How can we connect with another? How do we relate to ourselves? To what extent can our conversations communicate what we mean, how we feel?
In ‘Colour and Light’, we follow hotel worker Aidan, his business-orientated, hard-to-relate-to brother, Declan, and the mysterious screenwriter, new-to-town, Pauline. Before the present of the story, the boy’s mother has died, a person Aidan deeply related to, “the person on earth who loved him most”. When he thinks of her, “the thought creates a feeling – the thought might be only an abstract idea or memory, but the feeling follows on from it helplessly”. This proximity to her characters’ inner turmoil and complex psychology often draws me into Rooney’s stories. Aidan is self-reflective and hyperaware of how he inhabits the world, of how he sees others and how he is seen; he yearns to understand what things mean and how he can relate to the ‘social’ world of adults and expectations. Meeting Pauline is a hot flash of colour in the grey of his daily existence. People hang on her every word and desire to be with her, while, conversely, he feels utterly alone: “If I dropped dead the only people who would care are the people who would have to cover my shifts”.
Through a series of chance meetings, Aidan and Pauline’s lives intersect. Their conversations are lively, playful and almost reach an honesty that Aidan yearns for. In an interview with The New Yorker, Rooney explains, “I tend to write characters who are roughly as articulate and insightful as I am about what they think and feel. In other words, they are sometimes perceptive but more often crushingly unable to describe or explain what is going on in their lives”. Aidan and Pauline epitomise this idea; the two attempt to voice their similar feelings of alienation and loneliness, but there is a barrier to their intimacy. Their own selves getting in the way. They speak of sex, but it seems this isn’t exactly what they desire; the root, it feels, is connection. Ultimately, they part, and like Aidan, we are left to wonder what it all meant.
First published by The New Yorker, 2019, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Being Various, Faber, 2019
A Personal Anthology 