the times | Saturday April 30 2022 saturday review 5
inadvertently patronising in a well mean-
ing, scatty, self-absorbed sort of way. Sasha
Lane is the bumptious, chatty Bobbi.
Normal People was famous for its ex-
tended sex scenes. In the second episode of
the series there’s one that lasts nine and a
half minutes, or about a third of the epi-
sode. Critics applauded the truthfulness:
Connell fumbling about for a condom,
Marianne briefly getting her bra stuck on
her head and so on. The sex in Conversa-
tions with Friends is briefer, less explicit
and more conventionally shot; the tradi-
tional abstract Hollywood tangle of limbs
and panting faces.
For, as Abrahamson says, Conversations
with Friends is not primarily a romance.
“The coming-of-age aspect of the novel
is the spine.” The drama derives from
Frances’s entry into the adult world. The
narrative question at the heart of the
story is not “will they, won’t they”, but will
Frances survive her first painful contact
with the real world? Although love is uni-
versal, the torments and social agonies of
late adolescence are less immediately re-
latable to adults who have passed through
it and discovered the real horrors of
grown-up life.
That Conversations with Friends makes
it gripping is down to Oliver’s virtuosically
awkward performance as Frances, con-
torting her face almost to the limit of
dramatic believability. She is all frowns,
fidgeting hands, shrugging, apologetic
nodding and failed attempts at eye con-
tact. She brilliantly evokes the way that
when you’re young and shy, every attempt
to make public conversation feels like a
doomed and excruciating venture from
the first word.
In an early dinner party scene she
adopts an all too relatable expression of
silent personal trauma when her halting
syllable-at-a-time attempt to contribute
to a conversation about race is swept away
by a rush of confident chatter from Bobbi
and Melissa.
Few directors can have thought as much
about the power of awkward silences as
Abrahamson. He says he agonised over
using awkward pauses to create the “cor-rect density” in the film “so that there
was enough space, but that space would
be charged”. The experience of Normal
People showed him that there was an
audience for “space and ambiguity” and
that he did not need to worry about “story
points being small”. He knew he had to
get the dinner party scenes right because
the drama is as much in “the truthfulness
of how it feels to be 21” as it is in the plot.
Abrahamson hasn’t yet read Rooney’s
third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are
Yo u. He says that to have been reading it
while involved in filming Conversations
with Friends “would have been too much”.
Will he be up for filming a third Rooney se-
ries? He equivocates diplomatically.
“I’ve been in that world for a long time,”
he says. And although he “thoroughly en-
joyed it” and “got a tremendous amount
out of it”, there are other projects that have
been shelved. He trails off and says: “I can
absolutely imagine doing another at some
point in the future.”
If Conversations with Friends sparks
even a fraction of the Normal People
frenzy, and we’re all reading articles about
Alwyn’s beard in a few weeks, he may have
no choice.Now read the books: Times critics on Sally Rooney
ENDA BOWE/BBC; DAVID M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGESConversations
with Friends,
2017
Reviewed by
Kate Saunders
A 21st-century
Bonjour
Tristesse,
transferred to modern
Dublin. Frances, the 21-year-
old narrator, is a student by
day and a performance
poet by night, alongside her
best friend Bobbi, who used
to be her girlfriend. Melissa
is a journalist in her
early thirties, married to
Nick, an actor. She is writing
an article about Frances and
Bobbi, and draws the two
girls into her glamorous
orbit. At first Frances feels
awkward, and increasinglyaware of the sexual current
between Melissa and Bobbi.
And she is confused by the
signals sent out by
handsome Nick; how can he
be coming on to her, when
he claims to be happily
married? Rooney’s writing is
witty and assured.Normal
People, 2018
Reviewed by
James
Marriott
The book
starts in a
provincial Irish
sixth form. Connell is poor
but popular and Marianne
is wealthy but socially
outcast. Where Marianne
is an individualist, unableto fit herself to others’
expectations, Connell
finds that “his personality
seemed like something
external to himself,
managed by the opinions of
others, rather than anything
he individually did or
produced”. This is the
principal theme. Should you
strive to fit in, to be a
“normal person”?Beautiful
World, Where
Are You, 2021
Reviewed by
James
Marriott
Millennials
in their late
twenties and early thirties,
are working out how to liveseriously in a society that
seems to despise beautiful
things, to loathe serious
thought and to overlook the
countless casual cruelties
necessary to its ordinary
functioning. Eileen’s tragedy
is the most characteristic of
her generation. Highly
educated, sensitive and
lonely, she is full of hopeless
dreams of love and security,
but condemned to pay three
quarters of her tiny salary
from her job working at a
literary magazine to rent a
squalid Dublin flat. A series
of essayistic emails evolve a
world view that is socialist,
pessimistic and strikingly
old-fashioned, but for all its
structural oddness, this is
Rooney’s best novel.It’s more complex
than Normal People
and rewards thought
and re-reading
N P R J M T s pB W A R J M M it ti dC w 2 R K A B Tt fdtConversations with
Friends is on BBC3 and
iPlayer from May 15chain reaction Top:
Sasha Lane, Joe Alwyn,
Alison Oliver and
Jemima Kirke in
Conversations with
Friends. Right: Alwyn
and Oliver. Above: Daisy
Edgar-Jones and Paul
Mescal in Normal People