Tina Berning, Illustration for the New York Times, 2016
(December 14, 2019) I liked Conversations With Friends so much I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this, Sally Rooney’s latest book. As with the other, I mowed it down pretty quickly. There is just something so engaging about her people -- which are the same people as before, really, just in slightly different circumstances, and this is third-person narration. However, we’ve got the bright, quirky, naive girl who is smitten with the adorable but indecisive man who is equally smitten but can’t commit. It’s the weirdest love-story situation in the history of love-story situations, but I have enjoyed it twice now because of Rooney’s.... way.
Sometimes while reading it (them) I wonder if I’m charmed mostly by the lack of quotation marks, which sometimes makes it unclear exactly what people are saying aloud and what they are thinking to themselves or simply doing in the third-person narration. You can reread a passage and take a slightly different interpretation sometimes for the lack of quotation marks.
This is a darker version of the first relationship; there are some wrenching motivations behind some of the behaviours (whereas in Conversations With Friends it was all pure quirk and naiveté).
I know that these people and these relationships have existed in real life because Rooney is reconjuring a strong experience like Van Gogh painted sunflowers.
For all the reasons I liked Conversations With Friends, same here.
