Conversations With Friends
A nuanced exploration of complex relationships and personal identity, following the intertwined lives of two young women and an older married couple in Dublin, as they navigate love, desire, and the blurred lines between friendship and intimacy.
A Missed Opportunity
After reading Normal People and being mildly disappointed, I was hoping this book would redeem Rooney's storytelling for me, but I think that it was much worse than NP (maybe an unpopular opinion).
First, I want to say that I did enjoy Rooney's writing style. It's fascinating, fairly realistic, and pretty witty. Her lack of quotation marks was slightly confusing at first, but it was easy for me to adjust; it actually grew on me after reading Normal People and then transitioning to Conversations with Friends. I thought it meshed well with her stream-of-consciousness style of writing (I know it's not true stream-of-consciousness, but it felt similar to me).
It was hard for me to get into the story in the beginning, but as the character dynamics started to develop, it drew me in more. The middle of the book was thoroughly engaging and I couldn't put it down. However, the ending significantly dropped off for me. I felt like the story could have gone in so many different ways by elaborating on power dynamics and imbalances, familial ties and relationships, physical illness and recovery (shoutout to the endometriosis representation), and so many more, but it did not do any of that. I was so disappointed that Frances -- a character who seems like she has no idea who she is and who bases her entire personality off of those who surround her -- did not actually undergo any type of spiritual revelation and discover her "true self" through therapy, a vacation, or any other method of self-discovery. After one anticlimactic phone call, she is suddenly aware of her own avoidant psychological tendencies but does not investigate her relationships with her mom, her dad, Bobbi, or Nick (who are all, in my opinion, thoroughly unlikeable characters).
Arguably, the most disheartening thing for me was that there was no analysis of Nick and Frances' relationship. Given the fact that he is much older, married, and wealthy, while she is a young, broke college student, I thought this book would be a deep-dive into power dynamics and manipulation. Instead, she cuts it off with him, seemingly because of her own psychological issues and not because he is a married man who likes younger women. After she is "healed," he reappears at the very end of the story to "save her" (which is the same complaint I had in Rooney's Normal People with Marianne and Connell).
TLDR: Great writing style, unlikeable characters, poor/rushed protagonist development, lack of depth regarding any real issues mentioned.