Rooney turns out to be as intelligent and agile a novelist as she apparently was a debater, and for many of the same reasons. As its title promises, Rooney’s book glitters with talk ... Capitalism is to Rooney’s young women what Catholicism was to Joyce’s young men, a rotten national faith to contend with, though how exactly to resist capitalism, when it has sunk its teeth so deep into the human condition, remains an open question ... one wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge ... She writes with a rare, thrilling confidence, in a lucid and exacting style uncluttered with the sort of steroidal imagery and strobe flashes of figurative language that so many dutifully literary novelists employ ... But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.
Rooney sets her story in the post-crash era, among a Dublin elite. Her characters work in the arts and denounce the evils of capitalism while living off inherited wealth. The novel, indeed, is almost post-Irish ... Rooney is not a visual writer. There are no arresting images, no poetic flights. She is of the tell-don’t-show school: many of the conversations that comprise most of the novel are presented as he-said she-said reportage ... 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 ... Her hyperarticulate characters may fail to communicate their fragile selves, but Rooney does it for them in a voice distinctively her own.
Sally Rooney is a planter of small surprises, sowing them like landmines. They relate to behavior and psychology—characters zigging when you expect them to zag, from passivity to sudden aggression and back ... Conversations With Friends asks whether it is possible to sustain authentic connections to people in the presence of flawed, overarching structures: capitalism, patriarchy, a devilish ménage à quatre ... Rooney herself is acute and sensitive—she may have pinned these fragile creatures to a board, but her eye is not cruel. Bobbi, Frances, Nick, and Melissa excel at endearing banter and hesitant, vulnerable disclosure. They are all thrillingly sharp, hyperverbal ... Rooney has done the impossible in the Trump era: She’s rescued the ego as an object of fascination ... Rooney reveals a young woman painfully coming to terms with the beliefs, desires, and feelings that belong irrevocably to her. Conversations With Friends sparkles with controlled rhetoric. But it ends up emphasizing the truths exploding in the silences.
...this novel partakes in the inexplicably chic trend epitomized by Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot of merely recording everything its characters do or say, like a video feed, with no effort to discriminate between the trivial and the significant. Readers, therefore, have to push through reams of banal small talk and hackneyed dinner-party imagery ... Then things change...Suddenly the book takes on the excitement of a romance novel or Hugh Grant film about ordinary folk who have relationships with gorgeous celebrities. The writing picks up purpose and intensity. The sex scenes are, well, sexy, which is rarer than you’d think. Ms. Rooney’s trick is to render them largely in dialogue, avoiding awkward anatomy lessons. A breathless page-turner emerges ... A lot of affectation encrusts Conversations With Friends and the ironic repartee gets old quickly. But even the filler can’t disguise that Ms. Rooney is a natural-born storyteller.
Rooney–a young Irish novelist with the chops of someone twice her age–delivers a novel that will be remembered for years to come ... This is the kind of novel you could talk about for hours because there are just so many ways it could be interpreted. Take it to the beach at your own risk because it might be impossible to pull away from when it’s time to go swimming: the emotional tension is tighter than a violin string ... The novel falls apart a bit when Frances’ health crisis comes to a head; it feels manipulative. Despite this minor stumble, there is no doubt that Conversations marks the arrival of a major talent.
Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes, and it’s hard to imagine Conversations With Friends appearing without Elena Ferrante’s 'Neapolitan Tetralogy' and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series as immediate antecedents ... Somehow the entire novel manages to remain within the neutral territory of its title. Rooney can make the stakes seem high even when they’re obviously low, and she does so without resorting to Ferrante’s melodramatic swoops or Knausgaard’s existential freakouts. Partly this is a by-product of Rooney’s control of tone and her disciplined use of plain language even when she’s getting off her most charming lines ... A larger reason for the novel’s appeal is simply Frances’s youth and naïveté, her natural role as an object of sympathy, as well as the sense that we’re witnessing exactly what it feels like to be naïve in 2017. But a few times the spell is broken, and it’s usually because Rooney’s characters’ extreme politeness and eminent reasonability leap off the page, as glaring as a typo ... a novel of delicious frictions delivered at a low heat.
Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney’s bracing, miraculous debut, starts out typically enough, laboring in that old vineyard of novelists — infidelity ... Rooney has a gift for pacing, and the illicit builds with each chapter: The glances that last a few moments too long. The intrusive thoughts. The texts ignored; the texts whose importance is denied; the texts pondered over; the texts eventually responded to ... Frances, self-described as plain, analytical, and cold, advances through the early stages of the affair as she does through the entire book, with minimal introspection ...reads like a very well-written, lucid email from a close friend — the kind of email you save and never delete. Part of this frictionless feel is Rooney’s talent, but technique figures too ... As Rooney writes, you do not feel, as with so many writers, that she is looking over her own shoulder, questioning her own word choice, critical of herself, happy with herself. There is no struggle.
In our age of email and instant messaging, we are able to read back both sides of a correspondence and, unlike with letters, dwell on our words once we’ve sent them. It has become literature’s job to capture these new levels of dizzying self-awareness, and the effect it has on the way we relate to people 'in real life.' Sally Rooney’s wise debut novel is a perfect example of this shift
Our literature is still in the early days of capturing this generation’s non-binary, exploratory approach to sexual relationships. Yet, as is clear with Conversations with Friends, writers are increasingly adept at capturing the ways in which we all communicate. Aspects of our digital culture have stopped merely being markers by which a book can become 'relevant' and then dated in turn. They have become part of the medium of our lives, inseparable from a new generation of writers and their way of seeing the world.
Conversations With Friends slips in slyly by a side door, its categories askew or in flux. Is it a love story about Frances and Bobbi (or Frances and Nick)? Is it an adultery novel? Is it a comedy of manners? Rooney, who reportedly wrote the novel in three months, doesn’t seem to feel that she needs to make up her mind about that, just as her characters believe they have kicked off the categories that restrained generations before theirs ... At times, Conversations With Friends reads like a satire, its characters prattling on about love as a 'discursive practice,' reading books about 'postcolonial reason,' and calling themselves communitarian anarchists while living what are, after all, fairly routine bourgeois lives ... The novel is a masterful portrayal of the formlessness of that period in contemporary middle-class life when schooling is over, or nearly over, but adult life hasn’t really begun ... The end of Conversations With Friends isn’t romantic, but it is oddly hopeful. Frances may be on the verge of becoming lost by her best friend, but she is also on the brink of finding herself.
In this searing, insightful debut, Rooney offers an unapologetic perspective on the vagaries of relationships ... Rooney lets readers glimpse the rich interior of Frances's life—capturing the tension and excitement of her attraction to Nick, how she justifies her feelings and treatment of the people around her, and how she is shaped by the separation of her understanding mother and her alcoholic father. Here, too, is a treatise on married life, the impact of infidelity, the ramifications of one's actions, and how the person one chooses to be with can impact one's individuality. Throughout, Rooney's descriptive eye lends beauty and veracity to this complex and vivid story.
As a narrator, Frances describes all these complex fragments in an ethereal and thoughtful but self-loathing way. Rooney captures the mood and voice of contemporary women and their interpersonal connections and concerns without being remotely predictable. In her debut novel, she deftly illustrates psychology’s first lesson: that everyone is doomed to repeat their patterns. A clever and current book about a complicated woman and her romantic relationships.
