They just change format, so that a discussion begun in person continues through texts or e-mails or, as in the following dialogue, instant messages:īobbi: if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenonīobbi: and try to understand it as a social value systemīobbi: it’s both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishnessīobbi: which dictates the whole logic of inequalityīobbi: and yet also it’s subservient and facilitatoryīobbi: i.e. Observations, theories, and quips about the world fly between the friends like so many shuttlecocks in a conversation that never ends, because conversations, in our world of screens, don’t have to.
As its title promises, Rooney’s book glitters with talk, much of it between Frances, the novel’s narrator, and Bobbi, her best friend, two Trinity students supremely gifted in the collegiate sport of competitive banter. Rooney turns out to be as intelligent and agile a novelist as she apparently was a debater, and for many of the same reasons. There are prizes for fiction, it’s true, but writing it is a private performance: you judge yourself first on your own stage, by your own rules.
Rooney is now twenty-six and, after earning a master’s in American literature and publishing a few short stories, has just come out with her first novel, “ Conversations with Friends” (Hogarth). “Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren’t any prizes,” she wrote. Yet she was also disturbed by her talent for advocating morally dubious positions, like capitalism’s benefits for the poor, or “things oppressed people should do about their oppression.” She quit after winning the championship. What Rooney loved about debating was entering a state of “flow,” that magical mental hum when disparate facts and ideas effortlessly assembled themselves in her mind and poured from her mouth as argument. 1 debater on the Continent, but she wrote about her feats the way a recovering alcoholic might look back on a time of sotted carousing, at once proud of her exploits and appalled by the person she had been while having them.
A couple of years earlier, as a student at Trinity College, Dublin, Rooney had risen through the ranks of the European circuit to become the No. In 2015, The Dublin Review ran a goodbye-to-all-that essay by Sally Rooney, a young Irish writer, about her brief career as a university debater. Photograph by Ruby Wallis for The New Yorker Rooney, twenty-six, is a writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style.
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