Conversations With Friends

Over the past three weeks, I made my way through The Portrait of a Lady. As much as I admire Henry James’s elaborate sentences, and as much as I love a dramedy of manners and an American abroad, finishing the book felt like a marathon with an additional 13 miles tacked on at the end. Portrait is no doubt James’s magnum opus, yet it’s a masterpiece that’s one hundred pages too long. Having read Portrait right after Vladimir Nabokov’s magnificent, whirlwind Lolita, I found myself craving lithe, direct prose.

Sally Rooney (Photo: Jonny Davies, The New York Times)

The buzz of Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations With Friends, has remained strong since its 2017 release, renewed by the recent debut of her second book, Normal People. Moreover, Conversations provided the antidote for the meandering sentences and ten-cent words of James and Nabokov, which I do love. Rooney’s lean, sharp prose is readable and what it lacks in inventiveness, it compensates for in exactness and psychological genius. If Ernest Hemingway’s simple, declarative sentences were transmuted through Tao Lin’s overthought angst and ennui, you’d get Sally Rooney’s writing. Quick, easy, yet packed with wry and accurate observations — and the appropriate literary style — of millennial malaise.

Enjoying Rooney’s writing is a profound experience for someone with anxiety, which is almost anyone, to some degree, in our chaotic, fast-paced world. Our protagonist, Frances, is, at the tender age of twenty-one, an insecure college student with a severe propensity for overthinking. These tough elements of her personality remind me of myself, which made me judge her harsher than the average protagonist at the outset. I understand the magnitude of Frances’s self-doubt, which makes her unaware of how compelling she is, what a brilliant poet her peers and suitors consider her. When I find myself rolling my eyes at Frances’s statements, it’s not because I’m cold, callous, and male. It’s because I’ve been there before and they feel too real. I know her pain, I know her fears, completely human worries that only the anxious among us voice out loud.

I empathize with Frances, too, because her life is the narrative arc of my generation — if we have one. While attending Trinity College in Dublin, she’s active on the local spoken word circuit with her best friend and former lover, Bobbi. They’re spotted by Melissa, a local writer of some import, who proposes an interview with the whip smart duo. The interview takes place at her house, where Frances meets Melissa’s husband, Nick, for the first time. Nick is a B-list actor better known for his brawn than his brains, but possesses a droll wit that captivates our protagonist. Frances and Nick start talking, then sleeping together, drifting apart before getting back together when Frances and Bobbi join Nick, Melissa, and their friends for a week in France. The pattern continues once the girls return to Ireland, where Frances has a health scare and several fainting spells. After an especially bad incident at a church, she reevaluates how she’s treated the people she’s closest with in her life. The end of the novel finds Frances in a labelless partnership with Bobbi and testing the waters again with Nick.

Summarizing the plot is a dizzying task. Imagine living it, and that’s the experience — exaggerated, of course — of millennials, who have made peace with roller-coaster romances and who have a warranted aversion of defining relationships. Rooney’s writing hits home because many have lived it. At 27, she’s right in the middle of my generation and knows what she’s talking about.

While Rooney’s direct sentences are designed for dwindling millennial attention spans, they’re coupled with sneaky smarts that challenge the generation’s anti-intellectual reputation. The characters reference Deleuze in passing, and know their history and current affairs well enough that rigorous and engaging debates pop up every few pages. When they speak of pop culture, they understand the nuances and theories that move it along. These conversations give me hope that there are other millennials who’d rather bury their nose in books, go to cultural events, and study the world around them than skip work or class, hit a JUUL, and party hearty with a 40 oz. in hand and trap music booming over tinny laptop speakers.

Rooney’s characters are a bit old fashioned, though. Frances met Nick when his wife was interviewing her, and they communicate through email. There’s not much texting, but enough phone calls to drive the average millennial batty. Had Nick and Frances met on Tinder, their relationship may not have blossomed. Frances, in truth, would have swiped left on Nick, since, in the words of Bobbi, “if it absolutely had to be a man i assumed it would be someone wussy and effeminate...”

Frances and Nick’s romance drives Conversations, and Rooney writes sex better than anyone beside James Salter. No one will capture lust, foreplay, and climax like he did in A Sport and a Pastime. What Rooney does is describe the fraught moments of sex with candor, and the confusion that accompanies them in real time. Frances and Nick think and talk in the middle of intercourse. They worry, they doubt, yet they still enjoy each other’s caresses, sighs, and whispered sweet nothings. Rooney’s sex scenes aren’t written to arouse the reader, though they don’t repulse, either, because of their familiarity. There’s nothing novel about them, except the authenticity with which they’re presented.

The way Conversations portrays a new, healthy model of vulnerability in our relationships is just as remarkable. Not throughout most of the book, of course, which is a meditation on millennial misery, but by the close of part two. With the end in sight, Rooney presents us with a primer for love and friendship. Real connection, she shows through Frances, happens when we cast away our pride, work through our jealousy, and stop playing power games. True love, romantic and platonic, means all parties involved give of themselves, share, listen, empathize. Once upon a time, these characteristics may have seemed natural. Today, in a world consumed by the quest for likes and the trap of technology, we focus on the self at the expense of the relationships in front of us. Once we begin engaging beyond surface level, as Frances discovers, life becomes more vivid. We’re no longer living but alive.

The absence of quotation marks in Conversations, however, is irksome. Perhaps it’s because it reminds me of my own tendency of omitting periods at the end of texts, a habit I developed after reading a study that found their adherents were deemed less sincere than people who left them out. I’m a stickler for proper grammar, but I don’t want my friends and family thinking me exacting and insincere, since texts convey far fewer emotions than face-to-face interaction. Rooney’s attempt at sincerity, with this similar omission, feels strained, improper, confusing. Throughout Conversations, I read and reread dialogue with the mission of determining who is saying what. This endeavor proved especially challenging at the end of dialogue or during a pause in speech. Unless Rooney is tricking us and the whole novel is a conversation, this otherwise small quirk is affected.

Such a trifle does not detract from the novel, and it’s one of three books I’ve read over the past year that I’ve felt loss after reading (the other two being Lolita and A Sport and a Pastime). While this loss reflects my sadness that I won’t be reading a specific book anymore, it’s a positive feeling because the book in question moved me enough to provoke that response. Though I have more contentions with Conversations than the other two books mentioned, the pull is its realism, relatability, and how Rooney’s writing makes you like her characters because of their shortcomings and foibles. They’re not people living fantastical lives; they’re very much like us.