‘Opening a door on a misty landscape’

How the first chapter of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends constructs the conceit of the text

Note: This analytical close reading was originally written in 2021 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for my Undergraduate Diploma in English Literature: Literature Past and Present at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. It is reproduced here in full to share my thoughts and analysis with the general public.

Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends is a novel that begins the way it means to go on, but does so in a deceptively subtle way given the short length of the first chapter and the surface-level appraisal that could be made concerning its narrative substance (or lack thereof). This is because it is primarily focused on using form to set expectations on how the reader is going to consume the narrative, determining register and cultivating the narrator’s sense of alienation, among her other relationships to other characters. Iris Murdoch stated that, “Starting a novel is like opening a door on a misty landscape; you can see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing” — for Rooney, this mist is cleared in small motions across the 31 chapters of the novel through mechanisms such as direct and indirect discourse, lack of dialogue tags, and a curious blend of observation, denotation, connotation, and deduction on the part of Frances that reads almost as a spiritual successor to the affect of early 20th century stream-of-consciousness techniques. The whole novel takes place as a conversation between third parties, Frances, and the reader themselves, blending interpretation, reporting, and observation, making it a tale all about the said and the unsaid, as well as the filtered and the unfiltered.

The emotional and physical environment constructed by the novel’s opening, its affect, must necessarily be discussed first with relation to form. The very first paragraph introduces the reader to one of the novel’s chief structural conceits — indirect discourse. It is very much in the vein of recounting words told to the listener by a conversation partner. For example, “Melissa told us we were welcome to come back to her house for a drink.” This reportage aspect actually encapsulates three modalities of conversation within this simple expressive choice, which is an opportunity to trouble the title of the book itself. First, the indirect discourse brings the characters into conversation with themselves in the context of the events being related, the discussions actually taking place. Second, it brings the yet-to-be-named Frances into a conversation with her past self, recounting things she witnessed and thoughts she had and how those thoughts related to actions she was engaging in. The passage of time is made clear on p.3 when she says, “I was always thinking about rich people then” (Rooney, 2017). This look into the past also links with the final mode of conversation, between Frances and the reader. As Frances reports the happenings and her thoughts, speaking in the first person, a certain intimacy is cultivated between her as the narrator and the reader as the receiver of information and emotion. In this sense, the very title of the text, “Conversations with Friends”, plays into the discursive form chosen and expands the scope of friendship beyond the simple narrated events, thus questioning the limitations of the events reported in a bound novel itself — conversations that no longer live only in the novel after being transmitted to the reader, who, in that sense of intimacy cultivated by indirect discourse, becomes a kind of “friend” as well. In this way, the novel’s opening already sets expectations and denotes the hallmarks, the “smell of the earth” and the “wind blowing”, of the functional way in which the story that will be relayed, on that lives in the head of someone who experienced it and is expressing it through the filter of the novel’s text.

Delving deeper into this aspect of form, there are many indirect conversations that do not take place as speech, or even as words — conversations between Frances’s thoughts and what she sees, and then the words that actually comes to pass between her and her conversation partner. The novel as a form must, by its nature take place using words. Conversations must by their nature, supposedly take place using words too, as well as body language. Living in Frances’s head, the reader is hearing and witnessing all the dialogue without dialogue tags. Words are reported as they are said, in the same way a spoken conversation has no indicator of speaker unless it is distinguished by a name or a pronoun and verb, or the speaker making air quote; indeed, in this text, it’s sometimes not clear if it is a thought or spoken words, nor who the speaker is, until the end of the first clause. An example is in the line, “We have guests, Melissa called down the corridor” (Rooney, 2017, p.3); this is one of the first instances of direct discourse being removed from the conventions of its use, and it is jarring, putting Melissa’s voice into Frances’s, again reinforcing the filter through which these conversations are heard. Here, and elsewhere, it’s not always clear, sometimes until the end of that first clause, whether something has that been reported by Francis or if it is her internal evaluation.

This plays into the obfuscation of the grander story elements that Murdoch alludes to in describing the “misty landscape” is something exacerbated by the light, conversational aspect of the story and the clear relationships between words and people. The simplicity of clauses the discourse — “Melissa took our photograph outside”; “Melissa used a big professional camera”; “She chatted and smoked while taking the pictures”; “Around midnight the bar closed” (Rooney, 2017, p.1) — engages the reader through the easy flow of illustrating discrete events and environmental elements, despite appearing staccato as written text. More significantly, this mirrors the simplicity of the title that masks the complex web of relationships within the text, with a misleading reductive sense that these are simply “conversations with friends”. The reader is given a lot of extraneous detail that shields the truth of the text behind a mist at its inception — words, objects, actions. The obfuscation carries through as the events of the novel and its observations are all framed as conversation. There is little distinction made between what is verbalised and what is not, melding unspoken conversations with the filter of spoken conversation, and a key function of this is Frances’s point of view. Her interpretation of conversations is the filter through which the audience experiences them. She draws conclusions and interpretations based on conversation that are either reported in real time or shortly after, such as on p.4 when Nick first enters the kitchen and asks Melissa “if she had fed the dog, she said no” (Rooney, 2017) — the very next chapter she links this with his expression that “he’d expected a dinner party [Melissa]’d arranged to be ‘a nightmare’” and concludes that “it didn’t seem like Nick and Melissa were crazy about each other”.

This is interesting because it somewhat subverts the integration of nonverbal communication in conversation, taking advantage of how the nature of novels as written text allows us to actually codify unspoken aspects of communication into transmissible form — visual to sonic to visual and thus verbal when finally processed by the reader. Returning to the notion of the reader as conversation partner, in that vein, this actually expresses on the page the same act the reader would be partaking of as being on the receiving end of dialogue with Frances — a reader, observing the unfiltered speech and actions of Nick and Melissa reported by Frances, may draw very similar conclusions about the relationship of the couple. The art, in this case, imitates life, with Frances’s drawing of conclusions catching up to the reader’s and giving form to the indicators of the “misty landscape”. Thus, these are elements of form that play into the ability to obfuscate, what is happening at the precise moment within the story while still giving a sense of the core lines of tension within the novel, because the reader is picking up on observed cues, but not necessarily getting real time analysis.

With the reader in conversation with Frances but also in Frances’s head, there is no privilege to being an instantaneous recipient of context. The context is often something Rooney chooses to unravel as the story wears on, but something that Frances, speaking of the past, is already privy to. The cause and effect between events tends to be delineated in a backwards, unravelling motion. The effect on the reader is to be made less aware and less prepared for when the text is going to dip into the inner world, or when it is going to be immediate and observing simple reportage of a conversation, or observations of body language sans analysis, or observed physical or enunciated language that triggers analysis. An example would be Frances observing as Melissa “lit a cigarette and tipped the ash into a kitschy-looking glass ashtray”, considering that “the house didn’t smell of smoke at all and I wondered if she usually smoked in there or not”, followed by immediately being drawn into Melissa saying “I made some new friends”, again without dialogue tags (Rooney, 2017, pp. 4–5). The bobbing back and forth between small observable things and Frances’s own ruminations, that seem deeply transient and private yet are shared by the reader, have the effect of being almost Woolf-like in their ability to affect a stream-of-consciousness penchant for seamless experience of narrative through a single persona’s headspace, though not necessarily mimicking the style per se. The novel in this regard almost feels like a 21st Century successor to novels like Mrs Dalloway that evoke the relationships of people through place, choosing in this instance for the vehicle to be speech. In this way, Rooney uses form to construct the narrative used by the persona of Frances.

Having evaluated form in terms of direct and indirect discourse and their effects, it is necessary to now turn the discussion to how the personae, particular that of Frances, construct themselves and, in terms of Frances, her “friends”, in relation to conversation, to better understand the way in which understanding is consciously withheld from the reader, compelling them to step into the mists to find the source of and clarity for what is heard and felt and surmised. The story itself begins by Frances introducing herself as the speaker by first introducing Bobbi, saying “Bobbi and I first met Melissa at a poetry night in town, where we were performing together” (Rooney, 2017, p.1). From the first, Frances defines herself in relation to others, living inside her head but only doing so in relation to where she goes with Bobbi, where she travels with Melissa. She speaks of the “back of [Bobbi]’s neck and her little spoon-like ear” when they get in the car, and that “the dog had followed us to the kitchen and was snuffling around at our feet, but Melissa didn’t mention the dog so neither did we” (Rooney, 2017, p.1, p.3), essentially taking her cues and surmising her observations based on how others look or react. Even more clearly, while in the care to Melissa’s for the first time, she states that “I felt excited, ready for the challenge of visiting a stranger’s home, already preparing compliments and certain facial expressions to make myself seem charming” (Rooney, 2017, p.3) — essentially, in the car, observing Bobbi and her spoon-like ear and her rapport with Melissa, Frances is already playing off indirect discourse between her companions and physical observations to draw conclusions, and her response to this, her reply to this mix of “dialogue” is to plan her verbal responses around it.

It is curious to note that for a novel that is drenched in the miasma of Frances’s affair with Nick, he makes such a cursory appearance in the first chapter that for a reader that had not read the back cover copy, one might be forgiven for believing Nick to be a completely sidelined character. He is alienated from the first, in the way Frances is alienated from the first — from herself, from the reader, from the gulf between what she sees and thinks and what she says. This is interestingly reflected in Frances’s Marxist philosophy, in which the alienation of the work is a key concept, driven home as well by the earlier point of the tailored image, the divorce of the sense of self from the self by the need to conform to social cues in a post (or post-post) modern capitalist, digitised society. The loss of identity and direction is stark, and the vacuum that needs to be filled already generates the tension that will be fulfilled by the commencement of the affair. It also drives home that power of conversation continually expressed in this novel. Melissa is the entry way for Nick and the rest of the story — he enters the space before he enters the space. The ability to communicate through words can put characters onto the page or into the conversation who are otherwise not there, but in doing so, can also rob them of agency when their words are unheard, misinterpreted, or expressed nonverbally and thus ignored.

The alienation or absence of Nick at the very beginning of the novel also homes in on the immediacy of Frances’s recounting of the events, and actually serves to demonstrate the way in which the catalyst — the affair — is not necessarily also the chief payoff of the tension in the novel. Bobbi is introduced first because it is her relationship with Frances, and the fruits of that relationship in the poetry night, that underpin the entire novel, that create the scenario for her to meet Melissa to meet Nick, that informs the way she will eventually come to consider her responses to the affair as a band-aid for her sense of self that in many instances harms Bobbi, such as on p.75 when she jokes about Bobbi being jealous of her relationship with Nick (Rooney, 2017), only to receive an upset message from Bobbi the very next chapter describing her hurt at the accusation — expressed verbally, and not necessarily truly reflective of Frances’s inner world. The novel does flag somewhat in terms of how effectively it interweaves Bobbi into these discourses, but the set-up in the first chapter is in essence crucial to driving home Bobbi’s place in Frances and the way Frances converses.

All of the above also plays into the inherent, form-based indirectness of the conversation between characters, narrator, and reader, by throwing up yet another barrier, yet another filter between the inner world and the outer world, again making sure that the lens of the conversation is tailored to Frances’s. It is very apt, in this regard, that the chief motivator for the initial encounters of the three women is focused upon photography. The introduction here, the allusion to framing, is expanded into its fullness in Chapter 2, wherein Frances notes the difference between events as she perceives them, and events as they are captured from the outside on film. It is interesting to note in this first chapter is also when Bobbi and Frances’s history is first shared, and shared quite clearly. In no-uncertain terms are the observable traits expressed in the first few paragraphs clarified, painting Bobbi as “opinionated” and abrasive (Rooney, 2017, p.6), demonstrating the manner in which unlike Frances, she does not have a filter, or at least not the same sort of filter as Frances. The contrast between the two eventually intermingles with the stories of Melissa and Nick, and Melissa’s much later descriptor of Nick as someone who has a “weak personality & compulsively tells people what they want to hear” (Rooney, 2017, p.233) — there is a clear mirror, a genuine dynamic between why Frances’s approach to dialogue melds with Nick’s. Conversation, by its nature, can be assumed to be collaborative. It can also be assumed to be combative, when occasion or need should arise. Bobbi’s personality is combative, and this is the tack that she takes as expressed indirectly by Frances in the frame of their school days, later observed clearly to the reader in the conversation between Marianna, Philip, and Camille later on (Rooney, 2017, p.241). Frances’s is not — it is receptive, it is responsive, but it also means that it lacks a flair of directness and honesty, particularly honesty of the self, and this is grounds for conflict later on in the novel.

In sum, Conversations with Friends is a novel that sets up an immense number of expectations for readers pertaining to form, tension, and character, from the very beginning of the text. Conversation here acts as action without explicitly carrying out any action that contributes directly to stakes, directly to tension, or directly to cause and effect. Action is the vehicle that the narrator, Frances, uses to transmit snippets of conversation directly and indirectly to the reader, highlighting events and observations as perceived through her filter. This filter is one that is informed by a personality that sees conversation as something collaborative, even passive, something to be responded to rather than actively steered or engaged with — an attitude contrasted by Bobbi and challenged by the conflict it generates through being perpetuated in her relationship with Nick, and their poor communication. Directness — the directness of Bobbi, particularly — is something that is obfuscated down to the level of form, with Rooney eschewing dialogue tags in favour of slipping dialogue seamlessly into the flow of the text, as if it were Frances’s voice retelling the story that the reader was listening to, as opposed to the genuine voice of Melissa, or Bobbi, or nick. Indirectness becomes an almost meta way to bring the reader into the very conceit of the title, beyond the actual premise of the novel itself, and also makes space for the characters to show the deep gaps in their understanding of others and of themselves. The opening to Conversations with Friends therefore evokes Murdoch’s scents, and sounds, and feelings, and notions, and through a deceptively uneventful opening plants the seeds for the key conflicts and major thematic through-lines that are fulfilled by the end of the novel, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the reader — for the novel, like Melissa’s camera and like Frances’s voice, is merely a snapshot, a retelling of a retelling of events, and the reader, like Frances, is merely the interpreter of a story both finished and unfinished, said and yet unsaid.

Works Cited

Rooney, S. (2017). Conversations with Friends. Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition.