At the convent high school where they met, Bobbi was a cigarette-smoking contrarian with a pierced nose who freaked out her square classmates and pissed off her teachers. To be “anti love,” as Frances declares herself, is as ideologically satisfying as it is emotionally untenable, a weak position that Bobbi pounces on with startling pitilessness.įrances’s disavowal of love strikes a poignant note, too, for Bobbi was her girlfriend before she became her friend. Capitalism is to Rooney’s young women what Catholicism was to Joyce’s young men, a rotten national faith to contend with, though how exactly to resist capitalism, when it has sunk its teeth so deep into the human condition, remains an open question. Cranly and Dedalus came of age in an Ireland riven by religious strife, Bobbi and Frances in an Ireland gutted by the 2008 financial collapse. This exchange, so rigorously serious as to be comic, calls to mind another pair of brilliant Dublin students, Cranly and Stephen Dedalus, who stroll around in “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” arguing over the Eucharist and apostasy. Me: but I mean, I get that, I’m anti love as suchīobbi: you have to do more than say you’re anti things. Me: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect Me: capitalism harnesses “love” for profit
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mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motiveīobbi: which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one levelīobbi: and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free 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). Photograph by Ruby Wallis for The New Yorker Rooney, twenty-six, is a writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style. “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.