Sally Rooney Has Written a Debut About People Behaving Badly

Twenty-six-year-old Sally Rooney is really good at talking. At the age of 22, she was so good that she became the number one competitive debater in Europe. But what really makes someone a great conversationalist has less to do with their ability to talk than it does their capacity to listen and observe. A native of County Mayo who now calls Dublin home, Sally Rooney is curious about people; how they live, how they justify their behaviour and, especially, how they love.

Her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, dwells on all of these themes, but gets particularly forensic in the way it explores the latter point. A multilayered twist on an adultery novel, Rooney allows dialogue to be the driving force of her story and displays the same blend of humour and psychological curiosity that animates classics such as Woody Allen's Annie Hall; invested as much in what characters struggle to vocalise as what they find themselves able to say.

The book focuses on 21-year-old Frances, a student and poet, alongside her ex-girlfriend-turned-best-friend Bobbi, a beautiful but abrasive History and Politics undergraduate. The girls are deeply enmeshed in each other's lives, spending their days discussing everything from sexuality and gender roles to capitalism and the Iraq war. Both are budding communists (though Bobbi does not apply her "otherwise rigorous anti-establishment principles" to her relationship with her father, who treats her to fancy dinners during her parents' acrimonious divorce proceedings). After meeting Melissa, a glamorous older writer, at one of their poetry performances, Frances and Bobbi are drawn into her orbit.

For Frances, private property is a cultural evil, so it's especially disconcerting to her when she begins coveting aspects of Melissa's life – her tastefully decorated house and her handsome actor husband, Nick. Even more disconcerting is the way that Nick returns Frances's attraction.

But Rooney disrupts established narrative tropes to let this romance between an older man and a younger woman play out in a way that's fresh. The relationships in Conversations with Friends refuse neatness, they slip past definitive labels; "boyfriend" would not adequately describe the bond that ties Nick to Frances, and friendship is not quite a roomy enough word to house the electric connection she shares with Bobbi. Rooney tells me that she is interested in capturing dynamics that "don't seem to fit into any readily available categories".

Together, we try to summarise the connections between characters in the book, but they are so layered and complex that we inevitably fall short. "It's not until I got to the end that I was able to understand exactly what it is these people meant to each other," says Rooney, "and I think that's partly a function of us not necessarily having contemporary vocabulary to talk about contemporary relationships." If we don't have the vocabulary to describe new or alternative relationship forms, Rooney considers, "then how can we even inhabit them conceptually?"

As a narrator, Frances sits somewhere between a J.D. Salinger character and the kind of hyper-analytical observer-narrator found in books by Ben Lerner or Tao Lin. The gaps that form between thought and speech become canyons under Frances's watch; her process of converting feelings into words is about as accurate as Google Translate. It's this kind of self-aware, acerbic and, at times, anxiety-ridden voice that will resonate with readers Rooney's age. People who are used to constructing palatable versions of themselves online, which often gloss over their more deeply felt emotions. Though none of the characters seem to use social media, it hangs over the novel.

Communication, its triumphs and its failures, sits at the core of Conversations with Friends. Soon after they meet her, Melissa sends Bobbi and Frances some photos from an evening they shared together. Frances muses (in a line that immediately brings Instagram to mind) that "the dinner party depicted in the photographs bore only an oblique relationship to the one we had actually attended". Later on, as her friendship with Nick is beginning to take on a new shape, Frances worries about seeing him IRL because she's concerned she won't be able to be as "droll and indifferent" as she seems over email.

Rooney is so animated and at home discussing her characters that I forget we're talking about works of fiction. The four leads are so well drawn that it feels like we're chatting about mutual friends. Rooney says it's been "quite disorientating" to see that some people's responses to the book seem to hover around the question of "do I like these people or not?"

"I didn't even think about that," she tells me, "all I wanted was: are they plausible, are they real? I didn't stop and think, 'Are they nice?'

"When these characters behave badly, which they almost always do, they still do it in such a way that I can empathise with the rationale that they're providing themselves with." She sees Nick and Frances as being motivated by wanting to feel close to other human beings, a pretty universal impulse.

"Obviously they go about that in ways that can sometimes be hurtful, but I think: don't we all?"

Sally Rooney's 'Conversations With Friends' is available now.

@KLoftusOBrien

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