One should of course resist the strange temptation to pit women novelists against each other, but still, I couldn’t help thinking to myself as I read this that Sally Rooney wishes she could write like this. And then I immediately chided myself — they’re different! And Rooney does have a kind of lightness and gobble-it-up quality that this novel doesn’t quite get to — this one slows you down a touch (which gives you time to appreciate it). What this novel does have, at any rate, is a really breath-taking emotional intelligence. It seems to so deeply understand the characters (of all ages!), neither demonizing them nor totally letting them off the hook. It’s intellectual without being pretentious, and the emotional intensity is keyed just right. It recognizes that people can be awful, but it doesn’t subject you to punishing accounts of abjection. It has a kind of equanimity (maybe I’m projecting, because the first book of hers I read was Making Babies, a collection of essays on becoming a parent, that had exactly that quality too).
In any case, I really admired it and am looking forward to reading more of her boks.
Kasia Reads 