Do I hate this book?
Yes.
Why do I hate this book?
Like the confused protagonists, I don’t have a clear answer for that.
Let me get the good part out of the way, so that I can thoroughly whine about just how much this book irritated me.
I’m a sucker for books that focus on and obsess over the inner workings of the protagonists. There is no grand adventure or suspense here. It is the inner monologue and emotional turmoil of two characters that drive the plot, which I absolutely love. There is a certain degree of introspection that took place whenever I saw a part of myself streaked across early Connell’s mannerisms or in how he viewed the motivations or repercussions of his actions.
Besides identifying a little too much with one of the main characters, I absolutely loved how the story progressed in the beginning. Sally Rooney has masterfully described the mixed feelings associated with nascent high school love in a way I’ve never read before. Her maniacal focus on the little things, the tiny details, is what makes it so compelling for me.
If he silently decides not to say something when they’re talking, Marianne will ask ‘what?’ within one or two seconds. This ‘what?’ question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them.
How could I NOT expect great things from this book?
But alas, things quickly went downhill from there. I understand that humans are flawed and that our medium of communication is abysmally under-equipped when we start talking about emotions and feelings. If we could all communicate using telepathy to convey how we’re actually feeling, the world would be a much easier, less misunderstood place to live in. Alas, until Elon Musk unveils telepathic communication chips, we’ll be stuck depending on our sub-par mode of communication.
But, that isn’t an excuse for the characters to NOT talk about stuff. There were more than a few instances where I felt the whole situation could’ve been diffused had they just talked about it. I must sound like a hypocrite to some of you, who know me better than most. But alas, I hold fiction to a higher standard. The whole business of creating artificial conflicts just to get a juicer resolution feels like an insult to the reader.
We are all communicative in different ways when it comes to our emotions. As much as I hated the latter part, I’d still recommend this to everyone, given how well the story unfolded in the beginning.