Book Review: Conversation with Friends
Another book from the rising queen of Contemporary, Sally Rooney, that's failed to impress.
I do not understand the hype. This is the second book I’ve read of Sally Rooney and how I feel about it is almost consistent with how I felt about Normal People: ordinary, boring. Maybe it was because of Rooney’s writing style, or of the characters, or both (after all, the writing was the lens of the main character, Frances), but there is something about this book that made it listless and disengaging. I felt disinterred and distant, like I was only watching the characters do their things but stayed at arm length instead of actively participating in the scene. The writing was particularly very introspective and provided little description of the outside world, which made it even harder to build that imaginary setting in my head and put myself in it.
Another big issue for me was its cast, which I found to be very unlikeable. Now, characters with bad traits are not rare in literature – in most cases, they set the premise for developments in the characters and the plot – but the cast in Conversations with Friends were bad AND had little character development as the story went on (and this is despite it being a character-driven book). Frances, our main female characters whose perspective we read from, started off as narcissistic and remained narcissistic till it ended. The only time I counted as development in Frances’ character was when she emailed Bobbi to apologize, but even then, there was no resolution to her situation with Bobbi and her book. The same went for Nick, Frances’ love affair: he was malleable, pathetic and emotionally indecisive; by the end of the story I was still not clear how emotionally invested he was to either his affair with Frances or his marriage to Melissa. I couldn’t settle on how exactly to think of Melissa – probably pretentious, narcissistic and mean if I really had to force some out (the three adjectives probably apply to all characters in the book tbh) – but she was probably also the contender for “Most dislikeable character” along with Frances. Bobbi was a better character in that she had a more complex personality that did undergo certain development, but still, she felt distant. In most fictions, I would enjoy seeing people making bad choices and not being always perfect because it shows that fictional characters were humans and to that I could relate. But in Conversations with Friends, I felt disinterested and couldn’t relate to any of the characters at all.
Overall, would NOT recommend. I was tempted to pick up Rooney’s latest book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, after this, but seeing how monotonous her characters and storytelling were after having read Normal People and Conversation with Friends, I decided against it. Time is limited and there’re far better books from much better authors to read.