Hmmm, this fell short of expectations. I think she more fully realized the formula of dialectic couples' drama in Intermezzo the characters of which were also far less annoying. Whilst none of these did any singular thing (though several came close) that constitutes the full on trash protagonist brand, none of them were nearly as compelling as some of her other portrayals of ~troubled persons. Whereas Intermezzo seems damn near transcendental by comparison in terms of the portrayal of romantical themes, the subsurface message of this book seems to be that if you're still washed up and single by the time you're thirty, you just gotta cave on any sort of self-respect if you don't want to be alone. Something to this end is voiced nearly verbatim by each of the four characters all of whom are pretty trash in order of Eileen < Felix < Simon < Alice.

The book is half-autobiographical through Alice's POV who is dealing with a crisis of identity as an isolated author whose novels seem to invite parasocial commentary from the rest of the world while sticking her with the burden of celebrity which (along with self-imposed pressures surrounding being a creative who has made it, but maybe just by fluke) makes it hard for her to connect with really anyone.

Eileen is my least favorite character not so much because of anything she does (though there's plenty wrong with how she acts and what she says), but rather because it seems like Rooney designated her to by the political mouthpiece of commentary to be lifted from the novel and pulled into reality. Tbf, she does come around to be less jaded and cynical but only in the very last chapter after an 18 month flash forward to the happiness of baby fever which does very little in the way of showing development of her character and instead reads like a forced "happy ending" which is so contrary to everything she purports to want from life (which is also not much, she doesn't have much positive of anything to add, just lots of complaining). Her character is shallow and lazily used to spew some insane millennial doomerism. The thing I'm annoyed about by her (so, really, by Rooney) is that she'll have a "hot take" that she knows to be hot, and so she'll qualify or preempt criticism which is never forthcoming and of course cannot be in the context of the one-way stream of information that is a novel (elsewhere, Alice even acknowledges the inanity of commercial lit crit, preemptively taking the wind out of our sails in terms of any post-hoc commentary we might have about her [Rooney's] characters). I actually agree with this, which is why it's so lame for her to just cop out of fleshing out any of the stances that Eileen takes, and instead hedges everything she says a la "this is based on wrong first principles buuuuuut...." . This cannot even be construed as her character's deference to the more intellectual recipient of the letter, because she still comes out and says plenty of radical things that just read like Rooney wanted to get this off he chest and Eileen's character drew the short straw. E.g.

Markets preserve nothing but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them shorn of meaning and memory as transactions. What could be conservative about such a thing.

and denigrating "forcible protection of existing property arrangements".

Worth noting as well that she's not actively being victimized by markets (she subsists on tax payer grants lol) nor property rights. Not that you have to wait to get shot before you complain, but these arguments don't even seem well placed in her character. It is far more significant to the story that she grew up as Simon's "younger sister" than the fact that she thinks microplastics are evil, so why throw that in? Existential concern about modernity can be expressed without debasing one of your characters who could otherwise give voice to a good perspective in the context of a romance. She attributes the discontinuity of the present point in time as a direct result of the availability of information which is hilarious. Like you want to exist in a sensory deprivation tank or return to the feudal ages when you would die from a toothache? What the fuck are you on about?

I know that we have good reason to be skeptical of aesthetic nostalgia, but…

and then she proceeds to be skeptical about aesthetic nostalgia. AND HER PILLAR OF NOSTALGIA IS THE SOVIET UNION WHAT?

I've been thinking about the later parts of your message for a few days now—about whether, as you say, 'the failure is general'. I know we agree that civilization is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition. This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I'm not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs,

I know that you personally feel the world ceased to be beautiful after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Like Rooney should just say it with her chest instead of write off a character which such slop. And again, this wouldn't even be that annoying if her character didn't do a 180º into baby fever in literally the last few paragraphs of the book with no explanation as to how she got there. I do not think that the intended message of the book is that "you're just blowing everything out of proportion and should probably actually just start a family," especially in light of the distribution of pages spent complaining about the current state of affairs vs. exploring the possible fulfillments of motherhood/parenthood, but ironically the lazy ending ends up correcting for all the pseudo-political gripes I would otherwise hold, but keep to myself, if 1) her character was at least consistent with the attitude and 2) had enough conviction to further explain why why felt that way instead of always qualifying with "I know many people disagree with this for..."

She did the same thing with Ivan little ancom rant in in Intermezzo, but it made more sense for his character to behave that way. It was a detail about his character, instead of his defining attribute. Speaking of Intermezzo, I do like the connectedness of the universe of her stories thus far. E.g. Simon who is politically involved was playing a game of chess with his friend Peter who he works with – that's fun.

Not a fanny of the "daddy" stuff, but that's on me. Absent any depth to the characters, i.e. the daddy issues of the her other aforementioned novel, this just seems like a perverse endorsement of the age gap b/w Eileen and Simon. Interpolating between them bangin & then flashbacks to their childhood when she was like a preteen and he was almost an adult is not good. Not saying that grafting a death of a father as was the case in Ibid would make it better at all, but it at least in that novel, she had composed the sufficient depth to represent the intersection of reality + that sort of thing and here it’s just sm*tty.

Alice and Felix are just frustrating to read. They both put words into each others mouths like "So you want me to leave," when it's clearly not what the other person wants. They want to pick a fight, to be pushed away, and they say as much but neither of them does anything about it. They just keep fuckin fighting and then going all goo goo gaga I love you afterwords, as if they don't actually put any stock into the words that had just upset them so much. Also not saying that they have to hold a grudge, but the shit that they say to one another is so wrathful and there is no productive forgiveness or discussion, it's literally just loneliness and horniness that reunites them, it's depressing. And they have this air of "man most people wouldn't get us hur dur" and it's like yeah I hope not, but it's not for any lack of wisdom you fucking sociopaths. Lotta people throwing out the phrase "I love you" and then acting to the contrary, and the recipient will just get stepped on because when you're thirty you just have to eat shit or sleep alone.

Felix takes all the unflappable Irish wit of terse retorts stoic pragmatism and instead of being endearing he's just a huge prick. Seems as though the minute he finds out how wealthy Alice actually is, in convenient revelation to the magnitude of his (gambling?) debts, he makes a point about going out of his way to tell her that nobody cares about her. She doesn't have any friends and no one will ever really get to know her just to prove the point that he's a worse person than her, which is such a sick and manipulative thing to say because it's just part of his "woe is me i'm so misunderstood an wretched" gambit which he immediately cops to by being like "yeah you let me come over at two in the morning as a wreck so that you could feel good about yourself being a better person than I am. Just know that as soon as you get the upper hand or let me feel like I have it, I'll know." and then she does do exactly just that and it's like no wonder you had a psychotic break lady, you do nothing in the way of protecting yourself from psychic terrorism. Later, Alice says she thinks she's going to kill herself and his Irish bedside manner is all "yeah I felt that way too, but you won't do it" which is not really the the turning point in his character brought out by the trauma of an argument that it's supposed to be coming in the penultimate chapter...

As for Simon, he's never depicted with quite the same indignity as the other characters, but tbh I think all the bad things that people say about him throughout the book like the Martyrdom complex, the praying on young women, the thinking he's better than everyone because he has God is true.

Page-to-page, it wasn't poorly written at all – I burned through it in one sitting (as was foretold by Kayla), but structurally and thematically I didn't like it nearly as much as Intermezzo. Going to simmer before picking up Normal People.

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