Thoughts About Conversations With Friends

There is nothing that makes me more excited than a great surprise when it comes to books. I mean, I love reading authors like Dostoyevsky, Márquez, or Virginia Woolf. But frankly, there is no surprise there – I know that whatever I pick up will be amazing. With Sally Rooney, I didn’t expect that.

To be completely honest, I didn’t expect anything—I picked up Conversations with Friends out of curiosity because I had heard about Rooney from many people whose opinions I respect. And I’m proud I did it, because otherwise I would still be stuck in this ridiculous, unfounded conviction that these are just some ordinary romance novels written for people in their twenties. So far, I have read only Conversations with Friends (her other novels are definitely on my TBR), but I will permit myself to say that while she herself is a millennial, as are her characters, this type of literature is for everyone.

Plot

The story follows several months in the lives of Frances and Bobbi, ex-girlfriends who remained close friends and perform spoken poetry. They are 21-year-old students finishing their degrees and having no big plans for the future, but they have a rather strong value system.

Both are highly critical of capitalism and aware of class-, race-, and sex-based oppression across the world, and they often discuss these issues with their friends. At one of their poetry-reading evenings, they meet Melissa, a successful journalist who proposes to write a piece about them. From that moment onward, the lives of these ordinary university students start to change as they get pulled into Melissa’s world of artists and intellectuals, drastically different from theirs—or rather, from Frances’s.

Bobby, an attractive and outgoing lesbian who is no stranger to the world of glamour, is immediately fascinated by and attracted to Melissa. Frances, who, on the other hand, comes from a working-class family, appears cold and uninterested at first. But after meeting Melissa’s husband Nick, an actor, things start to look different.

Of course, as is often the case, chemistry is present from the moment they meet, and they quickly start seeing each other secretly. And I am going to stop here, because saying anything else would be nothing but a spoiler.

Reflections on Conversations

This is not, however, why I like this book. Much to my surprise, it generated a somewhat similar feeling to what I felt some time ago when I first read Jane Austen. Not in terms of style, of course—unlike Austen’s, Rooney’s style is very conversational. At times, it even feels like you are in a pub listening to someone recount snippets of someone’s life. Some people (like my best friend, for example) can find it off-putting. I agree to some extent—it took me a while to get used to it, but once I did, I couldn’t put the book down, and I find the style rather interesting.

I also feel it necessary to mention that this is not a plot-driven novel—nothing exceptionally important happens here. It is entirely focused on those several months in the lives of not particularly likeable characters. You can find yourself maybe sympathizing with Frances, Bobbi, Nick, or Melissa at one time and at another despising them. I know I have—there were moments I thought if these folks were my friends, I’d never want to see them in my life. However, there is something in her choice and building of characters and the way she brings various social themes that makes this an excellent read.

This is where I find her similar to Jane Austen. The way Austen uses the adversity of the Dashwood women to address the social problems and difficulties women of the late 18th century faced, Rooney now uses the experiences of two young women to address issues such as class, neo-imperialism, and other such matters in the 21st century.

Conversations With Friends is a novel pervaded with explicit mentions or references to communism, feminism, and present-day wars, which all make it a very contemporary novel. Personally, I also find it a valuable one because it brings important but unjustly demonized ideologies to the center stage of conversations with a positive connotation.

Despite all expectations, I fully enjoyed this novel, and I can’t wait to read her others. Beautiful World, Where Are You is going to be my next read. But I would like to invite you to a conversation about Conversations With Friends. Have you read it? What are your thoughts?