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His friends do what anyone confronted by a supposedly well-known person would do: They Google her.
Felix, growing visibly uncomfortable, deflects by downplaying the fact that Alice has a Wikipedia page at all.
Anyone can have one of those, he says to Alice.
You probably wrote it yourself.
But Alice rejects this collapse between her internet persona and her personal life.
No, she replies, just the books.
The story follows two pairs of lovers hovering around 30 over the course of a few short months.
Characters attend dinner parties, go shopping, and have mostly sweet, mostly straight sex.
With the exception of Felix, they are rarely depicted while actually working.
Tide returning now with a faint repeating rush over the sand.
Sounds fun, right?
Well, sort of.
Its an epistolary novel meetsUlysseslite.
Eileens response: Ive also been thinking lately about time and political conservatism, although in a different way.
As the novel unfolds, the stilted and superficial cadence of their letters hints at deeper troubles.
Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?
begins one of Eileens emails.
If this is thefamous self-awarenessfrequently associated with Rooneys fiction, then its self-awareness approaching self-parody.
It is difficult not to interpret the character as a stand-in for Rooney.
Have I told you I cant read contemporary novels anymore?
writes Alice in one of her emails to Eileen.
I think its because I know too many of the people who write them.
If novelists wrote honestly about their own lives, no one would read novels and quite rightly!
asserts Alice at one point.
Frequently, Alice threatens never to write another novel again.
Rooney herself has often questioned the value of her labor.
Her politics do suggest there are other more urgent and materially valuable things she might be doing.
The emails in Rooneys latest novel are her most overt attempt to counter that.
To read them is to feel the discourse winning.
