Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Faber, 2017 (paperback 2018)

Why?

I'd never actually read Sally Rooney, although, like many, I'd been gripped by the screen adaptation of Normal People during lockdown. I thought it was time to discover what all the fuss was about.

Enjoyment factor

I couldn't have cared less about the characters, whom I found entirely uninteresting and unremarkable. It's difficult to become absorbed in a novel when you're indifferent to the people inhabiting it.

It left me thinking ...

Initially, I wondered whether I simply couldn't relate to the characters because of their age and stage of life. But surely strong fiction should transcend such considerations. Alan Hollinghurst's novels frequently begin with adolescent characters, as do many of Evelyn Waugh's, for that matter. And, to draw a more direct comparison, I find the writing of contemporary Irish novelist Chloe Michelle Howarth utterly compelling, particularly her most recent novel, Heap Earth Upon It. Not to mention the fact that I'd been riveted by the screen adaptation of Rooney's own Normal People.

I guess the problem isn't the age or life stage of the characters, but rather a lack of universality. Normal People explores a clearly defined and profoundly relatable theme: the enduring, almost unbreakable bond formed between two people in adolescence, and the way it shapes their subsequent lives. Conversations with Friends, by contrast, left me struggling to identify what it was really about.

Perhaps that's the difference between fiction that observes human relationships and fiction that illuminates something fundamental about the human condition. For me, Conversations with Friends never quite managed that.