“Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.”
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties while his brother, Ivan, is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player whose career has stalled before it could even take off. In the wake of their father’s death, they each deal with this tragedy the best way they can – Peter over medicating himself and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women while Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman and becomes intensely involved with her. Rooney follows these two grieving brothers and the people they love or try to love through a period of desire, despair, possibility and growing up.
“what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
When the blurb for this book came out, everyone went on and on about how this is Rooney stepping out of her comfort zone and writing about brothers. Actually, this is very typical Rooney, she is still exploring human sexual and romantic relationships but this time her main characters are brothers. Like all her books, people fall in love and engage in toxic relationships or less than ideal relationships so that the book suddenly becomes literary fiction instead of plain old romance. I feel, at this point, I’ve accepted that as much as Rooney annoys me, and I genuinely believe that I hate-read all her books, that she has become a must read author for me. Rooney releases a book, and I read it, she just writes books that I enjoy ranting about. I do not even know if I truly enjoy any of her books.
“Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.”
This book has no quotation marks. That’s probably why you’re reading the above quote and wondering if I made a mistake, but I didn’t. There is just no quotations or commas in the entire book. I came across a clip of Rooney on Instagram in which she said she enjoys exploring different human relationships and accessing what it’s like to need people. I think that clip made me enjoy this book more and I intend to find the full interview and listen to it. Maybe if I listen to her perspective, I’d enjoy her books more. That being said, I ended up appreciating this book even though I started out completely annoyed by the structure. I enjoyed reading about the relationship between the brothers and the relationship they have with their mum. I think this is one of Rooney’s books that I’ve appreciated in a long time.
“Didn’t human sexuality at its base always involve a pathetic sort of throbbing insecurity, awful to contemplate?”
I never recommend Rooney to anybody because even though I will be the first to say that she is a fantastic writer, I still think her books are sad girl aesthetic. Her books are about nothing or about sad people being sad and having sex with each other. It is about people of a certain class, navel gazing about things the rest of the world barely thinks about. Rooney is good at fucked up relationship dynamics, but Ivan and Margaret were just cringe to me. I can’t believe Margaret listened to Ivan chatting like a 12-year-old as opposed to his 22 and still made the decision to sleep with him. Ridiculous. I liked Peter more than Ivan. I found him to be a more complex character but then Rooney decided to wrap everything up in a bow and everything was just tidied up at the end. I found that completely disappointing.
“Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction — which even makes sense from an evolutionary perspective — is simply the strangest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.”
Overall, I liked this book better than I did her last offering. I gave this 3 stars on Goodreads. Am I going to read the next Rooney book? Who am I kidding? Of course!
Leggy
TwoNightStands 