Conversations With Friends is published by Faber. Her hyperarticulate characters may fail to communicate their fragile selves, but Rooney does it for them in a voice distinctively her own.Ĭlaire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know is published by Faber. Though herself young – she was born in 1991 – she has already been shortlisted for this year’s Sunday Times EFG short story award. She is alert to the invisible bars imprisoning the apparently free. Rooney writes so well of the condition of being a young, gifted but self-destructive woman, both the mentality and physicality of it. On reading the short story that Frances has written about Bobbi, Bobbi says she “learned more about feelings in the last twenty minutes than in the last four years”. 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. Even Frances finds herself caught off guard when Rachel is placed in her arms. She is the only person for whom Nick can freely express emotion. Another wild card is the baby, Nick’s niece Rachel, who makes a brief but lovely appearance. It will not be suppressed, and instead flares up in outbreaks of sexual desire and acts of self-harm. 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. “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”. The characters are keen to label themselves. 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. There are no arresting images, no poetic flights. 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. 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. Frances explains that she “wanted to destroy capitalism and that considered masculinity personally oppressive”. That’s like claiming not to have thoughts.”Ĭonversation in the world of the novel is – like the spoken word poetry, which unfortunately isn’t depicted – a performance art, often a gladiatorial one.
But as Bobbi points out: “I don’t think ‘unemotional’ is a quality someone can have. She repeatedly declares herself to be emotionally cold, despite evidence to the contrary. Her formidable intellect prompts her to adopt an ironic position towards everything – including herself. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observerįrances is an unusually contradictory creation, so clever and yet so blind. When she finally blurts out that she loves Nick, he tells her she’s “being unbelievably dramatic”.
“It’s not an emotive topic for me.” The self-harm she perpetrates on her thin young body reveals otherwise. “I just don’t have feelings concerning whether you fuck your wife or not,” she lies to Nick. Frances is crippled by the pressure to perpetually “act unfazed”, to “affect an ironic tone” in situations that demand serious emotional engagement. Rather, the women have repressed themselves: they are too guarded to articulate their vulnerabilities. The apparatus of church and state haven’t repressed these people. 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. In Conversations With Friends, Frances’s mother describes it as “a real shame” when the girls break up. In earlier Irish fiction, the narrative would have focused on the social tensions surrounding a gay relationship – and a female one at that. Her characters work in the arts and denounce the evils of capitalism while living off inherited wealth. Rooney sets her story in the post-crash era, among a Dublin elite.
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