![]() ![]() And for Schwartz, it paid off: “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.” The casts of both novels flirt with the ‘grown-up world’ while also being semi-repulsed and frightened by it Reviewing the first novel in the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz admitted to “the curious feeling that Rooney wasn’t always sure where she was going but that she trusted herself to find out”. That tightrope act has been picked up by critics. Despite the bracing directness of her work, she seems drawn to equivocation, to teasing out the paradoxes that rigid views and actions can create. ![]() Rooney and I talk for some time about the attention that particular plot point has garnered, and I am delighted to report that she endorses my interpretation, also known as the fence-sitting position: “I don’t think I was strongly in either camp,” she says. In conversations with other readers, I have discovered the novel provokes a huge debate, much of it concerned with whether it has a happy or disastrous ending concerning Frances’s romantic life and her affair with the older married actor Nick. ![]() Photograph: AlamyĬonversations with Friends is the tale of young Dubliners Frances and Bobbi and their friendship (and more) with an older couple. Small-town life Castlebar, County Mayo, where Rooney was born and grew up. ![]()
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