by Joan Didion

I don’t know why I read this. It’s about the year after Joan Didion’s husband died and her adult daughter hovered near death in various ICU’s. The “magical thinking” was semi-conscious thinking like “I can’t give away his shoes; if he comes back, he’ll need shoes.” I have not yet lost my spouse and I don’t know what to say about it; I guess, thanx for the tip as to how horrible it’s going to be.

by Sally Rooney

This is not my kind of book – very talky-thinky. Dense pages with no paragraph breaks consisting entirely of people talking or thinking about their feelings.

I don’t like Sally Rooney, and this book reenforced that. I had read one book, NORMAL PEOPLE, and liked exactly one half of it. Now I have double the sample size. I don’t like her women and I don’t like her sex scenes. I preferred the young woman in the first half of NORMAL and I prefer sex scenes where people keep their socks on and not everything is wonderful.

It dragged in the middle. I thought, I get it, I get it, the “neurodivergent” guy is the most well-adjusted character in the book. I don’t buy Ivan as neurodivergent, FYI, if that’s what she had in mind, which it may not be; it may just be what readers are projecting onto him. He was a skinny guy that was really into chess. But he was as talky-thinky as anyone else when you got right down to it.

I loathed Naomi. I came to hate any scene where she was even mentioned, let alone appeared in. Why was everyone around Peter acting as if this were a perfectly appropriate relationship for him? To quote Woody Allen’s alien scene in STARDUST MEMORIES, “Hey look, I’m a super intelligent being, by your standards I have an IQ of 1600, and I cant’ even understand what [Peter] expected out of that relationship with [Naomi].”

Positives:

I thought it was really interesting about how concerned the characters were with what other people would think. Margaret says that the net you’re caught in, the net of other people, you can’t get out of it, because life IS the net. And Peter couldn’t get past what other people would about him being in a weird “throuple.” I think characters grown up in the US would not have these attitudes. If they had twinges of self-consciousness they’d shrug them off – Who cares what people think? I’m an adult, he/she/they are adults, this is our life to choose. Most of the rest of the world is very different; apparently even first-world places like Ireland.

It was actually beautiful how she conveyed the grief of the two brothers. Whenever the narration came around back to their father, in any way, whichever brother’s perspective she may have been inhabiting, you really felt the loss and the struggle he was going through; like real grief, large swathes of (narrative) time might go by without giving a thought to the loss, but a reminder would crash it down again.