cbr11bingo – Listicle: Slate’s Best Books of 2017
After reading and thoroughly enjoying Sally Rooney’s Normal People, I knew it was only a matter of time before I went back and read her first novel. Conversations With Friends is about the interpersonal dynamics between four people: Frances, a young writer at university who identifies as bisexual, her best-friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi, and Melissa and Nick, a married couple ten years older than them that they meet in Dublin’s literary scene. Melissa is a photojournalist and Nick a moderately successful actor. Melissa is intrigued by Frances and Bobbi’s spoken-word poetry performances and wants to profile them for a magazine.
Rooney is masterful at constructing a narrative out of inner life. While there are large and important events taking place in the novel, the heart of the story is in Frances’s thoughts and her anticipating how her actions impact the actions of the others. As her and Bobbi get more involved in Melissa and Nick’s lives, Frances’s character is revealed through her choices. Even as she deals with a complicated love life, with jealousy and heartbreak, a health crisis, and her complicated relationship with her divorced parents, the drama is mainly internal.
Frances is an endearing and winning narrator. Her youth and inexperience are contrasted with her obvious intelligence, while her self-doubt and insecurity make it easy to relate to her. Rooney does an especially good job at characterizing Frances through contemporary communication tools like email and texts. As we all know so much of life today is trying to decipher what people really mean in the messages they send, even as we all know that we’re likely reading way too much into them.
Though perhaps not quite as brilliant as Normal People, Conversations With Friends is clear evidence of Sally Rooney’s remarkable talent for depicting the intricacies of consciousness and communication. She’s a writer I’m eagerly looking forward to reading again, hopefully soon.