Alice, a novelist, leaves Dublin for the countryside, where she meets Felix. Eileen, Alice’s best friend, is trying to figure out her relationship with Simon, a childhood friend. The book alternates between Alice’s and Eileen’s points of view, discussing love, politics and the future, many preoccupations for thirty-year-olds. This is the first book of Sally Rooney’s that I have read; perhaps I should have started with her debut novel. The writing is accessible, but I found myself getting bored towards the end as I couldn’t quite grasp where the book was going. I will have to try another one of Sally Rooney’s novels.
“Anyway, I have a new theory. Would you like to hear it? Ignore this paragraph if not. My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence. You can actually see the change in process if you look at street photography from before and after 1976. I know we have good reason to be sceptical of aesthetic nostalgia, but the fact remains that before the 1970s, people wore durable clothes of wool and cotton, stored drinks in glass bottles, wrapped food produce in paper, and filled their houses with sturdy wooden furniture. Now a majority of objects in our visual environment are made of plastic, the ugliest substance on earth, a material which when dyed does not take on colour but actually exudes colour, in an inimitably ugly way. One thing a government could do with my approval (and there aren’t many) would be to prohibit the production of each and every form of plastic not urgently necessary for the maintenance of human life. What do you think?”
Listen to as an audiobook