a lot of ground to give, why does it matter? You seem to think that aesthetic experience is, rather than merely pleasurable, somehow important. And what I want to know is: important in what way?” In some ways, this feels like Rooney’s most personal novel to date, “On one hand, I know the human body can be incredibly resilient. On the other, my sturdy peasant ancestors did little to prepare me for a career as a widely despised celebrity novelist. What do you think?”
No comments:
Post a Comment