Authors Electric

When I finished reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, I thought that is the saddest novel ever . When I re-read it some years later, I felt the same. Now Sally Rooney has updated my list: Conversations with Friends is up there with Tess, the saddest tale - though not ‘told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Rooney’s tale signifies her protagonist Frances is not an idiot – but she is a woman without a ‘map’, wandering in a fog of relationships and meanings. Frances and ex-partner-now-best-friend Bobbi are students and performance poets. Early on, we learn that Frances sits in bed, writing work to perform at gigs alongside Bobbi, and it’s at a gig that the tragedy begins to play out. Here we are, back at Trinity College Dublin, and indeed Rooney even introduces us to a cameo of one of the two main characters of her second book Normal People , set partly at Trinity College, about two thirds through the story. Their ‘friend Marianne’. Though i...