In 2015, The Dublin Review ran a goodbye-to-all-that essay by Sally Rooney, a young Irish writer, about her brief career as a university debater. A couple of years earlier, as a student at Trinity College, Dublin, Rooney had risen through the ranks of the European circuit to become the No. 1 debater on the Continent, but she wrote about her feats the way a recovering alcoholic might look back on a time of sotted carousing, at once proud of her exploits and appalled by the person she had been while having them. What Rooney loved about debating was entering a state of “flow,” that magical mental hum when disparate facts and ideas effortlessly assembled themselves in her mind and poured from her mouth as argument. Yet she was also disturbed by her talent for advocating morally dubious positions, like capitalism’s benefits for the poor, or “things oppressed people should do about their oppression.” She quit after winning the championship. “Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren’t any prizes,” she wrote.
She could. Rooney is now twenty-six and, after earning a master’s in American literature and publishing a few short stories, has just come out with her first novel, “Conversations with Friends” (Hogarth). There are prizes for fiction, it’s true, but writing it is a private performance: you judge yourself first on your own stage, by your own rules. Rooney turns out to be as intelligent and agile a novelist as she apparently was a debater, and for many of the same reasons. As its title promises, Rooney’s book glitters with talk, much of it between Frances, the novel’s narrator, and Bobbi, her best friend, two Trinity students supremely gifted in the collegiate sport of competitive banter. Observations, theories, and quips about the world fly between the friends like so many shuttlecocks in a conversation that never ends, because conversations, in our world of screens, don’t have to. They just change format, so that a discussion begun in person continues through texts or e-mails or, as in the following dialogue, instant messages:
This exchange, so rigorously serious as to be comic, calls to mind another pair of brilliant Dublin students, Cranly and Stephen Dedalus, who stroll around in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” arguing over the Eucharist and apostasy. Cranly and Dedalus came of age in an Ireland riven by religious strife, Bobbi and Frances in an Ireland gutted by the 2008 financial collapse. Capitalism is to Rooney’s young women what Catholicism was to Joyce’s young men, a rotten national faith to contend with, though how exactly to resist capitalism, when it has sunk its teeth so deep into the human condition, remains an open question. To be “anti love,” as Frances declares herself, is as ideologically satisfying as it is emotionally untenable, a weak position that Bobbi pounces on with startling pitilessness.
Frances’s disavowal of love strikes a poignant note, too, for Bobbi was her girlfriend before she became her friend. At the convent high school where they met, Bobbi was a cigarette-smoking contrarian with a pierced nose who freaked out her square classmates and pissed off her teachers. (Her coup de grâce was scrawling “fuck the patriarchy” next to a wall-mounted crucifix.) Frances remembers how, when she was seventeen, Bobbi approached her at a school dance, “radiantly attractive” as she swigged vodka from a bottle of Coke, to ask if Frances liked girls: “It was very easy to act unfazed around her. I just said: sure.”
The relationship lasted for more than a year, and though Frances doesn’t explain why it ended, the friends’ intimacy still has the all-absorbing intensity of romance, as well as its thorny imbalances of power and temperament. Bobbi is the clear star of the pair, beautiful and puckishly charismatic, with a suffer-no-fools bravado that, as Frances says, “could be abrasive and unrestrained in a way that made people uncomfortable, while I tended to be encouragingly polite. Mothers always liked me a lot, for example.” So do men. At the open-mike nights around Dublin where the friends perform spoken-word poetry together, Bobbi ignores any guy who tries to chat them up, leaving him to Frances. “I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl,” Frances confesses, but Bobbi considers such agreeableness to be pandering. “Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have ‘a real personality,’ but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment.”
The novel opens at one of these poetry nights, in early summer, where Frances and Bobbi meet Melissa, an established writer and photographer in her thirties. They are familiar with her work; Melissa, impressed with what she has just seen of theirs, invites them back to her house for a nightcap. As Bobbi entertains their host with clever conversation, Frances takes stock of her large, comfortable home, casing it like a thief. Melissa has money, Frances concludes. She also has a husband: Nick, an actor, whom Frances finds “handsome in the most generic way”— a strong, silent hunk with a soft mouth and good cheekbones who looks great without a shirt on, as she discovers later, clicking through images of him on Google. The pictures are old, from cancelled soaps and second-rate films; Nick’s career has never quite taken off. It seems impossible to imagine that he could be the equal of cerebral, impressive Melissa.
There’s an aura of seduction to the boozy night with Melissa. Soon after, she e-mails Frances and Bobbi to suggest profiling them as literary up-and-comers for a local magazine. Flattered, they accept, and as they spend more time with Melissa and Nick, eating dinner at their house, socializing at book launches, a fraught dynamic begins to take shape. Though Frances is the writer—it is her work that the friends perform—Melissa clearly prefers Bobbi, with whom she establishes a rapport of cozy, mutual infatuation. Frances, excluded and hurt, finds herself thrown together with Nick, the other neglected partner in this odd four-person dance. He’s far sharper and subtler than his looks suggest, with a quiet, tentative quality she finds surprising in so masculine a man. “He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music,” Frances thinks, though the tone that she and Nick take with each other is so relentlessly sardonic that neither is sure if the flirtation is serious. It is. At Melissa’s birthday party, they kiss. Frances flees in confused shame, but when she returns, a few days later, it is to his bed. “I might never be able to speak again after this,” she thinks, in stunned ecstasy, as he begins to touch her—a frightening thought for someone so used to protecting herself with language, and a freeing one, too. In spite of herself, Frances has stumbled straight into a love story.
And what a love story to stumble into! With her queer credentials and radical politics, Frances is an unlikely protagonist in a novel of adultery, that most clichéd of genres. Nothing could be more bourgeois than an affair, or more banal than being the other woman, as Frances is all too aware. She’s humiliated by the sheer triteness of the feelings that come to govern her: lust, jealousy, above all vulnerability, raw and excruciatingly real. “We can sleep together if you want, but you should know I’m only doing it ironically,” she tells Nick, sounding, for once, like the millennial she is.
This is a lie, of course, and one wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. Frances is committed to a vision of herself as principled and disciplined, motivated by a stringent brand of altruism that seems to her the only rational response to the world’s grotesque unfairness. Throughout the novel, she is tormented by crippling menstrual pain, which she tries to ignore on the principle that her suffering is no more important than anyone else’s. Then there’s her take on the joint problems of inequality, privilege, and insecurity. If the globe’s G.D.P. were divided equally among all people, Frances has gleaned from Wikipedia, each person would get $16,100 a year, and she sees no sense, “political or financial,” in earning more than that. Bobbi has a similar scorn for money, but she can afford her attitude: her family is rich. Frances’s parents are middle class, barely. That she can’t depend on them for extra support is a point of honor, and the cause of more than a little anxiety. “I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy,” she tells us. She’s right. But it’s also a way of deferring adulthood, with its unavoidable ideological compromises and moral imperfections.
An attractive ascetic principle is at work here. Frances believes that to act in the world is to do inevitable damage to it. The only solution is not to act, and certainly not to do something so obviously harmful as sleeping with someone else’s husband. Yet her affair with Nick is an expression of exquisite, compulsive selfishness; never before has she had so little control over herself and so much over another person, a disturbing truth that she does her best to ignore. Among the novel’s bittersweet ironies is that, for all Frances’s suspicion of cliché, she can’t shake her sense that Nick, as a handsome, older man, will behave according to type, discarding her as soon as he is bored or sated. Actually, he is touchingly tender and openhearted, as fragile, in his way, as Frances is in hers. He has been hospitalized for depression; Melissa handles him with an infantilizing mixture of indulgence and contempt that disgusts Frances. And yet she herself treats Nick callously, abusing her emotional and erotic power over him precisely because she refuses to believe that she could have any.
Rooney has said that she wrote the bulk of “Conversations with Friends” in three months—there’s that flow for you—and her book has the virtues of that speed with surprisingly few of its faults. Perhaps as a result of such swift execution, the novel gave me the curious feeling that Rooney wasn’t always sure where she was going but that she trusted herself to find out. She writes with a rare, thrilling confidence, in a lucid and exacting style uncluttered with the sort of steroidal imagery and strobe flashes of figurative language that so many dutifully literary novelists employ. This isn’t to say that the novel lacks beauty. Its richness blooms quietly, as when Frances, about to have sex with Nick for the first time, says, with moving clarity, that her insides feel “hot like oil,” or when she recalls a terrifying episode during her childhood when her alcoholic father, stumbling into the house drunk, tripped over one of her shoes and threw it into the fire: “I watched it smouldering like it was my own face smouldering. I learned not to display fear, it only provoked him. I was cold like a fish. Afterward my mother said: why don’t you lift it out of the fire? Can’t you at least make an effort? I shrugged. I would have let my real face burn in the fire too.”
But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do. Who does? Frances’s defensive, deceived self-awareness, her painful errors in emotional judgment, feel so vividly truthful that the reader sympathetically braces for her comeuppance. Yet Melissa, too, is skilled in the art of self-deception. When the affair does come to light, as it must, she neutralizes the pain of betrayal by consenting to it, agreeing to cut Nick in half, like the pretender to the baby in the Judgment of Solomon. Frances can have him, but Melissa will keep him, too, with Bobbi bouncing platonically between the couples in this modern, precarious ménage à quatre.
Rooney’s title comes from a private joke of Frances and Bobbi’s, “meaningless to everyone including ourselves: What is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?” The joke does have meaning, though. Everyone defines the common terms of life for herself, because everyone makes up her own life. What is a marriage, if it can be opened? What is love, if it can be shared? Do Nick’s feelings for Melissa invalidate the ones he has for Frances, as she fears? Or does Frances’s relationship with Nick contaminate the one that she has with Bobbi?
There is another, murkier betrayal in the novel. Frances writes a short story, her first—not, as we expect, about an episode from her own life but about one from Bobbi’s. In the story, she casts Bobbi as “a mystery so total I couldn’t endure her, a force I couldn’t subjugate with my will, and the love of my life.” The high heat of their friendship will remind many readers of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels—one headstrong, dazzling girl; one watchful, more apparently “normal” one—but it’s more like that of teen-age Clarissa and Sally Seton in “Mrs. Dalloway,” a founding example of the kind of passionate, consuming intimacy between young women that is only now coming into its own as a literary theme. Like Clarissa, Frances is awed by, and more than a little attracted to, her fantastic friend, who speaks her mind with such free, natural authority and seems to be beyond the range of standard human destinies and disappointments. Like Clarissa, she will surely be proved wrong. “You think everyone you like is special,” Bobbi tells Frances. She means it as a warning, and as a hint. Maybe it’s Frances who is extraordinary, bound for great things. Frances, so devoutly committed to arguing against her own position, doesn’t want to believe her, but we do. Rooney knows that some debates are worth losing, and she lets Frances, briefly, share her epiphany. “It felt good to be wrong about everything,” Frances thinks, in a moment of rare, uncomplicated happiness. Amen to that. ♦
