Sally Rooney is the most acclaimed Irish novelist working today. Her books receive extensive favourable reviews. They are translated into many languages and read by thousands of people. She features in leading international news and cultural outlets and her interviews are widely read, circulated and quoted from.
Following a stellar academic and debating career at Trinity College Dublin, her practice as a novelist and screen writer has grown steadily. She has written three acclaimed novels, one of which, Normal People was successfully adapted for the screen, while another, Conversations with Friends, is set for a screen release in 2022. Her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? was written while she was a fellow at New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Colson Whitehead was previously a fellow.
The publisher’s blurb on the inside the cover of Faber and Faber’s 2017 edition of Conversations with Friends advises that it can be read either as a romantic comedy or a feminist text. I finished it just before Christmas, as news came of the death of American writer, academic and feminist, bell hooks, who, as well as powerful work on race, gender, class and capitalism, produced a number of telling insights into the nature and practice of love, including
Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.
Putting Rooney’s novel down, I was struck by how apt bell hooks’ aphorism was for Frances, who narrates the novel. I didn’t find much love in the novel, though there is desire and sex, joyless most of the time. The word ‘hate’ features throughout, with Frances and her friends hating pretty much everything in their lives and, most particularly, themselves.
The word ‘nice’ features throughout as well. But the word that has the most force in the book, perhaps even more than ‘hate’, is the word ‘rich’. Everyone is either rich or concerned about who is rich. One character is described as having ‘a moneyed British accent, too rich to be comical’.
No one laughs.
On page 153, Frances says
I hate that woman
about the rich British woman who owns the French beach house, where Frances is staying.
At the bottom of page 158, when Frances and Nick are in bed together and all the others are asleep, I read
I laughed and so did he. Although were were laughing about the impossibility of our relationship, it still felt nice.
Frances lives in three pre-Covid bubbles; firstly, with other Trinity College students, all excelling in their courses, who spend their time competing rather than chatting when they are conversing; secondly, with her separated parents, based in Mayo, in the west of Ireland, comprising a hard-working mother and a drunken wastrel of a father who, though he loves Frances, sometimes neglects to forward the allowance which keeps her going in an uncle’s apartment, twenty minutes walk from college; thirdly, with Melissa and Nick, a married couple, ten years older than Frances, marked as rich, working professionally as an essayist-photographer (Melissa) and an actor (Nick), and Bobbi.
To a person, all of the characters are hard to stick. They exist at various points on an obnoxious scale, running from ‘complete pain’ to ‘tiresome’.
Frances is closest to her fellow-student, Bobbi, who is brilliant and rich, and with whom she shares an on-off relationship as friend and lover.
Once the world of the novel (middle-class Dublin, with a nod to an outlier-land in the West) is established, the action centres on who will develop a sexual relationship with whom. Bobbi with Melissa? Frances with either Melissa or Nick? The heterosexual option is taken with Frances and Nick embarking on an affair, which they strive to keep secret from Melissa and Bobbi, despite enjoying trysts and overnights together under the others’ noses.
There is some sex, but not much action otherwise. There are house-parties and dinner-parties. A trip to France, to a house owned by the woman with the moneyed British accent, Melissa’s patron, is a minor calamity, reminiscent of English mid-twentieth century social-comedies by Waugh and Powell, but without the laughs.
The following dialogue appears in the Channel 4 tv adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell.
Everybody seems to know everybody else.
Well, they do. That’s just the way it is.
It could be applied to the world of Conversations with Friends, with a shift to 21st Century Ireland where class divisions are less blatant, though nonetheless present.
The prose is praised as precise, which, at times, means ‘banal’. Chapter 31, the last, opens on page 311 with
The following week my phone rang.
Communication-at-a-distance devices are prominent throughout the book. The friends are best kept apart, except for sex, rows and huffing. Chapter 31 can be read as a précis of the entire novel. It is a dialogue between Frances and Nick, during a hiatus in their affair. The lovers are in different locations in Dublin city centre. Frances is outside a bookshop, beside Trinity College, where she had been browsing new fiction titles. There are a number of possible echoes from Rooney’s own life in the book.
Nick is in a supermarket. He means to contact Melissa, his wife, but mis-dials. Frances phones him back. The conversation is stilted and aching. It rocks back and forward on the see-saw of submission-dominance, which is the engine of all the relationships in the novel. This may be Rooney’s essential offering.
The chapter ends with a submissive line from Frances
Come and get me, I said.
Or perhaps it’s a line showing dominance, by delivering an order?
Either way, I was left with a sense that the relationship will putter along for a round or two more, until Frances gets involved with lovers her own age, while Nick loses his good-looks and drifts into middle-age as a spent actor. Perhaps he will go on to enjoy a mid-life career on tv as a drink-fuelled police Lathario, continuing, as it were, ‘to have it both ways’.
I took a straw pole of other readers, as I was nearing the end of the book. I wasn’t sure if I was enjoying it. I felt I was the wrong age (I’m a working OAP) and perhaps the wrong gender, though I don’t usually depend on such categories when I read a book. Anyone can read a Sara Paretsky or a Nadine Gordimer.
My sister, an avid reader of fiction and self-described as a middle-aged mother, said that the friends reminded her of people she knew in college, who were so self-absorbed and out of touch with reality that she just couldn’t like them. A mid-fifties doctor, also an avid reader, said she couldn’t stick the book, but her teenage son read it and enjoyed it. The doctor was happy if it was the sex scenes that held him, as his reading habit had lapsed since he finished the Harry Potter series. A twenty-eight year old male podiatrist (I see a number of medics) loved the book and can’t wait for the tv adaptation.
It may be an age thing.
I still couldn’t decide if I enjoyed the book, though I read it to the end. I struggled with the pained dependencies and the strained interactions. The truculence and petulance on all sides annoyed me. No one took pleasure in the bounty they enjoyed.
The self-hate burns from page 181, as Frances takes one of her periodic reviews of her naked body in a mirror.
For a while I just stood there just looking at myself and feeling my repulsion get deeper and deeper as if I was experimenting to see how much I could feel. Eventually I heard a ringing noise in my bag and went to try and find it.
Frances is distracted (saved?) by a distant friend, this time a missed call from her father. The famous words of Philip Larkin underpin the scenes with Frances’ parents -
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
Her reactions to them produce more truculence and petulance. A telling comparison between the state of Frances’ room in Dublin and her father’s house in Mayo – disarray, uneaten meals, rubbish and unwashed dishes – underlines the continuing generational line.
Frances’ behaviour is tolerated by others because she is described as either ‘talented’ or ‘brilliant’. These words serve the same purpose as the word ‘rich’. They are shields behind which obnoxious behaviours hide.
Frances is diagnosed for endometriosis, an often debilitating condition of the tissue of the womb. She collapses and is hospitalised. She hates the medics and is convinced they hate her.
By the end of the book I realised I had been reading a coming-of-age dirge. A series of low notes, not even a scale, are struck in the opening chapter, when Frances and Bobbi meet Melissa at a literary event and go back to her house, where Nick serves drinks. The same notes play throughout, without much variation or development.
Or love.
I return to the late bel hooks.
Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.
Sally Rooney is illustrating bel hooks’ point, perhaps.
Coda: Sally Rooney is a member of the Irish Writers’ Union, consistent with her stance on solidarity. I am a long-standing member of www.irishwritersunion.org, a community for writers to gain support, advice and encouragement. Writers of any practice and status can be part of a union. If you are a writer, consider joining the writers’ union where you live.
Conversations with Friends; Sally Rooney, Faber and Faber, London, 2017
A Dance to the Music of Time; Anthony Powell, TV miniseries, 1997
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118297/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
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