What would the novel do without adultery? Invent it, one supposes. Even these days, when adultery might seem easier than ever—there are specialized dating websites and discussion forums at your disposal—it still retains its fascination for the storyteller. In part, this is because infidelity immediately generates a story, pulling the reader into the gap between reality and presentation, what you want and what you want to want. Adultery places duty and desire at the center of its story; it creates an explosive secret; and its protagonists, sometimes even a wronged spouse, receive from us a curious mix of sympathy and disgust.
Everyone in Conversations with Friends, a remarkable first novel from the Irish writer Sally Rooney, is involved in infidelities of various kinds. College students Bobbi and Frances, ex-girlfriends turned best friends, perform live poetry readings. (Frances writes the poetry, but as she tells it, Bobbi is the performing talent.) This brings them into the orbit of Melissa, a prominent local writer. Melissa invites them to dinner; Bobbi is smitten with Melissa; at dinner they are introduced to Nick, Melissa’s depressive husband, an actor who sits solidly in the mediocre space between failure and success. It’s this combination of uneasy and unstable relationships that drives the story.
Some of the infidelities are small: pursuing and flaunting a new friendship, fictionalizing an episode of somebody else’s life. Some are medium-sized: accidentally-on-purpose giving away a painful secret. And some are big: Nick and Frances begin an email correspondence and then, eventually, an affair.
At this point a certain kind of reader is already rolling her eyes. The washed-up married man and the promising young girl is one of the most well-worn of stories. But Conversations with Friends is narrated by Frances and the story is more concerned with her than with Nick. What kind of a woman is drawn into this situation?
One who can’t admit she wants anything is one answer. As everyone in the story seems to recognize, Frances is a talented writer and intensely intellectual. She nourishes deep attachments to others but maintains a careful distance. Her parents are divorced and her father is an alcoholic whom Frances, with only apparent indifference, watches spiral deeper into addiction. She herself is mysteriously ill, racked with sudden and inexplicable pains that she does her best to ignore. Despite all of these ties to the world, however, Frances cultivates within herself a deep emptiness. If she could be nothing, she would. Or so she thinks.
Frances is a particular kind of youthful person: an intelligent, wary woman who counts on her intelligence and her foresight to protect herself from feeling. Instead, she discovers that her careful detachment does not save her from feeling real love and real loss. Over the course of the story, Frances loses the people close to her. The mysterious pain is endometriosis, a lifelong illness that may mean she has lost the ability to have children before knowing if she even wants them.
So while Frances’s affair with Nick is one of the emotional threads of the novel—and certainly an important one—it’s hardly the only one. There’s her writing, her health, and her father. But the real center of Frances’s emotional life is Bobbi. It’s the false start of Bobbi’s own attraction to Melissa that pushes Frances toward Nick in the first place, and it’s her conversations with Bobbi that Frances returns to and seeks guidance from throughout the book.
Frances grew up with the latest technology at her disposal and so has always had the ability to record and revisit herself. Thanks to this, she is always watching herself in the mirror, waiting for the future to have happened so that she can wash her hands of it. Meanwhile, her art is aggressively ephemeral: She can’t bear to print any of her poems and will perform them for, at most, six months.
Frances treats her life as a text, something she can step back from and interpret as she will. She is constantly “reading” her past, trying to understand her mistakes in speaking, watching videos and looking at pictures to better know herself or others.
In every practical sense, Frances is adrift—without money or much of a job, and, eventually, without friends—but she’s always in control, or trying to be. There’s a way to get through this and not be touched at all. When possible, she denies feeling, escaping into intellectual abstraction. “I always had negative feelings about authority figures . . . but really only when I met you did I formulate the feelings into beliefs,” she writes to Bobbi—instead of a simple “I miss you.” Her intellectual interests are real—Frances is a Communist and many of her conversations are political—but they’re also a shield. That Frances’s desire to be numb to feeling and consequence is also a deep depression escapes her, though not the reader.
When Frances begins her affair with Nick, she’s giving herself half of something to prove she doesn’t want it, though she doesn’t realize this until it’s too late. It’s safe, or so she thinks, until it turns out she loves and needs somebody she’ll never have. To this dilemma, openness, whatever its virtues, isn’t a solution: Nick and Frances attempt to be open with Melissa and Bobbi, but this collapses under needs that Frances can’t help but have. She comes to the humiliating realization that she longs for love as much as any other human being.
“I was like an empty cup,” Frances says after the end of her affair, a cup that “Nick had emptied out, and now I had to look at what had spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value and my pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t.” The great burden Frances must face is not her loves for Nick or Bobbi, which can never quite be what she requires, but instead her normality: that she has a body, emotional needs; that these are both worth taking seriously and yet, at the same time, not special and not in her control.
Recognizing the inescapability and indeed banality of one’s own desires, failings, needs—one place to do this is religion, where one’s everyday failings can be both made smaller and transfigured. Frances begins to read the Bible and even goes to church, where she prays and collapses out of pain. Before she faints, she experiences a vision, seeing herself as part of a community of others:
Rooney, carefully, doesn’t overplay this moment. Frances is changed, slightly. She seeks forgiveness and strives to be a better person, but stops short of conversion. “A certain peace had come to me,” she reflects, “and I wondered if it was God’s doing after all. Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.”
A love affair is a free fall: It stops, but it doesn’t resolve. Frances ends the book better off in some ways and not in others; problems of love and of the body cannot be solved, only lived. She recognizes that she’ll suffer, that she’ll love someone she can’t really have, and that these will simply stay true. She remains her wary self, willing to accept she might be such a ridiculous thing as a human being, not quite willing to swallow such a ridiculous thing as God.
There’s another relationship that doesn’t have a true resolution—friendship, that cautious proceeding of two parallel lines. Where adultery opposes love and duty, friendship attempts a fusion. After her experience in the church, it’s Bobbi that Frances reaches out to and Bobbi who once again rises to friendship’s peculiar demands. Love can be disappointing, out of reach, and incomplete. A friendship can be so intimate as to be a comfort and an irritation. As ordinary and unspecial as our loves are, their joys and satisfactions and frustrations nonetheless are our lives and important for that reason. No matter how undignified it can be to be a human being, it’s the love and connections between us that create our stories. As Frances comes to realize, it’s not you; it’s the others.
