Conversations With Friends sparkles with controlled rhetoric. Rooney reveals a young woman painfully coming to terms with the beliefs, desires, and feelings that belong irrevocably to her. Rooney has done the impossible in the Trump era: She’s rescued the ego as an object of fascination. They are all thrillingly sharp, hyperverbal.
Bobbi, Frances, Nick, and Melissa excel at endearing banter and hesitant, vulnerable disclosure. Rooney herself is acute and sensitive-she may have pinned these fragile creatures to a board, but her eye is not cruel. 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.
They relate to behavior and psychology-characters zigging when you expect them to zag, from passivity to sudden aggression and back. Sally Rooney is a planter of small surprises, sowing them like landmines. 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. But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. 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. 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. 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. As its title promises, Rooney’s book glitters with talk.
Rooney turns out to be as intelligent and agile a novelist as she apparently was a debater, and for many of the same reasons.
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