On Tone
Probaly my favourite book is David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest from 1998. The book is rich. I love it. It is such a joy to read each sentence, to reread the whole thing, despite the book being dense and long.
Infinite Jest is a sprawling thousand-page science-fiction-adjacent exploration of adiction and how entertainment media under capitalism must eventually erode people's sense of community and purpose and replace them with lonely, vapid consumption.
At first, Rooney's writing couldn't seem more different, but the two writers share a key characteristic; compassion for their characters. Their works acknowledge that all sorts of people exist and accepts those people for who they are.
Writing in the 90s, Wallace once called for a "new scencerity". He was reacting to postmodernity and the prevalance of irony and world-wearyness in literature and entertainment, particularly in the 90s.
And it seems that Infiite Jest was his attempt to practice what he preached. The book is peppered with horrendous stories relayed by recovering addicts - the worst imaginable situstions and deplorable actions. These are recounted as facts, as things that happeded. And without judgement. Many of the stories capture the moment of rock bottom for thier narrator. They have come to accept what happened and forgive it, to some extent, in an effort to move on.
Wallace wrote all this with extreme scencerity, validating his characters' feelings and grounding their lives in stories of generational trauma.
It's good!
Conversations in not about rock bottom. But it is about a dull, flat, basline level of existence and the self-destrucive urge that can arise as a response. It's about that hollow feeling of nostalgia for something happening right in front of you - the urge to just leap without looking.
What I find most striking about the book is how it presents the contradictions that everyone has to live with - the gap between the person you say you are, and the person you know you are and the person you want to be. This is not a new theme for literature obviously, but there is something about the writing that removes any layers of abstraction that an author mgiht typically use. This is not Hamlet. It' just someone living a normal life in Dublin in 2012 or whenever.
Conversations, like Infinite Jest, is packed full of moments of extremete honesty - how often we dissappoint ourselves, how often we surprise ourselves. How easy it is to ignore self-criticism, to keep on moving if that's what seems necessary at the time. How necessary it is to accept who you are and stop fighting it.
How easy it is to profess one thing and do another.
The novel does this literally. Francis is constantly telling people what her values are. What her poltiics are. What her feeligns are.
And then quite transparently, with hindsight as the narrator, she shows us exactly the opposite.
If there's a hole at the heart of a person, Conversations is about poking your head just far enough into the darkness. Most people don't hit rock bottom - most people can live with the contradictions and secrets that make up the totality of who they are. We've all made mistakes in slow motion while watching ourselves do it. And we've enjoyed it.
What's so impactful about Conversations is the absense of judgement. Rooney is not interested in punishing her characters, of taking a moral view on their decisions or actions.