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Youll feel like you hacked her Facebook Messenger.
The main characters backgrounds prescribe their lives and personalities.
It expresses everything all at once, which is the same as expressing nothing.
When he later asks a different girl to a dance, they break it off.
The politics of Rooneys novels are ultimately in service to her characters eccentricities.
Its as if the fullness of Connells character has been predetermined.
Its Calvinism for the secular age, class-defining personhood, i.e., Marxism.
The result is a hyperflatness, a hypersmoothness.
There is relatively little agency at play, relatively few decisions being made.
Hes poorer; shes richer.
Hes more attractive; shes initially less attractive.
It also feels realistic that the adults are the ones who actually have control making life-altering decisions for them.
The young folks are playing by the rules of older generations.
There is no interest in revolt, no interest in change.
May the revolution be swift and brutal.
In the end, politics isnt actually that big of a deal.
Itll all work out.
The ending is a provisionally happy one; love and meritocracy prevail.
And yet, Connell maintains the upper hand, as at the start.
But the lesson is that you are who you are, not who you want to be.
I want to use my hands to redirect her face to a fucking mirror.
Millie senses that shes permanently screwed.
Where Connell resigns himself to never understanding the rich, Millie pulses with class rage.
This feeling of captivity and degradation under capitalism takes on a more explicitly didactic form in Ling MasSeverance.
No regular income, no health insurance.
You quit jobs on a dime.
We could do with a bit more communism in this country if you ask me, he said.
From the corner of his eye he could see Lorraine smiling.
Come on now, comrade, she said.
I was the one who raised you with your good socialist values, remember?
Connell adopts this generational capitulation, not bothering to educate himself on Irish politics.
She texts back: The party of Franco.
Connell had to look up what that meant.
It is a set of unalterable circumstances that define the millennial condition.
But there is little revolutionary about Rooneys politics, no scent of revolt only oppression.
