Review: Conversations with Friends

Sally Rooney is a great author, and well-known among Millennial yuppies who read the New York Times. So well-known and liked in fact, that my copy of Normal People was stolen. Not the expected behavior of a New York Times subscriber, but Rooney's books are good!

Conversations with Friends is as good as Normal People* and that is strong praise. The two are both similar: they are both the coming-of-age romances of Irish college students where misunderstandings plague the characters. Misunderstandings run rampant, chaotically, viciously. Rooney captures how they appear from past life and intrude on the romantic sanctuary: classism, ambition, parental scars and more burrow their way into personal anxiety which extends itself into relationship anxiety which swings the souls of our poor lovers.

This leads to a rather stressful reading experience: We know the characters love each other- we don't even need their internal monologue in some cases- but they remain adamant to stick to their own psychological problems. "See a therapist, you depressed asshole!" you want to shout at characters fifty pages before they coil up on the floor in their first episode. "Don't you see you're giving up your love!"

There is a level of will-they-won't-they that runs through these novels, and this is the primary source of intrigue, but the conclusion is never brought. There is no ending. At the end of both novels, the lovers have left and come back together multiple times. The novels end- spoiler alert- with them together... but...

"Together... but" is what we're left with, then. The anxiety never releases itself, the dramatic irony never resolves. "They love each other, but they might fuck it up" is what you're forced to grapple with. In a Millennial world where uncertainty is ascendant (Peter Thiel would say that they are "pessimistically indeterminate") this is the best we can hope for.

The biggest flaw in Rooney books is not the kind of happy-sad endings. It's the flat characters. Our characters are buffeted by school chums and work buddies that are props on the stage of love. They are acted upon by our lovers' wit, but never challenge them, or they act like natural forces, and have no consciousness at all.

Perhaps this is also a strength- after all, our narrators are horribly unreliable and sometimes stupid, so maybe the flattening isn't an accident. Our main characters are really just so enraptured that everyone around them seems stale in comparison.

Aside from my quibbles with these side pieces, the main characters are quite fleshed out. Their cares and motives propel not only the story, but the reader. They're funny, and we quickly build rapport with them and want to see them happy. We don't often, which causes us to read even more.

* which I did not review