BOOK REVIEW: A Writer's opinion

 Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

Conversations With Friends, Irish writer Rooney's debut novel, was published in 2017 after what appears to be a fairly frenzied bidding war between publishers. It was nominated for the 2018 Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize and the 2018 Folio Prize, and won the 2017 Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer Of The Year Award. 

I feel a degree of personal interest in Rooney as she was, for a couple of years, editor (and is still a contributing editor) of Dublin magazine The Stinging Fly, which has published two of my poems in the past and which I rate highly as a literary journal.  

According to Wikipedia, Rooney wrote the first 100,000 words of the novel in three months while studying for an MA in American Literature at Trinity College Dublin, which gives you a flavour of her drive, energy and ambition.

Her follow-up novel, Normal People, was an international bestseller and was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. It won Irish Book Of The Year at the Irish Book Awards and Waterstone's Book of the Year for 2018. In 2019, it won the Costa Prize and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction. It was made into a critically-acclaimed 12-part mini-series by BBC3 and Hulu, and Conversations With Friends is also going to be made into a TV series. Her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, is due to be published later this year (2021). 

                     

The problem with this sort of success is that it sets reader-expectations unfeasibly high. I was given a copy of this novel for Christmas a couple of years ago and have only got round to reading it this year, but I was aware of the hype surrounding the novel when it was first published. Even the cover quotations, ironically, have a kind of negative effect on the reader. They had this effect on me, anyway. The stream of flamboyantly admiring quotations from celebrity commentators on the dust jacket and inside the front cover of the paperback felt like they couldn't possibly be true, or even seemed like a challenge to the reader to prove them wrong. It felt as if we were being told what to think about the novel, and most readers, I suspect, aren't completely keen on this. 

On the front cover, a quotation from the Sunday Telegraph describes the novel as 'darkly funny', but I have to say that I didn't find it even remotely funny, except very slightly in odd vignettes here and there. I felt it had an atmosphere of imminent tragedy all the way through, as if something terrible was about to happen. So I was primed to find the novel different from how these celebrities viewed it, right from the start.

This does a disservice to the book, as in fact it is a fine piece of writing. However, it took me a long, long time to start appreciating its qualities and strengths (though I am obviously in a minority here). The narrator, 21-year-old Frances, a highly intelligent university student, has a flat narrative voice where everything she tells us seems lacking in emotion. It takes a while for the reader to understand that this is intentional: Frances is a damaged individual who self-harms and represses her emotions. Her best friend and ex-lover, the beautiful Bobbi, seemed inconsistent to me - sometimes vividly drawn but often responding to events in ways I found unconvincing, though I eventually decided that this too was part of the unreliability of the narrative voice. The two women perform poetry written by Frances, and through this they meet Melissa, a photographer and essayist, and her handsome actor husband, Nick, with whom Frances embarks on an affair. The novel is built around the various conversations Frances has with the other three members of this group, and with other characters such as her mother and alcoholic father. These include telephone conversations, emails and texts.

For a good part of the novel, I found this constant focus on Frances's inner life rather tedious, if I'm honest. She seemed rather cold, distanced, and the novel appeared to be solely about the emotional game-playing, self-delusion, and often slightly mystifying interactions between these characters, none of whom I found recognisable. I'm a middle-aged, working-class Yorkshire woman, and I don't mix with actors and photographers, even minor ones, or with 21-year-old writers who are offered several hundred euros to publish the first short story they've ever written. I found it difficult to really care about these people and they seemed to be from a different planet to the one I live in, but not in an interesting Star Trekky way. When I was twenty-one, I wrote poetry but I was never the kind of woman that an extremely handsome actor in his thirties would have found sexually or romantically attractive. So I'm probably not the target audience for this novel. It is, in fact, an indication of the power of Rooney's writing that I kept reading for long enough for the novel to get under my skin. 

I found myself beginning to feel intrigued by Frances, invested in what happened to her, almost in spite of my mild boredom and failure to empathise with her. I began to realise the depth of her low self-esteem, the way she despises herself and constantly self-sabotages, her inability to talk about her feelings with her close friends, her constant dissection of the discourses in which she participates and the supposedly Bohemian morality of her group of friends which only thinly conceals their basic human feelings of jealous insecurity.

As the novel progressed, I still often found it sometimes irritating. Characters often seemed to react to things in ways I found implausible. Melissa's sort-of-acceptance of Frances's relationship with Nick seemed unlikely. The fact that the highly intelligent and well-read Frances seems never to have heard of endometriosis struck me as peculiar, though I suppose that a woman of her age might not have heard of it. The fact that no one immediately investigates why Frances's father told her he had transferred money to her bank account but then it turned out he hadn't, struck me as odd.  And there were aspects of the writing that I found difficult to evaluate - images that I found problematic (were they terrible or brilliant?): 'The sky was soft like cloth and birds ran over it in long threads', 'We were driving along by the harbour, where the ships implied themselves as concepts behind the fog'. 

Yet I found the novel increasingly compelling. There were moments when the story came vividly alive for me, one being the visit of the horrendous literary agent, Valerie, during Melissa and Nick's sojourn in Etables. Though there were moments when I wanted to shake Frances and tell her to grow up, there were others when I felt deeply sorry for her and found her inability to recognise her own emotions very poignant. And I have found that I appreciate the novel much more in retrospect than while I was reading it: it has stayed with me in a way that many novels fail to.  It had a greater impact on me than the last thing I read, Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. For this reason, I would, slightly grudgingly, give it four stars and consider reading more of Rooney's work. I think that a different kind of reader would find it deeply rewarding. All I would say is that you should ignore the promotional blurb and just read the novel itself. Make up your own mind.

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