![]() ![]() Every other chapter in this novel is an e-mail, written and responded to alternately. They exchange page-long emails explaining their world views, the Wikipedia articles they read, and their unbaked, pretentious theories of aesthetics (“human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence” or “Human beings lost when the Berlin Wall came down”). In this book, we get absolute access to the principles of two of the four main characters - Alice, the celebrity novelist who suffered a mental breakdown in the aftermath of fame, and her best friend Eileen, who works for a literary magazine in Dublin. It doesn’t demand an answer, merely expresses a rhetorical exhaustion with our world as it is. Notice that the title is a question, but there is no interrogation mark. This is most clear in her third novel,īeautiful World, Where Are You. ![]() Sally Rooney always pitches her characters in that hazy, contested zone between principle and practice - between what we believe to be true and what we end up doing anyway. (Try drafting a 240 character tweet that is tonally ambivalent.) And yet, real life can never be lived with theoretical clarity. It is frustrating, isn’t it, to believe, to have staunch principles, and yet to act like they do not exist? It is what some would call the contemporary condition, because social media has turned our thoughts into manifestos, our ambiguities into certainty. ![]()
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