Sally Rooney's latest much-hyped novel has bewildered me; I cannot work out whether I am in love with the world she has created or if I never want to be invited into it again.
As a positive person, I'll start with the positives. Firstly, Rooney makes me care about these characters, some more than others, almost against my innate desire to pull away from them and their lives. She forces me to confront them and engages me with the promise of what might or might not happen in their lives. I care about Eileen, Simon, Felix and Alice (roughly in that order) despite their protestations that they are nothing to write home about.
Secondly, some of the scenes were beautifully described, especially the wedding glance shared between Eileen and Simon that led us back in time to see their whole relationship captured in memory fragment snapshots.
Yet this is really what the whole novel felt like to me, a series of scenes that Rooney is laying out before us, as she describes in minute detail exactly what the characters are doing. She is playing with convention, I know that, subverting the 'show don't tell' rule to explore another way of scene setting and characterisation. However, for me I don't think it worked too well. I found that it got in the way of the happenings within the novel too much. It felt overdone.
The strange epistolary sections also stood out to me as being at odds with the rest of the narrative. Again, I realise that Rooney is playing with form, but these letters and their contents felt to me very much like a means for Rooney to explore the concept of a being a writer and other various literary discussions. The Alice and Eileen of the letters felt a very long way from the two women who met up in Alice's rented countryside house. Of course, one could argue that this is precisely to show the difference in the concept of 'self' between the self one uses to write and the self one portrays to friends in person, almost like the putting on of different coats for different uses of the self. One could then take it further and ask, what is the true self? Is there even such a thing or is it, rather, a self-involved concept that leads to the fractured sense of self so prevalent in contemporary society?
I don't know. You see how it confuses me, this novel. One moment, I think it does not work for me and the next, I think it is the most beautiful and honest thing I have ever read. On the one hand, I do not like the level of detail and yet on the other, I see the beauty conveyed through the mundane. I feel both pretentious and brutally honest. It is a paradox, of course, rather like Rooney creates in her novel.
Three stars!
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