The Post-Modern Condition
Alice and Eileen’s email exchanges are going to be by far more interesting to many readers than their respective romantic entanglements. These communiques represent the meat and the heart of the narrative, not to mention the intellectual soul. Typical of the content is this expression of post-modernist dread by Eileen, framed as simile:
“Alice, I think I’ve also experienced that sensation you had in the convenience shop. For me it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth.”
The End of World as We Know It
Indeed, all the best lines of the novel come not from discourse between lovers or even conversations between friends or strangers, but the ever-so-slightly more carefully considered and crafted exchanges between the two female protagonists in their ongoing existential examination of the world through the convenience of somebody@somewhere. Among the philosophical exchanges rating high on the metaphor meter:
“when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?”
Girl Talk
One can imagine a certain type of man reading this book—of course, it would take a lot of imagination to get this particular type of man to read this book—and seeing him scratching his head as he reads the email sections. He would be wondering to himself, is this how women really talk to each other? Even when the talking is emailing? This particular imaginary reader would certainly be baffled by the idea that any two people ever wrote email messages like the following. But then again, any time the subject is even tangentially related women and bathrooms, many men are immediately baffled:
“I bet you never look for the bathrooms in museums, Eileen. I bet as soon as you enter the hallowed halls of Europe’s great galleries, you simply leave such corporeal practicalities behind you – if indeed they ever plague you in the first place. One doesn’t think of you as a corporeal being really, but as a beam of pure intellect. And how I wish I had a little more of your radiance illuminating my life at the moment.”
Darkness
It almost never fails. Read a work of fiction published since the end of the 1800’s and the odds are greatly in your favor of coming across darkness used metaphorically. Today, it is even quite possible to read novels in which darkness is exclusively used figuratively with no relation to actual literal absence of light. That is not the case here, as darkness recurs liberally in both literal and metaphorical terms:
“It was so peaceful just to watch him, his fine handsome figure, making his way through the deep blue liquid darkness of December”
What is God?
The book tackles big issues through the email exchanges. Both women are ferociously smart and have moved beyond the ability to accept easy answers merely for the purpose of getting on with things. Few issues are solved, of course, but that is beside the point. The point is that despite all appearances to the contrary, it still remains possible and even necessary to discuss the really big and mysterious issues of existence that can’t be solved by watching a YouTube video. Even an issue so big it can only be discussed metaphorically:
“…nobody goes around committing mass murders just because they don’t believe in God. But increasingly I think it’s because, in one way or another, they do believe in God – they believe in the God that is the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything. Goodness regardless of reward, regardless of our own desires, regardless of whether anyone is watching or anyone will know”
