This new Sally Rooney novel might be my most anticipated release of 2021. I enjoyed Rooney’s first two novels, Conversations With Friends and Normal People, and I was so excited to get an ALC from @librofm . Rooney is a polarizing writer, but I think people who didn’t love her first two books will enjoy this one.
Synopsis: “Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?”
The plot of this story is simple–four friends navigate life, relationships, insecurities, and sex. The crux of this book is in how each character relates to the others. Alternating between narrative and long-form emails between the friends, this novel captures the uncertainties of getting older—is this adulthood? Is this love? Is this good sex? The characters all experience disillusionment with various aspects of their respective lives and we get to see how they handle or don’t handle those feelings.
Rooney’s writing is unembellished, lacking flowery, flourishing sentences, but the result is an honest, unfiltered exploration of the millennial plight. She’s been called the Salinger of the Snapchat generation and while social media is almost nonexistent in her books, I see where the comparison comes from. At times, I thought the long-form emails were a little self-indulgent, but they began to feel akin to many thoughts I’ve had or I’ve heard friends express. In using bared down language, Rooney taps into the vulnerabilities of her characters who feel supremely real.
Read It Like Rory 