The air outside is very still and the laundry hangs there in damp colors, not moving.” Rooney’s respect for the limits and biases of her characters’ minds was strict. Her control was so fine that she was able to convey Connell’s arousal during a reunion with Marianne by slowing down his perception and amping up its sensuousness: “She’s wearing a white dress with a halter-neck and her skin looks tanned. Rooney showed mastery of point of view as well. You’re acting like you’ve never kissed anyone before. Here are Connell and Marianne, the teenage lovers of Normal People, after their first kiss:Īll right, he said. Rooney also resembled Hemingway-and Raymond Carver, a renovator of Hemingway’s minimalism whom Rooney has cited as an influence-in her ability to write dialogue that sounds unpremeditated but has a neutron-star density of drama and emotion. With a writer so chary of detail, the reader rushes to fill in. At least, that’s what I imagine is going on in Frances’s head. “The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white,” he famously wrote in his short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” and in much the same deadpan way, Rooney has Frances, the narrator of her debut, look around a college library and think, “Inside, everything was very brown.” Ridiculous in isolation, Rooney’s line makes sense in context: Frances has just received an email from her lover’s wife, and while she waits for the courage to read it, she tries, unsuccessfully, to distract herself by focusing on her surroundings. I n her first two novels, Conversations With Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), the young Irish writer Sally Rooney resurrected the depressive, evacuated style that Ernest Hemingway made his signature. The way Rooney designs these conversations demonstrates her understanding of how so many of us think and speak now, in scattered thoughts, toggling between the registers of global catastrophe and personal shortcomings, gossip and political outrage.This article was published online on August 10, 2021. In one chapter, Eileen writes to Alice about how “structural symptoms, like the mass drowning of refugees and the repeated weather disasters triggered by climate change, are beginning to be understood as manifestations of a political crisis.” As she shifts to questioning the very purpose of having children while approaching civilizational collapse, she adds, “I’m probably thinking about all this now because I saw Aidan randomly on the street the other day and immediately had a heart attack and died.” Hyperbolic, dialectical and eerily familiar, these exchanges form entire chapters. In long emails interspersed between the central narrative, Eileen and Alice ruminate about everything from climate change to white privilege, from the history of writing to their ambivalence toward motherhood.

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