Millenial Angst

~ Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney ~

Old-fashioned readers, beware: there are no quotation marks in Conversations with Friends, and text and dialogue flow seamlessly together.

Oh, he said.Okay. Well, I’m sorry.

I am trying, you know. If there are things I’m doing wrong I want you to tell me.

In a slightly pained voice he said: you’re not doing anything wrong. It’s me, you know, I’m just awkward.

Characters have extended conversations via text message.

Bobbi: well you don’t really talk about your feelings

me: you’re committed to this view of me

me: as having some kind of undisclosed emotional life

me: I’m just not very emotional

Bobbi: I don’t think “unemotional” is a quality someone can have

And stream-of-consciousness emails are the norm.

I actually believed him when he told me that nothing had happened between you & it was just a crush. I felt relieved, isn’t that terrible? I thought oh well, he only met you during the summer, he still wasn’t himself then, he’s been so much better since. And now I realize that you’re actually a function of the betterness, or it’s a function of you.

I got used to the lack of standard punctuation, but found the stream-of-consciousness rather wearying.

Frances, the narrator, is ‘too cool for school’, as they say. Although only a 21-year-old in college, she is formidably intellectual, knowledgeable,  articulate, and quick-witted, and can more than hold her own in any verbal contest. She writes poetry, and performs it live in a duo with her ex, a woman named Bobbi who is strikingly attractive, photogenic, equally quick-witted and argumentative. Frances and Bobbi meet an older couple, Nick and Melissa, who are wealthy, live in a lovely house, and are also artistically inclined. Emotional and sexual entanglements between the foursome form much of the book, with Frances at the center.

Frances, it turns out, may appear impossibly self-composed to the world, but is actually full of self-doubt. She hides her insecurities behind sunglasses, shrugs and silence. Bobbi, in contrast, is never at a loss for words (or so it seems to Frances and the reader); she is the kind of person who rattles off obscure references and condescendingly tells others to go and read this or that book during an argument.

And yet, both Frances and Bobbi are very much young adults, who fall in love, agonize over what the objects of their affection feel in return, and tend to act without thinking.

Although they live in Dublin, there is no particular sense of place to the novel. The four of them are essentially rootless millennials, and could be anywhere. They speak and think in a universal modern style, with no quaint Irishisms. And all of them are endlessly willing to analyze and discuss their feelings and behaviour.

I found the relationship between Frances and Bobbi rather odd. On the one hand, their sexual and romantic lives are of deep interest to each other. On the other hand, they seem to have little interest in the quotidian problems that occupy most of us. When Frances is penniless and literally starving, Bobbi ‘shares her milk’, but asks no questions and provides little other support. When Frances is incapacitated with intense pain due to endometriosis, Bobbi makes her a hot bath, but never seems to follow up and check on her debilitating illness. This strange disengagement from the physical, normal parts of their lives, with an intense focus on the romantic and intellectual, seemed to me artificial. But perhaps my friends and I are just not cerebral enough for this kind of relationship.

Rooney’s prose is largely flat. The novel is layered in the sense that you learn more and more about the characters and their inner thoughts through the course of the conversations, but there are no delicate or lovely sentences that prompt reflection or reveal additional meaning upon re-reading.

This novel was worth reading, but whether one loves it or not might depend on one’s age and stage of life.

Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney. Hogarth, 2017