Crown Publishing, July 11, 2017.
Four Stars
Conversations
with Friends is an intense character study, following
the lives of two young women who were once lovers and are now best friends. Frances
and Bobbi are twenty-one-year-old college students in Dublin, where they
perform spoken-word poetry in night clubs and interact with the various artists
and literati of the city. One night they meet photo-journalist Melissa, who
wants to write an article about their work, and their lives are changed
forever.
Frances is cool and calm in the face of strong
emotion – she is darkly funny and yet deeply serious. Bobbi is beautiful and
confident, and often self-involved when it comes to understanding the emotions
of others. When the two young women are thrown into the lives of Melissa and
her handsome actor husband Nick, their beliefs about themselves and others are
challenged in unexpected ways. Bobbi, who is confident in her attraction to
women, becomes obsessed with Melissa. Meanwhile, sexually-ambiguous Frances
finds Nick intriguing despite herself – he is apathetic yet attractive, and she
can’t help but seek him out to spend more time with him.
At the start, Frances is mostly amused by her
flirtation with Nick – it is as if she is practicing for a more meaningful
future relationship, both in conversations and in the bedroom. She sees him as
a negative symbol of wealth and patriarchy, which is ironic because it doesn’t
bother her that her dad pays her bills. Frances’ analysis of her own thoughts
and feelings are self-conscious, and her intellectual debates with friends will
make you cringe with their self-aware awkwardness. In her naivete, Frances
explores the complications of intimacy, and the misunderstandings that stem
from email and messenger conversations – feelings are often confused, and both
Nick and Frances assume the other is cold and lacking emotion when in fact it
is simply lost in translation.
Throughout the novel, Frances’ various relationships
take on new meanings and fill new roles in her life – with Bobbi, with her
mother and father, and especially with Nick and even Melissa. Intellectual
stimulation is the most important aspect of Frances’ life, and yet she is
forced to reconcile herself to the physical world as well. She has always
placed mind over body, but eventually health concerns force her to pay
attention to her physicality and put herself first.
The conversations between friends, lovers,
acquaintances, and even adversaries are always at the forefront of this intelligent,
thought-provoking novel. It is a novel of ideas, although they are always
applied thoughtfully to the characters and their development. At first this
reminded me of another 2017 novel, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot – both books feature a naïve young female protagonist,
using deadpan humour and probing intelligence to explore a troubling
relationship in the age of the internet. However, Frances is much less
endearing and less likeable, which isn’t necessary a bad thing. The problem for
me was the ending, in which it didn’t seem that Frances truly developed or
changed at all – despite all her experiences, there was no real growth, and
that was disappointing. However, the strength of this novel is in its concepts
and conversations, written in a unique prose style that I savoured throughout
Frances’ oddly compelling journey – despite or maybe because of Frances’ many
issues, I found this book impossible to put down and I will be seeking out more
by the talented Sally Rooney.
I received this book from Crown Publishing and
NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
No comments:
Post a Comment