MixedThe Hindu (IND)The format of Sally Rooney’s third novel is excitingly novel, but the need for the characters to posture as intellectuals throughout completely undoes the effect ... The chapters between the emails seem to be told at times by a clueless third-person narrator who, at other times, has an intense, invasive access to their past. The whole of Eileen’s childhood and growing-up years is vomited out in one hurl of a chapter ... The first-person emails, coming after the chapters in the voice of the unnamed narrator, serve to clarify what the character was actually thinking in the preceding chapters. It is an exciting set-up — the events in one chapter and the interiority of the events a chapter later — but the need for the characters to posture as intellectual beings throughout completely undoes the format ... Rooney notes in the acknowledgements that a London Review of Books article on the collapse of the Bronze Age helped her write Eileen’s emails, where she pontificates on civilisational catastrophe. It is a section that feels utterly barren because it is insincere — it’s like writing what you think you should be writing. Eileen, Alice, and Rooney herself seem to be reacting to issues such as class, climate change and collapse at an intellectual level, which has no effect whatsoever on how they lead their lives ... Does Rooney’s unparalleled ability to craft tense conversations have something to do with this uneasy coexistence? While her dialogues are precise, at times they are too measured, almost rehearsed ... The men are at various stages of being emotionally neutered — in ideology or in practice. This makes me question if desire is intensely gendered or if that is a sexist notion. Alice is said to be bisexual, as is Felix. How would they behave with same-sex lovers, I wonder.