Contemporary Authors

• Conversations with Friends ( novel) Hogarth (New York, NY), 2017

1. Conversations with friends : a novel LCCN 2017032396 Type of material Book Personal name Rooney, Sally, author. Main title Conversations with friends : a novel / Sally Rooney. Edition First United States edition. Published/Produced London ; New York : Hogarth, [2017] Description 310 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780451499059 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PR6118.O59 C66 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

Print Marked Items
Speech therapy
Philip Maughan
New Statesman.
146.5382 (Sept. 1, 2017): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text: 
Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney
Faber & Faber, 336pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling]
The key to Sally Rooney's debut novel is hidden in plain sight. It's in the title: Conversations with Friends.
While on the surface this is a sharp, contemporary take on the bourgeois social novel, the stuff of marriage,
betrayal and touchy dinner parties, there are no dramatic set-pieces--no car crashes, no unlocked email
accounts, no catching them at it in the library. Instead feelings emerge and are appraised in speech. "He was
the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous
way I enjoyed coffee or loud music," says the narrator, Frances, a 21-year-old performance poet and student
who falls in love with a wealthy actor 11 years her senior. Who also happens to be married.
The dynamic is complicated in all sorts of ways. For one, Frances's last (and only) relationship was with a
woman, Bobbi, her anarchist (also wealthy) best friend from school. For another, the actor isn't everything
he appears to be. He's "handsome", we're told, "to an almost off-putting extent." In fact, by my reckoning
Nick is referred to as "handsome" at least 11 further times in the novel, whether pointedly to objectify him
or as an editorial oversight is never quite clear.
Despite this tired marker of male impressiveness, not everything is golden for Nick. He has recently
emerged from a psychiatric institution. He is passive, jaded, often depressed. By his wife Melissa's own
admission: "I've become so used to seeing him as pathetic and even contemptible that I forgot anybody else
could love him."
Not that Frances has it any easier. Throughout the book she endures a litany of woes--with her father, her
health, her finances--creating a situation in which nobody can fault her or old sad sack Nick for attempting
to squeeze whatever joy they can from their infatuation. It's possibly the most blameless affair in literature.
Even Melissa, the cuckolded wife, more or less agrees. "I once slept with another woman at a literary
festival," she explains to Frances and Bobbi, "then several years later, while Nick was in psychiatric
hospital, began an affair with his best friend, which continued even after Nick found out."
It's a lot to take in and understandably, Frances struggles with it. She's new to all this, after all. Hers is the
perspective of a Holden Caulfield or Jane Eyre, the narrator from a bildungsroman trying to keep cool after
winding up in the realm of Edith Wharton or James Salter. The mid-section of the book--which takes place
among the lakes, holiday homes and bounteous picnic spots of northern France--is particularly Salterian,
with sprinkles of lyrical Joyce thrown in. "The clouds were green and the stars reminded me of sugar,"
Frances thinks. "His heart continued to beat like an excited or miserable clock," she says of Nick.
This is another key point: Conversations is an Irish novel that has very little to say about nationalism or the
Church. In 1942 the short-story writer Frank O'Connor claimed it would be impossible to write a social
novel set in Ireland. In that sense, Rooney has defied the odds.
The language of commerce, so often deployed to analyse power dynamics in relationships --"I didn't think
you'd let someone take advantage of you like that," says Philip, a friend; "He was exploiting my tender
feelings for him," Frances reflects--proves inadequate when the reality being described becomes so messy
and protracted. There is no final verdict, no guilty and innocent, no strong and weak, and it's in
conversation, in the book's continual flow of dialogue, that the layers of complexity build and shade into
grey.
But that's also where problems emerge: the conversation doesn't go far enough. The recriminations that pass
between Nick and Frances, Frances and Bobbi, Frances and Melissa, wind up feeling pale and repetitive, not
quite the zeitgeisty shitstorm we'd begun to expect. Despite the regularity with which we are assured of
Frances and Bobbi's progressive credentials, men are still from Mars; women from Venus.
Take the depiction of Nick: at first, he's too macho (which is bad); later, he's weak and effeminate (also bad).
He does little more than shrug and agree with the women around him, making him "pathologically
submissive" according to his wife, a barb he, of course, accepts. He should probably have come down from
his crucifix--for the sake both of those who suffer his company and the vitality of the novel as a whole. But
straw men don't tend to have much life in them. At least he's handsome.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Maughan, Philip. "Speech therapy." New Statesman, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 47. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A506562861/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=426c828d.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A506562861
Conversations with Friends
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.19-20 (June 2017): p50.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
* Conversations with Friends. By Sally Rooney. July 2017. 304p. Hogarth, $26 (97804514990591.
University students in Dublin, Frances and Bobbi have been inseparable since they dated in high school. No
longer lovers, they perform Frances' poetry together and run in an artsy circle that is one day intersected by
a much older couple, Melissa and Nick. Bobbi, assured in her love of women only, is immediately smitten
with Melissa, a published author, while Frances feels an attraction to actor Nick, her first male love interest,
which appears to be, somewhat shockingly, mutual. Frances has idolized Bobbi since they met, often
comparing their confidence, intelligence, and beauty and feeling that she comes up short. Now her sexual,
top-secret relationship with Nick drives them apart. Add to that Frances' diagnosis with endometriosis,
which she keeps to herself, causing deep and confusing anxiety, along with the crushing, monthly pain, and
she is in a bad place. With painful missteps and wise triumphs, Frances probes her beliefs in most
everything--sexuality, relationships, politics, and her family--and learns to distinguish between what she's
told and what she thinks. Less a coming-of-age story and more a coming-of-now tale, Rooney's first novel is
a smart, sexy, realistic portrayal of a woman finding herself in and out of a well-depicted friendship.--Annie
Bostrom
YA: Frances and Bobbi's feelings, friendship, and the problems they must come to terms with are true to
their college age and will likely resonate with teen readers. AB.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Conversations with Friends." Booklist, June 2017, p. 50. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582679/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5d440bbc.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498582679
Rooney, Sally: CONVERSATIONS WITH
FRIENDS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Rooney, Sally CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS Hogarth/Crown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 11 ISBN:
978-0-451-49905-9
The story of the entangled affairs of a group of exceedingly smart and self-possessed creative types.Frances,
an aloof and intelligent 21-year-old living in Dublin, is an aspiring poet and communist. She performs her
spoken-word pieces with her best friend and ex-lover, Bobbi, who is equally intellectual but gregarious
where Frances is shy and composed where Frances is awkward. When Melissa, a notable writer and
photographer, approaches the pair to offer to do a profile of them, they accept excitedly. While Bobbi is
taken with Melissa, Frances becomes infatuated by her life--her success, her beautiful home, her actor
husband, Nick. Nick is handsome and mysterious and, it turns out, returns Frances' attraction. Although he
can sometimes be withholding of his affection (he struggles with depression), they begin a passionate affair.
Frances and Nick's relationship makes difficult the already tense (for its intensity) relationship between
Frances and Bobbi. In the midst of this complicated dynamic, Frances is also managing endometriosis and
neglectful parents--an abusive, alcoholic father and complicit mother. As a narrator, Frances describes all
these complex fragments in an ethereal and thoughtful but self-loathing way. Rooney captures the mood and
voice of contemporary women and their interpersonal connections and concerns without being remotely
predictable. In her debut novel, she deftly illustrates psychology's first lesson: that everyone is doomed to
repeat their patterns. A clever and current book about a complicated woman and her romantic relationships.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rooney, Sally: CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002884/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=922c64d8.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002884
Conversations with Friends
Publishers Weekly.
264.20 (May 15, 2017): p2.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney. Hogarth, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-0-451-49905-9
In this searing, Insightful debut, Rooney offers an un-apologetic perspective on the vagaries of relationships.
When Frances and Bobbi, former lovers and college students who perform Frances's poetry together, meet
Melissa, a famed photographer who wants to do a story about them, the two young women's lives are
transformed. Bobbi, the more outgoing and social of the two, has a crush on Melissa; Frances, ever the
enigmatic intellectual, is intrigued by Nick, Melissa's glamorous actor husband. From Frances's point of
view, readers experience the exhilarating and devastating emotional roller coaster of love, not only in the
trajectory of her developing relationship with Nick but also In the layered, complicated relationship between
her and Bobbi, as they traverse the rocky road from lovers to friends and back again and transition to the
world of adulthood. Rooney lets readers glimpse the rich interior of Frances's life-capturing the tension and
excitement of her attraction to Nick, how she justifies her feelings and treatment of the people around her,
and how she is shaped by the separation of her understanding mother and her alcoholic father. Here, too, is a
treatise on married life, the impact of Infidelity, the ramifications of one's actions, and how the person one
chooses to be with can impact one's individuality. Throughout, Rooney's descriptive eye lends beauty and
veracity to this complex and vivid story. (July)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Conversations with Friends." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 2. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435549/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4e45dee5.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435549

SCHWARTZ, ALEXANDRA
Conversations with Friends
New Yorker. 7/31/2017, Vol. 93 Issue 22, p74-76. 3p. 1 Color Photograph, 1 Cartoon or Caricature.
Book Review
In 2015, The Dublin Review ran a goodbye-to-all-that essay by Sally Rooney, a young Irish writer, about her brief career as a university debater. A couple of years earlier, as a student at Trinity College, Dublin, Rooney had risen through the ranks of the European circuit to become the No. 1 debater on the Continent, but she wrote about her feats the way a recovering alcoholic might look back on a time of sotted carousing, at once proud of her exploits and appalled by the person she had been while having them. What Rooney loved about debating was entering a state of "flow," that magical mental hum when disparate facts and ideas effortlessly assembled themselves in her mind and poured from her mouth as argument. Yet she was also disturbed by her talent for advocating morally dubious positions, like capitalism's benefits for the poor, or "things oppressed people should do about their oppression." She quit after winning the championship. "Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren't any prizes," she wrote.
She could. Rooney is now twenty-six and, after earning a master's in American literature and publishing a few short stories, has just come out with her first novel, "Conversations with Friends" (Hogarth). There are prizes for fiction, it's true, but writing it is a private performance: you judge yourself first on your own stage, by your own rules. Rooney turns out to be as intelligent and agile a novelist as she apparently was a debater, and for many of the same reasons. As its title promises, Rooney's book glitters with talk, much of it between Frances, the novel's narrator, and Bobbi, her best friend, two Trinity students supremely gifted in the collegiate sport of competitive banter. Observations, theories, and quips about the world fly between the friends like so many shuttlecocks in a conversation that never ends, because conversations, in our world of screens, don't have to. They just change format, so that a discussion begun in person continues through texts or e-mails or, as in the following dialogue, instant messages:
Bobbi: if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon
Bobbi: and try to understand it as a social value system
Bobbi: it's both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness
Bobbi: which dictates the whole logic of inequality
Bobbi: and yet also it's subservient and facilitatory
Bobbi: i.e. mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motive
Bobbi: which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one level
Bobbi: and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free
me: yes
me: capitalism harnesses "love" for profit
me: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect
me: but I mean, I get that, I'm anti love as such
Bobbi: that's vapid frances
Bobbi: you have to do more than say you're anti things.
This exchange, so rigorously serious as to be comic, calls to mind another pair of brilliant Dublin students, Cranly and Stephen Dedalus, who stroll around in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," arguing over the Eucharist and apostasy. Cranly and Dedalus came of age in an Ireland riven by religious strife, Bobbi and Frances in an Ireland gutted by the 2008 financial collapse. 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. To be "anti love," as Frances declares herself, is as ideologically satisfying as it is emotionally untenable, a weak position that Bobbi pounces on with startling pitilessness.
Frances's disavowal of love strikes a poignant note, too, for Bobbi was her girlfriend before she became her friend. At the convent high school where they met, Bobbi was a cigarette-smoking contrarian with a pierced nose who freaked out her square classmates and pissed off her teachers. (Her coup de grâce was scrawling "fuck the patriarchy" next to a wall-mounted crucifix.) Frances remembers how, when she was seventeen, Bobbi approached her at a school dance, "radiantly attractive" as she swigged vodka from a bottle of Coke, to ask if Frances liked girls: "It was very easy to act unfazed around her. I just said: sure."
The relationship lasted for more than a year, and though Frances doesn't explain why it ended, the friends' intimacy still has the all-absorbing intensity of romance, as well as its thorny imbalances of power and temperament. Bobbi is the clear star of the pair, beautiful and puckishly charismatic, with a suffer-no-fools bravado that, as Frances says, "could be abrasive and unrestrained in a way that made people uncomfortable, while I tended to be encouragingly polite. Mothers always liked me a lot, for example." So do men. At the open-mike nights around Dublin where the friends perform spokenword poetry together, Bobbi ignores any guy who tries to chat them up, leaving him to Frances. "I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl," Frances confesses, but Bobbi considers such agreeableness to be pandering. "Bobbi told me she thought I didn't have 'a real personality,' but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment."
The novel opens at one of these poetry nights, in early summer, where Frances and Bobbi meet Melissa, an established writer and photographer in her thirties. They are familiar with her work; Melissa, impressed with what she has just seen of theirs, invites them back to her house for a nightcap. As Bobbi entertains their host with clever conversation, Frances takes stock of her large, comfortable home, casing it like a thief. Melissa has money, Frances concludes. She also has a husband: Nick, an actor, whom Frances finds "handsome in the most generic way"—a strong, silent hunk with a soft mouth and good cheekbones who looks great without a shirt on, as she discovers later, clicking through images of him on Google. The pictures are old, from cancelled soaps and second-rate films; Nick's career has never quite taken off. It seems impossible to imagine that he could be the equal of cerebral, impressive Melissa.
There's an aura of seduction to the boozy night with Melissa. Soon after, she e-mails Frances and Bobbi to suggest profiling them as literary up-and-comers for a local magazine. Flattered, they accept, and as they spend more time with Melissa and Nick, eating dinner at their house, socializing at book launches, a fraught dynamic begins to take shape. Though Frances is the writer—it is her work that the friends perform—Melissa clearly prefers Bobbi, with whom she establishes a rapport of cozy, mutual infatuation. Frances, excluded and hurt, finds herself thrown together with Nick, the other neglected partner in this odd four-person dance. He's far sharper and subtler than his looks suggest, with a quiet, tentative quality she finds surprising in so masculine a man. "He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music," Frances thinks, though the tone that she and Nick take with each other is so relentlessly sardonic that neither is sure if the flirtation is serious. It is. At Melissa's birthday party, they kiss. Frances flees in confused shame, but when she returns, a few days later, it is to his bed. "I might never be able to speak again after this," she thinks, in stunned ecstasy, as he begins to touch her—a frightening thought for someone so used to protecting herself with language, and a freeing one, too. In spite of herself, Frances has stumbled straight into a love story.
And what a love story to stumble into! With her queer credentials and radical politics, Frances is an unlikely protagonist in a novel of adultery, that most clichéd of genres. Nothing could be more bourgeois than an affair, or more banal than being the other woman, as Frances is all too aware. She's humiliated by the sheer triteness of the feelings that come to govern her: lust, jealousy, above all vulnerability, raw and excruciatingly real. "We can sleep together if you want, but you should know I'm only doing it ironically," she tells Nick, sounding, for once, like the millennial she is.
This is a lie, of course, and one wonderful aspect of Rooney's consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the selfdelusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. Frances is committed to a vision of herself as principled and disciplined, motivated by a stringent brand of altruism that seems to her the only rational response to the world's grotesque unfairness. Throughout the novel, she is tormented by crippling menstrual pain, which she tries to ignore on the principle that her suffering is no more important than anyone else's. Then there's her take on the joint problems of inequality, privilege, and insecurity. If the globe's G.D.P. were divided equally among all people, Frances has gleaned from Wikipedia, each person would get $16,100 a year, and she sees no sense, "political or financial," in earning more than that. Bobbi has a similar scorn for money, but she can afford her attitude: her family is rich. Frances's parents are middle class, barely. That she can't depend on them for extra support is a point of honor, and the cause of more than a little anxiety. "I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy," she tells us. She's right. But it's also a way of deferring adulthood, with its unavoidable ideological compromises and moral imperfections.
An attractive ascetic principle is at work here. Frances believes that to act in the world is to do inevitable damage to it. The only solution is not to act, and certainly not to do something so obviously harmful as sleeping with someone else's husband. Yet her affair with Nick is an expression of exquisite, compulsive selfishness; never before has she had so little control over herself and so much over another person, a disturbing truth that she does her best to ignore. Among the novel's bittersweet ironies is that, for all Frances's suspicion of cliché, she can't shake her sense that Nick, as a handsome, older man, will behave according to type, discarding her as soon as he is bored or sated. Actually, he is touchingly tender and openhearted, as fragile, in his way, as Frances is in hers. He has been hospitalized for depression; Melissa handles him with an infantilizing mixture of indulgence and contempt that disgusts Frances. And yet she herself treats Nick callously, abusing her emotional and erotic power over him precisely because she refuses to believe that she could have any.
Rooney has said that she wrote the bulk of "Conversations with Friends" in three months—there's that flow for you—and her book has the virtues of that speed with surprisingly few of its faults. Perhaps as a result of such swift execution, the novel gave me the curious feeling that Rooney wasn't always sure where she was going but that she trusted herself to find out. 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. This isn't to say that the novel lacks beauty. Its richness blooms quietly, as when Frances, about to have sex with Nick for the first time, says, with moving clarity, that her insides feel "hot like oil," or when she recalls a terrifying episode during her childhood when her alcoholic father, stumbling into the house drunk, tripped over one of her shoes and threw it into the fire: "I watched it smouldering like it was my own face smouldering. I learned not to display fear, it only provoked him. I was cold like a fish. Afterward my mother said: why don't you lift it out of the fire? Can't you at least make an effort? I shrugged. I would have let my real face burn in the fire too."
But Rooney's natural power is as a psychological portraitist. 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. Who does? Frances's defensive, deceived self-awareness, her painful errors in emotional judgment, feel so vividly truthful that the reader sympathetically braces for her comeuppance. Yet Melissa, too, is skilled in the art of self-deception.When the affair does come to light, as it must, she neutralizes the pain of betrayal by consenting to it, agreeing to cut Nick in half, like the pretender to the baby in the Judgment of Solomon. Frances can have him, but Melissa will keep him, too, with Bobbi bouncing platonically between the couples in this modern, precarious ménage à quatre.
Rooney's title comes from a private joke of Frances and Bobbi's, "meaningless to everyone including ourselves: What is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?" The joke does have meaning, though. Everyone defines the common terms of life for herself, because everyone makes up her own life. What is a marriage, if it can be opened? What is love, if it can be shared? Do Nick's feelings for Melissa invalidate the ones he has for Frances, as she fears? Or does Frances's relationship with Nick contaminate the one that she has with Bobbi?
There is another, murkier betrayal in the novel. Frances writes a short story, her first—not, as we expect, about an episode from her own life but about one from Bobbi's. In the story, she casts Bobbi as "a mystery so total I couldn't endure her, a force I couldn't subjugate with my will, and the love of my life." The high heat of their friendship will remind many readers of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels—one headstrong, dazzling girl; one watchful, more apparently "normal" one—but it's more like that of teen-age Clarissa and Sally Seton in "Mrs. Dalloway," a founding example of the kind of passionate, consuming intimacy between young women that is only now coming into its own as a literary theme. Like Clarissa, Frances is awed by, and more than a little attracted to, her fantastic friend, who speaks her mind with such free, natural authority and seems to be beyond the range of standard human destinies and disappointments. Like Clarissa, she will surely be proved wrong. "You think everyone you like is special," Bobbi tells Frances. She means it as a warning, and as a hint. Maybe it's Frances who is extraordinary, bound for great things. Frances, so devoutly committed to arguing against her own position, doesn't want to believe her, but we do. Rooney knows that some debates are worth losing, and she lets Frances, briefly, share her epiphany. "It felt good to be wrong about everything," Frances thinks, in a moment of rare, uncomplicated happiness. Amen to that.
PHOTO (COLOR): Rooney, twenty-six, is a writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): "Now my face feels tight."
~~~~~~~~
By ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

Matthews, John G.
Library Journal. 5/1/2017, Vol. 142 Issue 8, p68-68. 2/9p.
Book Review
DEBUT Best friends who were formerly a couple, Frances and Bobbi attend university and perform spoken-word pieces in Dublin. Melissa chronicles the urban Irish arts scene as an established photojournalist and wants to cover these talented young women and their work. As Melissa’s social circle closes around the younger women, Frances initiates an affair with Melissa’s sickly husband, Nick. This relationship, as well as Frances’s burgeoning literary reputation, attenuates the bonds among everyone involved. Ultimately, Frances’s art drives Bobbi away, even as Nick’s improving health and intimacy with his wife push Frances to the brink of mental and physical disaster. By book’s end, everyone has achieved a precarious equilibrium, though readers are left to wonder if it can last. Narrated by Frances, Rooney’s satisfying first novel artfully traces the emotional intricacies that draw people together as well as the social vicissitudes that complicate these connections. Frances is a tricky narrator, brilliant and analytical yet somehow unknowable to herself and others. VERDICT Readers who enjoyed Belinda McKeon’s Tender and Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells will enjoy this exceptional debut. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]

Maughan, Philip. "Speech therapy." New Statesman, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 47. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A506562861/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018. Bostrom, Annie. "Conversations with Friends." Booklist, June 2017, p. 50. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582679/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018. "Rooney, Sally: CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002884/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018. "Conversations with Friends." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 2. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435549/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/01/conversations-with-friends-by-sally-rooney-review
  Word count: 895

  Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney review – young, gifted and self-destructive
  A menage a quatre in post-crash Dublin tests the bonds between close friends
  Claire Kilroy
  Thu 1 Jun 2017 04.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 04.34 EST
  ‘Bobbi and I,” the novel begins – because Frances, the narrator, still regards herself as one half of a twosome. They were girlfriends at school for two years; now they are on their summer holidays from Trinity College Dublin, performing spoken word poetry as a double act.
  After one performance they follow Melissa, a photographer and essayist, home to the wealthy part of Dublin where she lives. Melissa says she wants to profile them for a prestigious magazine and they encounter her husband, Nick, a handsome actor. This is the world of grownups who have grown-up problems, but Bobbi and Frances do not know this yet. Bobbi gravitates towards Melissa; Frances later embarks on an affair with Nick. The “Bobbi and I” unit is fractured. The novel charts the seven months that follow, tracking the effect of the affair on Frances.
  Rooney sets her story in the post-crash era, among a Dublin elite. Her characters work in the arts and denounce the evils of capitalism while living off inherited wealth. The novel, indeed, is almost post-Irish. In earlier Irish fiction, the narrative would have focused on the social tensions surrounding a gay relationship – and a female one at that. In Conversations With Friends, Frances’s mother describes it as “a real shame” when the girls break up. Similarly, that great stalwart of Irish writing, the alcoholic father, is present, but he is a spent force, having been dispatched from the family home years ago; the greatest trouble he causes is when he stops paying Frances her monthly allowance.
  The apparatus of church and state haven’t repressed these people. Rather, the women have repressed themselves: they are too guarded to articulate their vulnerabilities. Frances is crippled by the pressure to perpetually “act unfazed”, to “affect an ironic tone” in situations that demand serious emotional engagement. “I just don’t have feelings concerning whether you fuck your wife or not,” she lies to Nick. “It’s not an emotive topic for me.” The self-harm she perpetrates on her thin young body reveals otherwise. When she finally blurts out that she loves Nick, he tells her she’s “being unbelievably dramatic”.
  Frances is an unusually contradictory creation, so clever and yet so blind. Her formidable intellect prompts her to adopt an ironic position towards everything – including herself. She repeatedly declares herself to be emotionally cold, despite evidence to the contrary. But as Bobbi points out: “I don’t think ‘unemotional’ is a quality someone can have. That’s like claiming not to have thoughts.”
  Conversation in the world of the novel is – like the spoken word poetry, which unfortunately isn’t depicted – a performance art, often a gladiatorial one. Bobbi and Frances excel in this arena. Frances explains that she “wanted to destroy capitalism and that [she] considered masculinity personally oppressive”. The girls (they object to that term) become so habituated to interrogating everything that it becomes an in-joke: “What is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?” Their discursive anti-establishment flair serves them well at dinner parties, but when applied to matters of the heart, it proves catastrophic to Frances.
  Rooney is not a visual writer. There are no arresting images, no poetic flights. She is of the tell-don’t-show school: many of the conversations that comprise most of the novel are presented as he-said she-said reportage. The characters are keen to label themselves. “I’m gay, said Bobbi, and Frances is a communist.” Melissa declares herself “a neurotic individualist”, and Nick tells Frances he is “‘basically’ a Marxist, and he didn’t want me to judge him for owning a house”. This desire for labels, seeking always to box off the great flux of human experience, to achieve mastery of it, is shown to be a reductive force: “No one who likes Yeats is capable of emotional intimacy.” The body, however, is the wild card. It will not be suppressed, and instead flares up in outbreaks of sexual desire and acts of self-harm. Another wild card is the baby, Nick’s niece Rachel, who makes a brief but lovely appearance. She is the only person for whom Nick can freely express emotion. Even Frances finds herself caught off guard when Rachel is placed in her arms.
  The salvation for Frances? Art, it is to be hoped – but she is far from out of the woods by the end of the novel. On reading the short story that Frances has written about Bobbi, Bobbi says she “learned more about [Frances’s] feelings in the last twenty minutes than in the last four years”. Frances has found freedom on the page. Rooney writes so well of the condition of being a young, gifted but self-destructive woman, both the mentality and physicality of it. She is alert to the invisible bars imprisoning the apparently free. Though herself young – she was born in 1991 – she has already been shortlisted for this year’s Sunday Times EFG short story award. Her hyperarticulate characters may fail to communicate their fragile selves, but Rooney does it for them in a voice distinctively her own.

• Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/sally-rooney-s-debut-novel-is-fearless-sensual-writing-1.3094967
  Word count: 1157

  Sally Rooney’s debut novel is fearless, sensual writing
  ‘Conversations with Friends review: Sally Rooney offers searing insights on affairs and relationships
  Sally Rooney: The debut novelist delivers a dynamic tale about the messy, overlapping relationships between four captivating characters. Photograph: Jonny Davies

  Sarah Gilmartin

  Mon, Jun 5, 2017, 11:20
  First published:Mon, Jun 5, 2017, 06:00

  As Anne Enright wrote in her 2011 novel The Forgotten Waltz, being the “Not Wife” is a delicate business. It’s a lesson that 21-year-old Frances, the narrator of Conversations with Friends, learns over the course of a listless college summer where she begins an affair with a married man.
  A cracking early scene sees Frances and her best friend Bobbi invited to the southside Dublin home of journalist Melissa, whose interest in the pair is sparked after profiling their spoken word double act. While Bobbi favours Melissa, Frances is attracted to her actor husband, Nick. The battle lines are drawn from the beginning.
  To Bobbi, Melissa is vibrant and beautiful. To Frances, she’s a phony: “She made us all laugh a lot, but in the same way you might make someone eat something when they don’t want to fully eat it.” Frances’s acuity and obsessive need for authenticity recalls literature’s most famous phony decrier, Holden Caulfield. Sally Rooney’s narrator has some years on Salinger’s, however, and her insights come from a more detached voice.
  The emotional intelligence and precision of Conversations with Friends delivers a dynamic debut novel about the messy, overlapping relationships between four captivating characters.
  Frances and Bobbi are not only friends but former lovers, a relationship that Frances depicts with great depth of feeling and admiration: “Onstage she was the superior performer and I often glanced at her anxiously to remind myself what to do.” Although they’ve split up, the pair remain inseparable – until Frances’s affair with Nick drives a wedge between them.
  Insidiousness of affairs
  The insidiousness of affairs comes through in the disintegration of their once formidable friendship. Bobbi’s “tendency to get inside things and break them open” builds over the course of the summer, culminating in a tense holiday in Provence where the affair is a barely kept secret in a house of guests who seem determined to ignore it.
  The American author Molly McCloskey’s latest novel, When Light Is Like Water, published last month, charts similar terrain but from the perspective of an older woman looking back on an affair that ended her marriage. Both McCloskey and Rooney bring their respective affairs to life with sensual writing that seeks to highlight the complexity of desire. For Frances, it’s like “a key turning hard inside my body, turning so forcefully that I could do nothing to stop it”.
  Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz comes to mind thematically, and in the sharp, wry voice of its female narrator. There are similarities, as well, even in name, between Frances and Sara Baume’s protagonist Frankie in her recent novel A Line Made by Walking. Both are highly intelligent young women who step back from the world to observe its strangeness. They are modern-day seers, at once harsh and funny.
  Frances is brutal in her criticisms, with Rooney capturing the pitch-perfect tone of a certain type of college student whose self-righteousness is undercut with self-loathing. Frances calls the adult characters out on their assumptions and blase comments. She dissects their use of language, such as Melissa’s assertion that time is “so funny”. She notices the “tendency of people to emphasise the qualifications of refugees”.
  She is equally forthright on the affair itself: “During these discussions, Nick laughed at all my jokes. I told him I was easily seduced by people who laughed at my jokes and he said he was easily seduced by people who were smarter than he was.” As their relationship starts to break down, Frances knows she’s going to tell him “the most desperate thing I could possibly tell him, as if even in the depths of my indignity I craved something worse”.
  Communication, or lack thereof, is a major theme. Frances gets on well with her mother back home in the west of Ireland, but her relationship with her alcoholic father has been fraught since childhood. Away at college in Dublin, she flits between humouring and ignoring him, until that option is taken from her.
  The means through which Frances and Nick communicate is analysed throughout the book. Much of their correspondence is through email and instant messenger: “Our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke which nobody else could understand.”
  Fallen woman
  When the affair sours, Frances must deal with the consequences alone; the penance of the fallen woman. After an agonising meeting with Nick and Melissa at a book launch, Frances is unable to share her inner turmoil with Bobbi: “Upstairs, we got our coats and then walked home together talking about college, about Melissa’s new book, about things that didn’t really concern us.”
  The ultra-cool repartee between Frances and Nick may grate with some readers, and Rooney does her utmost at times to cast her narrator in an elitist, unsympathetic light: “My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was.”
  This is fearless writing that seeks to get at the truth of an affair and a singular young woman who decides, with very little soul-searching, to enter into one. The pain this causes is contrasted with the high points, and Rooney is excellent on sex: “After a while it felt so good that I couldn’t see clearly any more, and I wasn’t sure if I could pronounce whole sentences.”
  Later on, the physical thrills no longer suffice: “I ran my finger along his collarbone and said: I can’t remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily.”
  From the west of Ireland, Rooney has a master’s in creative writing from Trinity. At just 26, her work has appeared in Granta, The White Review, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Kevin Barry’s Stonecutter and the Winter Papers anthology.
  The “conversation” of the title recurs frequently throughout her accomplished debut. From the breakdown in communication between Bobbi and Frances, to Nick’s role as listener, to the fact that during the affair their eyes “seemed to be having a conversation of their own”, the disparity between what people feel and how they express it is expertly mined by Rooney.
  Without a doubt, Conversations with Friends will be a major talking point this summer.

• Slate
  http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2017/08/sally_rooney_s_conversations_with_friends_reviewed.html
  Word count: 1215

  Tell Me I’m Interesting
  Sally Rooney’s debut novel is a remarkably charming exploration of that very uncharming subject: the human ego.
  By Katy Waldman AUG. 3 2017 12:28 PM
  Sally Rooney is a planter of small surprises, sowing them like landmines. They relate to behavior and psychology—characters zigging when you expect them to zag, from passivity to sudden aggression and back. The four protagonists in her debut novel, Conversations With Friends, are as hyperconscious of social norms as the vers libre poets were hyperconscious of meter. Rooney, a 26-year-old writer from Ireland, takes a similar tack toward narrative conventions (the “other woman,” the love letter), teasing and subverting them with assertive charm. Rooney has crafted a novel called Conversations With Friends in which not a single quotation mark appears. In some fiction, the choice to present dialogue without signpost punctuation can feel affected; here, it underscores how talk is not just a part of the story but the very material of the book.
  As in Rachel Cusk’s Outline, reality for these characters is not experienced so much as told to others. When your world takes shape through dialogue, it means you cannot construct your experience alone. You are always participating in a system, even when you haven’t consented to all of its rules. 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.
  The book follows two students, a 21-year-old communist poet, Frances, and her best friend and former lover Bobbi, a devil-may-care radical. At a spoken word performance, they meet the older, more established artist Melissa and her actor husband Nick. The quartet sinks into a knotty, lusty, fretful dynamic. Frances begins sleeping with Nick, while Melissa grows enamored of the magnetic Bobbi, who returns her interest but is increasingly possessive of her onetime girlfriend Frances. The students savor their alienation yet covet the couple’s wealth, stability, and minor fame. Melissa and Nick are drawn to the girls’ youth, their edge.
  The four protagonists seem to live their entire lives inside quotation marks (another reason for Rooney not to deploy them selectively to indicate speech). The boundary between their self-presentation and their inner worlds feels as evanescent as the smoke they are constantly inhaling outside trendy Dublin bars. “We can sleep together if you want,” Frances tells Nick, “but you should know I’m only doing it ironically.” When Melissa first invites Frances and Bobbi to her home, Frances is “excited, ready for the challenge … already preparing compliments and certain facial expressions.” “I enjoyed playing the smiling girl who remembered things,” she confides. “Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality,’ but she said she meant it as a compliment.”
  Frances’ passivity—her seeming reluctance to own her emotions or commit to any notion of herself—leads her to abuse and betray her friends on the theory that she doesn’t actually have the power to do so. The roots of this complicated act of permission lie in self-loathing. “My face was plain,” Frances says, in one of many wretched “conversations” with her mirror. Meanwhile, she describes Nick as “luminously attractive,” Bobbi as “radiantly attractive,” and Melissa as perilously charismatic. “You think everyone you like is special,” Bobbi tells her friend, diagnosing the quality that makes Frances both a ready sidekick and a born narrator.
  Rooney herself is acute and sensitive—she may have pinned these fragile creatures to a board, but her eye is not cruel. Bobbi, Frances, Nick, and Melissa excel at endearing banter and hesitant, vulnerable disclosure. They are all thrillingly sharp, hyperverbal, as when Frances observes that “Bobbi and I discussed at length what Bobbi would wear to the dinner, under the guise of talking about what we should both wear.” Conversations With Friends unfolds in an Ireland plundered by the 2008 financial crisis, a country in which the old constants—Catholicism, a national poetry, alcoholism—appear fleetingly, as contrails and vestiges. Nick scornfully remarks that “no one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.” (A Yeats fan might reply that these characters aren’t winning any human intimacy awards either.) And Melissa considers religious occasions “comforting in a kind of sedative way.” “They’re communal,” she tells the young women. “There’s something nice about that for the neurotic individualist.” Her faith is as toothless and theoretical as Frances’ communism, just another collective vision that goes nowhere.
  Rooney has done the impossible in the Trump era: She’s rescued the ego as an object of fascination.
  If the old forms have lost their power, new ones have replaced them. Frances grows “infatuated with the house [Nick and Melissa] lived in.” “I secretly liked all the expensive utensils they had in their kitchen,” she continues, “the same way I liked to watch Nick press the coffee so slowly that a film of dark cream formed on its surface.” That high-pile sentence makes no effort to separate the allure of costly appliances from the sensuousness of the coffee and the dark cream. Wealth, Frances learns, facilitates pleasure. And her relationship with Melissa’s husband introduces her to something else, too, an emotional power that shimmers and inverts with every line of banter. “You’re very easy to please,” Nick tells Frances at one point. She shivs him back: “Not really … I just know you like it when I lie there telling you how great you are.” If the enjoyment of luxury goods is a kind of romance, then romance itself is a commercial transaction, advantage changing hands.
  Rooney has done the impossible in the Trump era: She’s rescued the ego as an object of fascination. Frances craves approval from the successful writer Melissa and consoles herself, in low moments, by remembering how smart she is. “I had no achievements or possessions that proved I was a serious person,” she reflects; therefore, she is eternally out to impress onlookers, to project interestingness. Rooney casts this youthful thirst for praise and attention as a kind of exploration of what it means to be an individual—to be a self worth attending to—but she also gives it a mirror image. Frances mortifies her ego operatically, cutting holes in her flesh, starving her body, ignoring her terrible menstrual pain. “You suffer,” Bobbi observes in her sphinxlike way, to which Frances replies, wryly, “Everyone suffers.”
  There must be a middle ground between narcissism and such abnegation, between wallowing and denial, another posture Frances tries on. “I just don’t have feelings concerning whether you fuck your wife or not,” she insists to Nick. “It’s not an emotive topic for me.” To frame the cardinal facts of your life as mere “topics” for conversation is to remove them safely to the realm of the notional, the abstract. It is to defend your emotions behind a waterfall of smart-sounding words. Even if Frances won’t admit to anything, Rooney reveals a young woman painfully coming to terms with the beliefs, desires, and feelings that belong irrevocably to her. Conversations With Friends sparkles with controlled rhetoric. But it ends up emphasizing the truths exploding in the silences.

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