Bobbi (beautiful, rebellious lesbian) and the narrator Frances (bi though a hetero-virgin, clever, poor) are about 21 in Dublin, finishing degrees and performing poetry together that's written by Frances. They're befriended by Melissa (a photography and essayist) and Nick (an actor, ex Trinity) a married couple who are rather older. Frances has an affair with dishy Nick who she's excited by physically. She's insecure. She thinks of herself as "plain and emotionally cold" (p.83), looking like "something that had dropped off a spoon too quickly" (p.181).
Her personality hasn't yet set - "At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterwards think: oh, so that's the kind of person I am" (p.19). Later "I was aware of the fact that he could pretend to be anyone he wanted to be, and I wondered if he also lacked a 'real personality' the same way I did" (p.39). Later still "I couldn't hear my own voice when I spoke, but I think I said something about wanting to talk to him" (p.168). She consoles herself by reading ex's old e-mails - proof that she was once loved. She analyses them for nuances, like literary texts.
She's rather desperate to know if people really like her, perhaps because "It had been obvious to me from a young age that my parents didn't like one another" (p.48). She agonises in passages like "Derek and Evelyn seemed instead to feel awkward on Nick's behalf, like they thought he had been trying to conceal his feelings from me; and toward me they expressed a kind of unspoken concern, maybe that I would be offended or upset. Evelyn kept glancing at me with a sympathetic expression" (p.130). Later, alone in her room she thinks "it was clear to me for the first time how badly I'd underestimated my vulnerability. I'd lied to everyone, to Melissa, even to Bobbi, just so I could be with Nick. I had left myself no one to confide in, no one who would feel any sympathy for what I'd done" (p.135).
Some of Frances' actions seem unlikely to me (the risk-taking of going to Nick's bedroom with Melissa in the same house; the one-night stand; interest in the bible) though I suppose her mental state might justify them.
She rushes to hospital after a heavy period that might be an early miscarriage. But it's not. The affair goes on, both parties unsure about the motives of the other (is communist Frances merely trying to wreck a bourgeois marriage?), both doing just enough to keep the affair going. The affair continues unabated after Nick's told Melissa about it (Melissa's transgressed a few times herself), and Bobbi shares a flat with Frances.
Frances has the first story she's written accepted, worth 800 euro! She'd only sent it to a friend of Melissa's. It's heavily based on real life, mostly Bobbi.
Then Nick starts sleeping with Melissa again (he reveals he had low self-esteem - just out of a mental home - when he met Frances), Frances discovers she has endometrosis, and Bobbi moves out having read the story. Frances cuts herself - not for the first time. Nick and Frances break up. Frances sleeps with Bobbi again. After a month of no contact, a wrong number gets Nick and Frances talking again and they seem to decide to get back together. The End.
Except for a few street names, Dublin hardly appears. The action is interpersonal, the dialogue psychologically probing. If you don't like phrases like "You're interpreting your failure to hurt me as hostility on my part, I said. That's interesting" (p.279), don't read this book. The characters are bright, sometimes in a show-off way. If you don't like banter such as "Bobbi thought the fetishisation of 'untouched nature' was intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. I like houses better than fields, I observed. They're more poetic, because they have people in them" (p.242) you'll find the book tedious. You may find the characters' naivety and pretension comic, and/or their personal development interesting. Towards the end Frances realises that "I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed. By this logic Nick and Melissa were like my parents bringing me into the world, probably hating and loving me even more than my original parents did" (p.238).
One phrase seemed misplaced to me - "We were driving along by the harbour, where the ships implied themselves as concepts behind the fog" (p.138).
Other reviews
- Blair (Okay, I think this book might have worked better for me if I'd read it before Elif Batuman's The Idiot. Batuman and Rooney give their narrators similar voices: sharp, clear and deadpan but excessively self-aware. Both use email conversations to map out the development of a relationship. Both novels are told from the perspective of naive, supposedly intelligent young women who appear largely passive, falling into particular courses of action more because of the lack of a viable alternative than any great impetus on their part. ... This is a character-driven novel, and for me, the characters were the problem. On a personal level, I hated (most of) them; on a critical level I felt they lacked the necessary depth to make the plot work (in particular, I did not believe in Melissa and Nick as a thirtysomething married couple). ... I could find absolutely no sympathy for Frances and just felt irritated every time she got bogged down in her emotional distress over Nick. Unfortunately, this makes up an awful lot of the book. The narrative is always best when it moves away from Frances and Nick's relationship.)
- Claire Kilroy (Frances is an unusually contradictory creation, so clever and yet so blind. Her formidable intellect prompts her to adopt an ironic position towards everything – including herself. She repeatedly declares herself to be emotionally cold, despite evidence to the contrary. ... Rooney is not a visual writer. ... Rooney writes so well of the condition of being a young, gifted but self-destructive woman, both the mentality and physicality of it. She is alert to the invisible bars imprisoning the apparently free. )
- Adam Mars-Jones (Frances, the heroine of Conversations with Friends, has great difficulty discerning her own characteristics and moods. She often has to work backwards from physical gestures or reactions to establish what her feelings must be ... The characters share an esperanto of badinage, sharper than the style spread worldwide by Friends and its successors but not definitively distinct from it. When every exchange is a little stylised battle it’s hard to spot the moment when things become more fully charged, flirtatious banter not being a form of dialectic but a strange poker game in which the stakes can suddenly be raised without any apparent choice on anyone’s part ... Overall what is both memorable and remarkable about the book is how much emotional incoherence and damage can be accommodated in the portrait of its heroine without loss of sympathy, how much self-hatred is compatible with a residual sense of worth.)
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