On Genre
Conversations With Friends was released in 2017 and is set during the summer and autumn of 2015.
The novel - normal people in primarily domestic settings having conversations and navigating interpersonal relationships - is not plot driven. It brings to mind for me 19th century literary realist novels or even later, Joyce's Dubliners - the politics and morality of the time are front and centre in the interpersonal dynamics.
On top of that I see the influence of some of my favourite contemporary independent film - dense, fast-paced conversational works from Richard Linklater or Alexander Payne. Mumblecore adjacent films of Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Films about family and the drama of the mundane. Even the sincerity of a Wes Anderson without the pageantry.
These are not particularly insightful observations. Rooney lays out her influences, or at least her interests throughout her work. The Brothers Karamazov in her third novel. Middlemarch here in Conversations.
In all, Conversations references at least 12 books, films, games or musicians. Hamlet reflecting Francis's self denial. Middlemarch reflecting her growing sense of perspective and her sense of her place in relation to other people and so on.
She also obliquely references Mistress America - the first screenplay Gerwig and Baumbach wrote together - which stared Gerwig and was released in 2015. In it, a younger woman befriends an older one and uses her new friend's life as the basis for a short story that furthers her career. It's a surprisingly direct influence on Conversations.
Both Mistress America and this novel also make passing references to the post-2008 economy. They both address the bittersweet feeling of an impermanent moment.
The common thread running through Conversations and the film-makers it evokes for me is their earnestness, their attention to minutiae, their sincerity.
Let's go back to Infinite Jest for a moment and Wallace's had called for a "New sincerity." Wikipedia tells me that a "New sincerity" movement emerged in literature in the years that followed. I know some of those writers by name, but I haven't read their work.
But think about the culture at the time. The over-reliance on irony and cynicism in commercial art from that time period. When I was young.
It was such an interesting time in film, in particular. Infinite Jest came out in 1998. And in 1999 some of my favourites films were released. But how many of them had basically the same message - your life is meaningless and the only sane response is to disengage from society. This is just '99: Office Space, The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty and Being John Malkovich.
That tone has shifted so severely in the past 26 years. I can draw a trend line from then to now and I can see Rooney's work, with simple, sincere depictions of flawed characters, fitting on that line.
And where that trend goes, is from corporate disaffection and anti-government sentiment of the 90s, through hipster sincerity and handcrafted goods in the 2010s and out the other side towards socialism and grass-roots community building. Or so we might hope.
Rooney's work is part of a trend that is very contemporary. But it is also embedded in the history of the novel, part of the evolution of the process started in the 19th centaury.