Puzzles, Predicaments and Contemporary Mindsets—a review of Sally Rooney’s Color and Light

What would happen between two people with almost opposite traces of life? Tension? Confusion? Mysterious attraction? Sally Rooney’s short story Color and Light addresses this kind of encounter- or a series of such encounters, whether intentional or unintentional. As the author of the 2019 Book of the Year novel, Normal People, Rooney has been hailed as the ‘voice of the millennials’. Characters in her novels always feel contemporary and close to real-life – they struggle for the struggles of the current younger generation, and this short story is no different.

Color and Light gives out an artistic film vibe, starting with the readers thrown into a dark, narrow space- a car crowded with three vague characters: Aidan, Pauline and Declan. Aidan is an outsider, suddenly forced to confront the indefinite relationship between Declan, his brother, and Pauline, a self-claimed screenwriter. Aidan has many questions but he reserves them, which seems like a tacit contract between people in the present society. The language of the story is very similar to that of a screenplay: brief, clear-cut and pictorial as if leading the reader into Aidan’s stream of consciousness. This language style makes the reader feel intimate with characters when they detach themselves from their surroundings and bury themselves in their thoughts. The flow of language paves to the reader’s expectation that the mist around the most mysterious character, Pauline will be driven away by some revelation of her life story, but the expectation is frustrated. There are only sparse fragmented details, inadequate for readers to work the jigsaw out. All characters end up like grayish silhouettes in an unknown town during the time when ‘walkie-talkies’ were around. This time setting, I guess, does not reveal Rooney’s interests in depicting that specific era, since there is no other traces are marking the particularity of that time.

It seems more like the whole story is sealed in a time capsule, going on in a circle in its way, resembling the repetition we feel in our own lives. The setting implies that predicaments and puzzles are timeless and that we would have to coexist with them.

Color and Light very much captures the urban social landscape in a relatively atomic society. Strangers with totally different backgrounds bump into each other and since they both hold similar deep loneliness and disappointments about life, they may implicitly have some empathy for each other. This state is quite nuanced as depicted in the story. Pauline ostensibly has a more successful life, but deep down her spiritual world feels barren, suggested by the surprising emptiness and strangeness of her holiday home, “the house is spacious and, though furnished, appears curiously empty. The ceilings are high up and far away. […] The house is confusingly laid out, so he can’t tell where she’s gone or how far away.”. Descriptions about her holiday house seem like a metaphor about her status quo – apparently grand, but hollow inside. The house is a temporary place that symbolizes her situation as only dwelling in this town. The puzzling layout of the house also echoes her unknown life story to Aidan and readers alike. Her strong sense of insecurity is indicated by her worries about dangers and her doubts that everyone around her is trying to use her. She is so aloof from the busy and noisy life she is leading.

In contrast, Aidan’s life trajectory is another story. He lives a much more humble life, working as a receptionist at a hotel. For him, life seems to never begin since the excitement he expected as a teenager never arrives. What’s worse, the death of his mother, the only person that really cared and loved him, made him even more alienated from the real world. Aidan’s calm character and even indifference may have come from his boredom about the mediocrity and repetitiveness of life. The two characters’ apparently unrelated lifestyles and envisions about life do not prevent them from getting closer to each other. It’s surprising how hard their mindsets can get across to each other and how strangely mixed are their desires to get close and their qualms about that closeness. The characters’ situations are similar to many individuals in modern times, as the expansion of industries is causing swift changes to contemporary mentality. Those at the margin may feel a higher position in a career could solve the major problems in their lives, while those situated in the centre of this trend constantly feel instrumentalized and alienated. The lack of love gradually becomes a universal problem but the solution barely shows traces of arrival.

In the story, Pauline and Aidan become more intimate when they happen to be at a fireworks display together. Without others, the two finally have an opportunity to learn about each other and be more comfortable about asking questions and talking about their lives. Despite being more open about their life stories, their relationship is like that of two lonely city dwellers who strive for comfort and intimacy – the warmth is temporary while disappointments and coldness are the norms. Ultimately they cannot explain themselves or give out certain answers because confusion and uncertainty are what they are living in.

All these depictions in the story can relate to many young people in the current society. Individual isolation makes people have more implicit longings and the attractions and warmth from strangers appear to be mysteriously desirable. In some way, the reason why the mist around the characters of this story never comes away is because there are hundreds of people with similar backgrounds standing behind the characters in reality. They can never be accurate because they are plurality itself and multiple interpretations of their routes are inevitable.

Color and Light for me is an introspective and melancholic story about individuals in modern society. It sheds light on a hidden side of my life which I seldom share with people, but it lacks creativity and thus new inspirations. It is merely a calm narrative about the status quo where every individual has their own jigsaw to work out and since confusions are so omnipresent that they feel tired and not energetic enough to clarify everything.

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Bibliography

Rooney, Sally, "“Color And Light”", The New Yorker, 2021 <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/18/color-and-light> [Accessed 25 June 2021]