Oh, some fiction from an Irish author....

 

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

Here comes another from the author who wrote NORMAL PEOPLE. She has a way of putting a spin on life. Modernism perhaps. Yet maybe that soul searching has always been there, we just haven't picked up on it..until now.

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.” [Beautiful World...]

Of course, one might believe that Rooney's fortae is in dialogue and this is what we long for in most of her novels. But so much thought in this one you might forget the plot.  Is it John Green for adults? Oh, you might find yourself scratching your head at this one. But then isn't that adulting?