![]() But a few times the spell is broken, and it’s usually because Rooney’s characters’ extreme politeness and eminent reasonability leap off the page, as glaring as a typo. A larger reason for the novel’s appeal is simply Frances’s youth and naïveté, her natural role as an object of sympathy, as well as the sense that we’re witnessing exactly what it feels like to be naïve in 2017. Partly this is a by-product of Rooney’s control of tone and her disciplined use of plain language even when she’s getting off her most charming lines. Rooney can make the stakes seem high even when they’re obviously low, and she does so without resorting to Ferrante’s melodramatic swoops or Knausgaard’s existential freakouts. Somehow the entire novel manages to remain within the neutral territory of its title. Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes, and it’s hard to imagine Conversations With Friends appearing without Elena Ferrante’s 'Neapolitan Tetralogy' and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series as immediate antecedents. But it ends up emphasizing the truths exploding in the silences. Conversations With Friends sparkles with controlled rhetoric. Rooney reveals a young woman painfully coming to terms with the beliefs, desires, and feelings that belong irrevocably to her. Rooney has done the impossible in the Trump era: She’s rescued the ego as an object of fascination. They are all thrillingly sharp, hyperverbal. Bobbi, Frances, Nick, and Melissa excel at endearing banter and hesitant, vulnerable disclosure. Rooney herself is acute and sensitive-she may have pinned these fragile creatures to a board, but her eye is not cruel. 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. They relate to behavior and psychology-characters zigging when you expect them to zag, from passivity to sudden aggression and back. Sally Rooney is a planter of small surprises, sowing them like landmines. 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. But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. ![]() 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. one wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. ![]() 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. As its title promises, Rooney’s book glitters with talk. Rooney turns out to be as intelligent and agile a novelist as she apparently was a debater, and for many of the same reasons.
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