sent a message this morning when i was about 40% through (am currently on holiday, so finishing this in two days is not necessarily a comment on the book in any direction), which read, im struggling to see how this is going to shape into a plot beyond ‘navigating life is tricky for smart hot women’. i still think i stand by that summary, although i’d maybe add the detail that they’re also straight-coded skinny women, because the latter in particular becomes clearly clarified. most of the book is just verbs or amateur verso. the small actions and big conversations of the book do eventually erupt into a sort of emotional whirl climax which i found both recognisable and striking, and which give the plot its conclusion and therefore retroactively its form, but i wasn’t sold by the resolution enough to forgive it its earlier dawdling. 

i think i’ll come back to that. i picked up the book - my first rooney - because i heard it did emails, and i really did like how it was so conscious of the digital as a material part of navigating both the physical and intellectual world. it’s pretty unusual to me to read something which so specifically portrays spaces and ways of being i know: reading annie ernaux essays online and tapping social media icons and henry james and google maps. which is to say that i am also a pretentious english graduate in my 20s living in broadly the same part of the world.

but which isn’t to say the novel completely captures my life. there are constantly these maddeningly frank conversations - and i mean that jokingly literally, in that i feel that if i were to have a single talk like any of these, i would go instantly mad, like i’d just stared at a cthulhu, bc i am dramatically unused to that level of real chat in everyday life. the way these characters talk is so alien to me. it’s tiring and people don’t like it! — which at least the book does recognise. but so much of the text is this, in dialogue or email, and it becomes a bit numbing after a certain point. it’s particularly jarring when one of the characters is criticised for not being a sharer, when every discussion anyone ever has — him included — is a dmc. i think this is a good, interesting book, and the 3 star rating is merely a signal to myself not to rush to reread, and this is mostly why i’m warning myself off: because to get to the truths and observations that matter and resonate, you have to read through so much dull, deep sharing.

my love life also looks nothing like these romances, which is fine. in a moment where there’s so much doom around even straight relationships, where discussion around love is so often reduced down to tropes, and graphs showing rising misogyny and declining meet cutes, it’s nice to read romance in the shitty modern world given serious, largely-realistic representation. altho i did have to laugh at myself bc i caught myself being a bit shocked at the fact sex was being very clearly and coolly depicted, and then realised it was because all the other romance forward books i’ve read recently have been victorian at the latest. i am not anti sex scene i am just momentarily poisoned by historic morals as i catch up with the entire literary canon sorry!!

rooney’s prose is largely boring, but always effective, and the novel is really well written and communicated. there’s stuff i really admire in it, like how dialogue gets jammed together all in one paragraph - because conversation does often function as one single unrolling piece. i also liked the distance between the characters and the narrator, the way they’re often observed - or even put behind a closed door - with only noise or expression, external signs, for the narrator to supply, to puzzle out who they are. on the one hand, it does lead to those unimaginable convos, bc frank expression is the only way to regularly get into character heads, but on the other hand, hooray for having a narrator with a presence! henry james would be pleased!

final note on the ending

altho i do admire the friendship climax it builds to, it’s so brief, easily resolved, and smoothed over by the men, before everything reverts to perfect domestic harmony. who are these men? how are they so dreamy and empath coded? i understand men can be good, and right for women sometimes, and stuff, but god it felt so tidy, so conservative. so millennial, in some ways, in that you can sense that rooney, or her characters, have aged into idealising settling down. i’m a few years younger than her, and also not really a sally rooney type, for all that i did english and have brown hair and a fringe, and so it read as unconvincing and a little cowardly to me, for it all to work out