To read Sally Rooney is to visit a realm of casual entanglements, bookish occupations, and abstruse debates about microaggressions and Marx. To adapt her novels for the screen is to pursue the kernel of truth beneath these seemingly trivial goings-on. Done well, as Hulu’s brilliant Normal People (2020) illustrated, a Rooney-inspired series can soar on the wings of its characters’ irrepressible youth. Executed poorly, as in the case of the streaming service’s disastrous new Conversations With Friends, such a production can sink like a stone hurled into the Irish Sea.
Conversations With Friends begins in Rooney’s beloved Dublin, where former lovers Frances (Alison Oliver) and Bobbi (Sasha Lane) are finishing their last-but-one year at university. A poverty-wage intern at a literary agency, Frances worries that her “unqualified” opinions about manuscripts are a poor “test of cultural excellence.” Bobbi, meanwhile, teaches English on a volunteer basis and possesses not a shred of self-doubt, so intense is her swaggering amour propre. Together, the two women perform spoken-word duets on such subjects as female empowerment and the transgressions of the diamond industry. When the well-known photographer Melissa Baines (Jemima Kirke) sees and likes their show, a rapport that comes to include Melissa’s actor husband, Nick (Joe Alwyn), is swiftly established.
Like Rooney’s other novels, the source text for Hulu’s latest probes the nuances of interpersonal connection in an age of evolving ethical and relational norms. Falling into her new acquaintances’ orbit, Frances develops feelings for Nick that more than rival Bobbi’s crush on Melissa. When the former pairing turns overtly sexual, the narrative’s concern is with the effect on Frances and Bobbi’s friendship as much as with the perils of adultery per se. On the page, this material is often enthralling, a beautifully written critique of a generation torn between bohemian radicalism and the pleasures of domesticity. On the screen, however, Rooney’s story lines work only to the extent that her fundamentally flawed characters can be rendered likable. Normal People, one of the best television programs of the last decade, cleared this hurdle with room to spare. Conversations With Friends clips its feet on the bar, stumbles, and launches headlong over the nearest cliff.
For starters, there is the obstacle of the protagonists’ infantile politics. Frances, a self-proclaimed communist, frets about power dynamics but can’t bring herself to “do anything about it, at all.” Bobbi is similarly fanatical on race and gender issues, dismissing Nick as “some cis-het married guy” and lamenting the “whiteness” of Ireland’s capital. As sometimes happens when psychological novels receive the small-screen treatment, the show’s writers and directors have found no substitute for the interior narration with which Rooney rounds out such foibles and makes them palatable. To the extent that skillful acting is meant to do the trick, Hulu’s series is lamentably inadequate. A performer of limited emotional range, Oliver conveys little of what Frances is thinking and feeling at any given moment. Lane, by contrast, plays Bobbi so aggressively that one wonders if she means the character to be despised.
Indeed, the show’s most perplexing defect may be the utter unbelievability of the two leads’ long-standing relationship. An incorrigible faultfinder and nag, Bobbi criticizes Frances for her natural shyness (“It’s suspicious”), for keeping mum about her affair with Nick, for internalizing various homophobic ideas, and for apologizing badly when confronted with these faults. Surprisingly, given the series’s reliance on intimate human drama, none of its couples share particularly strong chemistry. Frances and Bobbi, however, take last place. It is entirely unclear why our heroine tolerates her bellyaching companion, much less why she considers the obnoxious scold to be the “center” of her life.
As for the show’s main romantic connection, it is, if less baffling, at least as poorly defined. Strapped with such intense social anxiety that they can barely compliment each other without backtracking, Frances and Nick mumble and bumble their way through a liaison, painfully unable to say what they want and why. Though the series’s uber-liberal creators would likely recoil from this suggestion, the Frances-Nick failing has consequences that go beyond mere imprecision. In Normal People’s case — as in the case of Rooney’s third, inevitably TV-bound novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You — audiences follow unattached young adults as they limp toward traditional partnerships. The difficulties may be legion, but the desired conclusions are never in doubt. Conversations With Friends, by contrast, places the viewer in the uncomfortable position of not knowing which outcome to cheer. Such is the power of a well-told story that we might have been made to support Frances and Nick’s clearly immoral union, whatever our scruples. Yet there’s no reason to do so if the pair themselves barely understand why they’re together and have no idea what they’re chasing.
The result of these many confusions is a show that strives toward little and speaks in a whisper as it goes. Forget emotional subtlety. Conversations With Friends is like an equation from which the figures have been removed. One can puzzle over it for a while if one likes, but there is, in the end, no answer.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
