... bedazzling, psychologically fraught ... In the abstract, Topics of Conversation is about social and sexual power, anger, envy, pain, honesty, self-delusion and female identity. In the moment, the novel is riveting, disturbing and thought-provoking. It’s a slender volume with the power of lightning.
Popkey’s sentences careen breathlessly as her halting, staccato prose mirrors the 'churning' within the narrator’s mind—the pulsing interior dialogue, the em-dash-laden reasoning back and forth with herself. Narrative agency is what interests the author, her manner of parceling out information evoking at times the fragmentary and diaristic sensibilities of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. Her style also conjures the rambling (and occasionally solipsistic) meditations on self-definition in Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, and aspires to reproduce the rhythm of spoken communication in Linda Rosenkrantz’s 1968 novel-in-dialogue, Talk ... Popkey presents us with a shrewd record of the act of unflinchingly circling these amorphous notions of pain, desire and control, all the while quietly noting their clichéd contrivances in snarky, dark humor. I liked being inside her mind; it felt natural. She doesn’t arrive at a totalizing, liberated endpoint. The most we can do is listen to her story.
... though there is much discussion about morality and desire in this book, it asks no radical question about why women in particular should feel beholden to people who like them, love them, or desire them ... for a book that deals in the paradoxes of desire, very little is described below the waist ... It is hard to know if these stories are chosen to illustrate some essential or unsayable truth of female sexuality ... Popkey understands the intimate and seductive purposes of self-disclosure. She is alert to the moment when story turns into self-enclosure, or narcissistic display. She also knows how competitive all that can get ... The voice, so light and elusive, performs one paradox after another, until paralysis becomes the natural and desired solution ... It is almost unfair to unravel Popkey’s light and winding arguments about love and desire, turning, as they do, on various elegant reversals, except to point out that the problem is always her narrator’s problem, and no matter where she tries to go, she always lands back at her own doorstep ... [The narrator is] good company, able to turn a good sentence and to maintain a tone, which is to say a distance, from the life described.
Popkey writes in a certain kind of style—masterfully controlled, delightfully chilly—and she writes about a certain kind of thing: erotic desire and its relation to power ... Desire always exceeds our ability to articulate or define it, but Popkey’s sentences, in their relentless drive to clarify and elucidate, try the impossible task anyway ... Sometimes, the language can sound overly fussy ... But then you realize that the fussiness—or, really, the drive for precision—is motivated by need. It’s the fussy precision that keeps anarchic desire at bay, or at least momentarily tamed ... Stories shape desire, Popkey suggests, and desire shapes stories. Both shape, even determine, the self.
The novel’s form is so transparently indebted to Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy—narrated by a woman in crisis who seems to rebuild her identity by drawing from the stories people tell her—that one looks for ways that Ms. Popkey has distinguished her work from its model. One way, unfortunately, is in style. Where Ms. Cusk’s prose is stern, mandarin and sharply aphoristic, Ms. Popkey’s is slow and tongue-tied, circling the same few ideas and further belabored by pointless stage directions that read like the nervous tics of a writer who distrusts the worth of what she’s saying ... The result is a book that, set against Ms. Cusk’s pitiless transcriptions, feels maudlin and needy, as though it sought absolution for the narrator’s behavior instead of simply presenting it ... These bits tell us how to think about the narrator, but like too much in this unfocused book, do nothing to reveal who she is.
... slim but potent ... Like a determined firefighter, Popkey pushes through the dark smoke, but what she exposes are difficult emotions, and what she taps into is an 'erotic current' that tingles and titillates, sometimes uncomfortably ... In this provocative debut, Popkey has gone deep inside the head of someone who is wired to make things hard for herself. The result is sure to spark conversation.
Popkey’s insistence on women’s desire for subjugation is misguided at best, and reactionary at worst ... Dialogue dominates; plot is sparse. It is, as Popkey has admitted, a rip-off of Rachel Cusk ... Taken on their own, some of Popkey’s observations about individual psychology are provocative, if not altogether novel ... too often, Popkey uses the idiosyncratic sexual inclinations of a few women, all of whom are from the same culture and class, to clumsily fashion a universal theory of female desire. As a result, Topics of Conversation often feels less like a novel and more like sophomoric philosophy. This is partly because despite the multiplicity of speakers, the novel is, in effect, univocal ... The contrived style isn’t just distracting and tiresome, it also flattens characters. Women in this novel don’t emerge as individuals but as indistinguishable members of a chorus with a point to make ... This should not be mistaken for feminism.
What is most curious is the way Popkey portrays the storyteller primarily as a stranger while simultaneously revealing her feelings. Our only way in is through inner monologue, filled with various fantasies and privately asserted opinions. While the ambiguous nature of the storyteller directs attention to the other narrators, her lack of presence yields confusion. In several entries other characters engage the storyteller, making it difficult to accept her presence in the story. We don’t know if we are in the play or part of the audience. The lengthy conversations are rich in detail and Popkey’s use of imagery is immaculate. Ultimately though, we are left misplaced ... Topics of Conversation is a high school reunion that reminisces ... Popkey’s novel is more of a conversation in an attempt at self-discovery, with an homage to David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and its first-hand storytelling style of the most scandalous and desirable confessions.
... has some big shoes to fill, and while this novel isn’t necessarily going to be the groundbreaking text of the decade, it’s certainly worth the read ... may seem a bit gimmicky (at least, that was my worry). Yet Popkey avoids falling into the traps that confound many an experimental author. While the book is spread out across two decades and jumps from conversation to conversation, the dialogue is accompanied with the narrator’s thoughts and feelings, her backstory, and her deepest desires. Filling in these details allows Popkey to fill in the gaps between conversations. In a way, it reads like most contemporary literary fiction rather than a transcription of conversations ... What makes this novel distinctive is not the structure but the prose ... Popkey writes the way humans really speak. At first, it’s maddening — why can’t she just write clearly? — but soon it becomes clear that this is not random incoherence but rather an apt reflection of the way we actually talk to one another ... the truthfulness lays the characters bare in a way that is almost painful. But perhaps these truths are painful because we’d rather not think about them, so deeply ingrained as they are in our society ... Some of the characters, however, are hard to relate to. While their thoughts are understandable their actions are not ... The actions characters take in Topics of Conversation are often over-exaggerations of what actual people might do with very real feelings ... Perhaps the biggest word of caution about Topics of Conversations is all the comparisons that plague it: When contrasted with other well-known authors, it’s hard for it to stand alone. Popkey will likely not rise to the level of fame of Rooney or Davis, but that’s a high bar. This is a novel that should be read, for its masterful use of speech-like prose and for the meaningful conversations it will inspire.
...bracingly unsentimental ... as she explores her own history through a shifting lens of female rivalries and friendships, the book’s surface coolness begins to peel away, revealing the raw, uncommon nerve of a radically honest storyteller ... A-.
... twisty, prickly, sometimes brilliant debut. Wit is never in short supply here; the narrator is a perceptive observer of her own habit of falling into, and her ultimate inability to accept, a series of stock roles...The fact that she drinks too much is an element of her persona that feels a bit too stock itself ... less a unified novel in the realist mode than a richly kaleidoscopic meditation on female identity as it evolves over time. If I hadn’t read the book’s jacket copy I might not have known that this was a single narrator, so different does she sometimes seem from chapter to chapter ... Popkey is sharp on the way young women can alternate between brash self-aggrandizing and deep self-loathing. She is also particularly good at evoking how women judge, and how they present themselves to be judged ... In this sense, the novel is heavily—too heavily—influenced by Cusk’s recent novel trilogy ... The narrator has learned to favor a less reductive approach. No wonder the prose is so circuitous, erupting, at moments, into wry erudition ... sometimes the author’s ambition to diagnose the underlying truth of a situation pushes the story into complexities that devolve into confusion ... Thematically, Popkey is interested in and perceptive about self-loathing, cruelty, erotic shame, ugliness. And yet something about all this feels a little bit safe, in contrast to, say, a writer like Mary Gaitskill, whose characters’ inner lives tend to be in flux. For stretches the style hardens into overworked mannerism, melting into animated prose periodically, then stiffening back up. What had felt marvelously alive and at risk—and vulnerable—in the first chapter started to feel overdetermined, crossing over into the kind of performance that the narrator is supposedly trying to interrogate ... But: Popkey is a talent, and when she is at her best it is hard to shake what you’ve read ... best read not as a portrait of a woman who finds an origin story, or a self-determined destination. Rather, it is a kind of essay on the intense pleasures and charged possibilities of talk—of conversation as performance and a means of unintended intimacy.
People who read and write literature like to invoke the myth that storytelling is an emancipatory, even life-sustaining, exercise, but in Topics its potential feels suspect ... The book knows that an ability to monologue articulately about destabilizing life events represents the culmination of a longer emotional process by which trauma calcifies into anecdote, the thing one can stash away and bring out at will. Every woman in Popkey’s book is allowed to tell her story in full ... The book deftly reflects this sense of depletion and stasis; it is forthright about its own clichés, leaning hard into their sordid edges ... Other times, playing to type can feel like a betrayal of principle ... the task becomes more complex on the level of individual narrative, where Popkey must simultaneously valorize the self-expression of her female characters, show how their feelings may have been conditioned by misogyny, and also maintain that this conditioning does not disqualify them as autonomous, free-thinking people ... The book’s final chapter daringly undercuts Topics’ structural conceit, which is that every story possesses inherent, equal value and is deserving of receptive attention.
Popkey’s narrative isn’t sweeping; instead, these deeply intimate conversations and the narrator’s framing allow the reader glimpses into moments—big and small—as she defines, revises, and questions her story ... While the conversations throughout the book are largely casual confessionals, the narrator builds upon these in her telling, adding layers to statements by including frameworks in parentheticals and proposing background motives or underlying meanings ... picking the right moments is key. In this novel, Popkey selects moments that are charged, but not ones that are obvious milestones ... The scenes are layered with dense descriptions and sharp observations, and the characters are built in these brief, vulnerable moments ... Popkey’s writing beautifully captures the casual tones of confession that bind people together in talking about their experiences and their desires.
Popkey deftly captures a particular group of women’s voices and confessions through her unnamed narrator’s 'conversations' with other women ... While Topics of Conversation is generally high-brow, primarily narrated by a woman who was in a PhD program in English, Pokey seamlessly constructs and differentiates her various speakers. For instance, Artemisia comes across as a worldly, more experienced psychoanalyst; the narrator’s mother is credible as a cheerful alcoholic from Los Angeles; and her academic friends are believable with their cigarette smoking, jargon-spouting, and name-dropping ... a smart, well-articulated and -designed novel. Popkey gives credence to women’s experiences—the good, the bad, and the ugly—by creating credible narrators who tell their stories.
Popkey is careful to ground all of the talk and rumination in time and space ... Popkey has an eye for gesture, and a carefully documented choreography of pauses and gestures interrupts and enlivens the conversations and monologues ... While a novel filled with the stories women will only tell in an intimate moment could bring to mind feminist consciousness-raising or its 21st-century descendant, the personal essay, with its bloggy, conversational voice, this narrator does not aim to draw other women near. Instead she repels any sympathy that might be born of her confessions; the tone recalls the iciest moments of an Ottessa Moshfegh character ... For all of the disclosures, one is left with the feeling that she has more to tell, or that perhaps the evolving language of gender and power dynamics has not yet furnished the right language for her particular story yet.
Certainly there are some brilliant moments on display, but too often they are undermined by a counterpoint of self-indulgence ... Occasionally [the narrator] seems excited by the possibilities that life offers but, to the novel’s detriment, she’s more prone to lassitude, coming across like an under-achieving twentysomething already jaded by the world, an effect that might appeal to readers of that age group but can be tiresome to anyone outside of it ... Some of the more interesting sections, however, explore our relationship to creativity in a culture where the emperors often have no clothes ... That said, Popkey employs some good lines along the way ... At such moments, her nascent skills as a writer come across and one hopes that she will trust in this rather than feeling that she needs to indulge every eccentricity ... the overall effect of Topics of Conversation is that there are some that one would be very willing to engage with but too many that leave the reader longing for someone more interesting to interject.
Popkey is up to the task of her interesting approach, seamlessly weaving dialogue into actions and backstories (sometimes without quotes) and letting it drive the story. As her narrator notes: 'There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current.' Popkey captures this idea over and over again in her talking book of a woman’s maturation and evolving desire.
Popkey’s singular approach to novel writing ... intense, intimate and, unexpectedly, sexual ... Popkey’s genius is in reproducing her narrator’s dual experience, participating in a dialogue while processing what is being said to her, thus interior and exterior, with all the attendant tangents, riffs, backtracks and corrections. And gradually you, the reader, realize that you are complicit in her project, that Popkey wants to be liked, and to be likable she must seduce.
Popkey writes in a stream-of-consciousness style that gives her novel a dreamlike quality. Though readers must make the connections among the narrator’s many changes in location and situation, the result is finally thought provoking. Fine for general fiction audiences.
... painfully sharp ... a book of ideas—about power and gender, about desire, about loneliness and rage—but it is also, at its core, a novel about storytelling, about the quest for a stable narrative that can explain us to others and to ourselves ... The first sections of the novel are incisive, often biting, but mannered, as though the narrator’s own oppressive self-consciousness has rubbed off on the prose. But halfway through, at a mommy group in Fresno, the novel takes a turn, going from cool to coolly wrenching, as Popkey layers something like tenderness ... A rich and rigorous dissection of how we construct who we are.
The women in Popkey’s astute debut bristle with wanting ... As the years progress, the narrator’s hyperawareness and cheeky playfulness when it comes to her narrative as something she owns, grows as well ... Popkey’s prose is overly controlled, but this is nonetheless a searing and cleverly constructed novel and a fine indication of what’s to come from this promising author.
