Sally Rooney, _Conversations with Friends_

I WAS IMPRESSED by a chapter of Rooney's Normal People that appeared in Granta, so I bought this--Normal People was not yet out then (it is now)--but it took me a while to get to it because the cover...is a little...Chick Lit, I guess: pastel colors, trendy font, a kind of imitation-Alex-Katz illustration. Turns out, though, the cover is a (detail of) a real Alex Katz, and the novel is a real novel, not just vacation reading.

Our setup: narrator Frances and her ex-lover-but-still-friend Bobbi are Trinity College students who perform slam poetry (written mostly by Frances) around Dublin. They get the attention of early-30s journalist Melissa, who is married to Nick, an actor whose career is sputtering a bit after a quick start. Melissa and Bobbi seem to be getting flirty, edging towards a liaison, but surprise! It is brilliant but uncharismatic Frances and handsome but insecure Nick who launch themselves into an affair.

The plot is mainly the discovery of Nick's and Frances's affair by Bobbi, then by Melissa, and the course of true love ne'er running smooth.... Plenty to keep you turning pages if you are reading this on a vacation.

What intrigued me more, though, was Rooney's decision to narrate the whole novel in Frances's first-person voice, because Frances is (a) not very perceptive about her own feelings and (b) not very forthcoming about them. For example, from p. 207:

   I opened my eyes then. He [Nick] was frowning.
   Wait, are you okay? he said. Why are you crying?
   I'm not crying.
   Incidentally it turned out that I was crying. It was just something my eyes were doing while we were talking, He touched the side of my face where it was wet.
   I'm not crying, I said.

Rooney does a telling job here of conveying how people (even [especially?] brilliant people) can be utterly without a clue as to their own feelings, removed from their own emotional lives and the messiness of their own bodies--that "incidentally" is a perfect touch.

Beyond that, though, Frances seems to fly in the face of female bildungsroman tradition, in that from Jane Eyre on, its heroines have been nuanced observers of their own feelings and generous in sharing them with the reader. Relying on a narrator so unwilling to narrate anything revealing is a really risky choice on Rooney's part, but it pays off--as we readers gradually become invested in Frances, despite her own best efforts (as it were) to keep us at arm's length, we are all the more powerfully invested because she has done so little to encourage us.

In  the early going, it seems all too clear why Melissa is fascinated by Bobbi, but scarcely bothers with Frances. But Nick is our precursor. As we get some genealogy of Frances's personality (a father suffering from alcoholism and depression), witness a health crisis (a pregnancy scare that turns out to actually be early endometriosis), and listen in on some cards-on-the-table confrontations (especially one with Bobbi over Frances's tendency to withhold), we begin to really, truly hope Frances will prevail, and--thanks to Rooney's pulling a relatively plausible happy ending out of her hat--perhaps she does.