conversations with friends

Times Literary supplement 27 september 2017

Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends is a fluent and impressive first novel. Still only twenty-six, Rooney says she wrote the book in a “huge rush”, and this has translated to the page. Urgency is crucial; the quartet of bourgeois artists that the book centres on are so introspective that, at times, it requires this sense of propulsion to stick with them. Frances, a twenty-one-year-old spoken-word poet, performs with her confident and beautiful ex-girlfriend Bobbi. Their work comes to the attention of Melissa, who hopes to write a profile on the pair. She also introduces them to her actor husband Nick.

When we first encounter Frances, she is describing a photograph taken of herself by Melissa in which she is “self-consciously holding my left wrist in my right hand”. This kind of wry, self-aware narrator will be familiar to readers of Gwendoline Riley, but Frances lacks the uncompromising self-actualization of Riley’s heroines. What Frances does have in common with Neve from First Love (2017), for example, however, is an enormous capacity for self-destruction. We know this almost from the outset as she relays an anecdote about her father hurling one of her school shoes at her face after he tripped on it. It lands in the fireplace and she watches it burn, “like my own face smouldering . . . I would have let my real face burn in the fire too”.

Like many candid portrayals of young people attempting to become themselves, Frances is both infuriating and deserving of our sympathy. She is not without integrity but lacks the resources to care for herself on the most basic level. Reliant on her alcoholic father to pay her allowance while she is studying, she is too proud to make her poverty explicit when he misses a payment, so she survives on the bread and jam that her lover – who is married – brings her.

The modern heroine she is most reminiscent of is Frances Handley from Greta Gerwig’s film Frances Ha (2013). There is even a pleasing sequence in Rooney’s novel when Frances and Bobbi watch the film. Conversations with Friends showcases a prodigious talent, but one feels and hopes that Rooney can reach further next time.

This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement