The key to Sally Rooney’s debut novel is hidden in plain sight. It’s in the title: Conversations with Friends. While on the surface this is a sharp, contemporary take on the bourgeois social novel, the stuff of marriage, betrayal and touchy dinner parties, there are no dramatic set-pieces – no car crashes, no unlocked email accounts, no catching them at it in the library. Instead feelings emerge and are appraised in speech. “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,” says the narrator, Frances, a 21-year-old performance poet and student who falls in love with a wealthy actor 11 years her senior. Who also happens to be married.
The dynamic is complicated in all sorts of ways. For one, Frances’s last (and only) relationship was with a woman, Bobbi, her anarchist (also wealthy) best friend from school. For another, the actor isn’t everything he appears to be. He’s “handsome”, we’re told, “to an almost off-putting extent.” In fact, by my reckoning Nick is referred to as “handsome” at least 11 further times in the novel, whether pointedly to objectify him or as an editorial oversight is never quite clear.
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