Summary
When we pick up again, Connell is with his friends Niall and Elaine, traveling Europe. They're headed to Marianne's family vacation home in rural Italy, where Marianne, Jamie, and Peggy have been vacationing together. On his travels, Connell has kept in touch with Marianne by writing long, poetic emails about everything from current events to his own life. He finds the descriptive work that goes into writing these emails highly fulfilling, even more than the short stories he's been working on lately. He also regularly has Skype conversations with his girlfriend, Helen. He finds a great deal of relief in his relationship with Helen, which feels healthy, supportive, and uncomplicated. He's even introduced her to Lorraine, and they get along well. The whole reason he's able to travel all summer is because he, like Marianne, has been awarded a highly coveted scholarship. His life feels utterly changed by this new financial freedom. Elaine, Niall, and Connell arrive at Marianne's vacation house. Connell feels a rush of love for Marianne, and realizes how much he'll miss her, since she's spending the next academic year studying in Sweden.
Rooney then offers some background information about Helen and Marianne's relationship. When they first met, Helen suspected that they'd had a romantic or sexual relationship in the past, and Connell had confirmed this, downplaying the intensity of it. She'd at first tried to befriend Marianne, but had found Marianne's all-consuming interest in politics and intellectual topics annoying and pretentious. Eventually, she had told Connell that she found Marianne promiscuous, and he had asked her not to talk badly about his friends. Connell also recalls a conversation in which Helen told him that he wasn't "cool," partly because of his accent. However, Helen had said she meant this approvingly, and that it was a good thing to be uncool. Regardless, this section of the book provides an emotional symmetry, suggesting that both main characters need to undergo a period of intense and simultaneous struggle before they can, possibly, be happy together.
Back at the house in Italy, Marianne and Jamie get into a small argument over dinner about the type of glasses being used for champagne. In another flashback, Connell remembers getting breakfast with Marianne after their scholarship awards ceremony. Marianne had eaten very little. They'd had a relatively frank conversation about class and money. Connell had pointed out that Marianne's family paid Lorraine very little for her cleaning. He had mentioned his conflicted feelings about getting so much scholarship money, noting that he was troubled by imagining what their old schoolmates would think of such a thing. Marianne, however, had pointed out that Connell had been too concerned about classmates' opinions in high school. In Italy again, and still at dinner, Jamie makes a disparaging comment about Asian tourists, and Niall accuses him of being racist. Minutes later, an irritable Jamie chides Marianne for failing to serve dessert correctly. The two get into a vicious argument in the house's kitchen, partially within earshot of Connell and their other friends. Connell goes inside to intervene. Jamie, furious, breaks a glass on purpose to frighten and threaten Marianne. Marianne tries to physically attack him, though Connell stops her. Jamie calls Marianne a "mental case." Marianne and Connell go outside together and Connell comforts her in silence. She asks whether she can sleep in his room rather than with Jamie, and he consents. Lying in bed, Marianne tells Connell, for the first time, the full extent of her family's abusiveness. Connell is deeply moved and saddened, especially when he asks Marianne about her choice not to share this information before, leading her to explain that she was afraid he'd lose interest in her if he knew. They kiss, but Marianne gently pulls away, and Connell regrets kissing her.
The following winter, Marianne is in Sweden. She has opted not to go home for Christmas, because she doesn't want to see her family. She eats breakfast and responds to emails from Joanna and Connell, the only people from Trinity who continued speaking to her after she broke up with Jamie. Peggy and her other friends took Jamie's side, and he spread vicious rumors about her. Marianne now feels ashamed that she ever thought Peggy, Jamie, and her other ex-friends were good people. She feels that she tolerated them simply because they seemed to like her. Joanna's email is short and businesslike, and Connell's is long and literary, describing the beauty of a deer he saw recently. Both, however, reference a Swedish man named Lukas, whom Marianne appears to be seeing.
Marianne finishes with her emails and gets up, having eaten very little: she hardly eats anything these days. She also feels oddly disconnected from reality. She arrives at Lukas's apartment/studio. Lukas is a photographer, and he thinks of himself as a deep, artistic person. He enjoys sexually dominating Marianne in a specific way: Marianne is not allowed to speak or look at him when they have sex, or after, while he tells her disturbing information about himself. She doesn't particularly enjoy this, but she does find great relief in giving up control and authority over her own body. Lukas begins photographing Marianne in various stages of nudity, but when he tries to tie her up and constrict her movement, she becomes upset. He tells her that he loves her, which is the last straw for Marianne: she threatens to call the police until Lukas releases her, and then she leaves. She wonders as she goes whether Lukas truly loves her, and whether he was hurt by her departure, despite his violent behavior towards her.
The next chapter focuses on Connell back in Dublin the following spring. He's sitting in his university's mental-health counseling office, where he's filling out a questionnaire about his depression symptoms. He's feeling extremely depressed and anxious, and even somewhat suicidal. The counselor calls him in to her office and he explains that his depression began in January, several months prior. This is because, in January, his high school friend Rob died by suicide. Though they were no longer close, this was deeply upsetting for Connell, and made him feel guilty about abandoning his life back in Carricklea. He'd gone back to Carricklea for the funeral, bringing Helen with him. Marianne had also gone, flying in from Sweden. Though miserable and anxious at the funeral, Connell had been relieved to see Marianne and had admired her social smoothness around the high-school classmates who had once bullied her.
However, that night, Helen had accused Connell of staring at and flirting with Marianne. They had broken up just a few weeks afterward. His counselor in Dublin tells him that he appears to be severely depressed and asks him about his friends at college. He says that he frequently Skypes with Marianne in Sweden and remains friends with Niall, but feels generally alienated from his upper-class classmates. As his counselor offers him a few worksheets and a referral for medication, he thinks about a literary reading he attended recently. He felt irritated afterward, sensing that the pretentious atmosphere of the reading flattened the experience of literature, and that his classmates were largely attending in order to cultivate a cultured persona. However, the author from the reading agreed with him, and even encouraged Connell to incorporate his frustration with Trinity into his fiction. Connell often wonders whether literature is completely useless as a form of political resistance. Yet despite his doubts, he can't resist the urge to describe his experiences in writing.
Analysis
On a structural level, this segment of the book offers a kind of evening-out. In the high school-centric segment, Connell held power over Marianne, and generally enjoyed a better, happier life. In the early college section, their situations reversed: Marianne felt popular and happy, while Connell felt friendless and lost. Now, they have both hit such low points as to be equally depressed and lonely. Marianne, for her part, sees her previous popularity and sense of fulfillment as an illusion of sorts. Without this illusion, however, she has no distraction from the traumas of her childhood. Not only does she feel alienated from others and from her own feelings, but she also acts self-destructively. Her relationship with Lukas is deeply degrading, and she has clearly developed a severe eating disorder, nearly starving herself in Sweden.
Rooney suggests that these impulses towards submission and self-destruction come from a desire to be loved: Marianne hopes that, if she is as obedient and malleable as possible, she will be treated with care. In general, her anguish seems to come from a near-impossible desire to reconcile her experiences back in Carricklea with her adult life in Dublin and Sweden. While she once tried to escape her past, she now finds that she cannot. Connell, meanwhile, also becomes depressed, and his depression also comes from a futile-feeling desire to reconcile his Carricklea and Dublin lives. In his case, it is Rob's suicide that has this effect. He realizes that he can never talk to this old friend again, and that he has made a more or less irreversible choice to leave his childhood community behind.
Both Marianne and Connell, in these chapters, find themselves grappling with the intersecting issues of art and morality. Marianne feels deeply depressed when she thinks about Lukas, who simultaneously seems to lack moral sensitivity and to have a genuinely refined and sophisticated artistic sensibility. She feels that artistic taste and moral judgment should be related, and wonders whether art has any value if it can be so neatly separated from questions of right and wrong. Connell experiences a similar feeling of doubt concerning his own literary aspirations. He loves writing, but feels unsure about whether literature can have any power because of the way it is used and produced. For one thing, he frets, the marketing and publication of books is mediated by a publishing industry, which is itself subject to the same material concerns as any other industry. For another, he worries that literary readership is itself a dangerous thing, because many people read solely as a way to signal that they are educated and upper-class. If literature is so inextricable from existing power structures, Connell wonders, is it redeemable?
The place where Connell finds the greatest literary fulfillment and purpose, however, is not through any traditional form of writing: it is in his emails to Marianne. This may be because those emails, like his relationship with Marianne as a whole, are largely free from the pretensions and posturing of the outside world. When he emails Marianne, Connell writes in a loose, casual prose style, though his vivid, emotionally infused descriptions remain literary in their own way. These become a realm in which he can freely enjoy writing, without those aforementioned forces of capitalism and wealth. In fact, when he and Marianne are together in Italy, he finds himself wishing he could email her—after all, those emails are far more private and intimate than being physically together but surrounded by other people. Moreover, emailing gives Marianne and Connell a private space without physicality or sexuality. This allows them to maintain a close relationship even when they're dating other people. It also gives them much-needed perspective, allowing them to feel close with some relief from the physical attraction they feel to one another. This allows them to communicate more deliberately and carefully. At times, the sense of deep, almost mystical mutual understanding that the two feel around one another—especially in sexual situations—actually impedes clear communication. This is what happens in Italy, when Connell kisses Marianne after she fights with Jamie. He believes that his sympathy and care for her will be seamlessly expressed because of the physical connection they share, but later feels that his impulse was unkind and insensitive. Taking sex out of their relationship, even temporarily, and making it entirely verbal offers it a kind of breathing room. It also confirms that they love and care about one another, outside of physical chemistry.
