Below the break I set out, first, what is good about CWF (especially compared to NP), then a couple of caveats and, finally, why I think NP got much higher praise than it deserved.
I should start by saying that CWF is high-quality modern literary fiction. There will be no faint praise or anything of that kind from me. It's not to everyone's taste (no inverted commas for speech; the sexual ethics of the characters are non-traditional; etc etc) but I'm left in no doubt as to Rooney's abilities.
The most striking thing about CWF (to me, at least) is how much better it is than NP. For a start, it is funny. For example, at one point early on our narrator tells us: "I sat in bed in the morning writing poetry, hitting the return key whenever I wanted". That ironic distance between us and the concerns of the protagonists is a notable aspect of the book: the characters are, of course, all terribly left-wing and hold all the right views on all the right topics, but we're allowed to laugh at them. I'll give you three examples, not all outright comic, but all of which indicate that we are allowed to bestow an indulgent smile on the political obsessions of the protagonists.
Perhaps even more significant than the light tone of these mentions of politics is the fact that they arise as part of the story: people are not simply sitting down to talk about politics (yawn) but actually doing something (misbehaving, being tired, sitting in an airport waiting for a Ryanair flight), in the course of which politics comes up - because that's the kind of people they are - but politics is not the point of the incident. There is a particularly good moment when Bobbi is arguing about whether monogamy is 'natural' or not: we are mostly spared the arguments themselves, but we are given the manner of her delivery, the completeness of her victory and so on, all of which illustrates her rather than her politics; moreover, the very question that she is debating is personally relevant to some of the people present in the conversation, which adds another level of interest to the whole scene.
Following on from that point, the inter-relationship between the overt politics and the power structures of the characters in CWF is also far more interestingly handled than in NP. When I wrote about NP, I said that I found the gap between the relentlessly patriarchy-focussed discourse and the relentlessly matriarchy-focussed facts to be so noticeable as to invite speculation about Rooney's true motives. That's not true of CWF. In CWF, there are men with appeal and agency: Nick, the romantic lead, is rich, successful and good-looking, for example, and Frances (unlike Marianne) has a father, who is hopeless, but at least he gets to do something.
Before I get to the caveats, I should say a few other things that the book does well. As the title suggests, conversations are a big part of the book - and they are good conversations. In my review of NP, I gave examples of boring conversations and suggested that the heroine would have preferred to talk to someone else: that is not a fault of CWF, which includes sequences one might even describe as repartee. I won't spoil the book for you by quoting too much of it, so I won't quote the sparkling conversations, but instead I will give you the beginning of as good a depiction of flirting as I can recall reading. The scene: Frances and Nick are in a hot utility room at a party. Now read on.
That's probably enough praise from me. The book is covered in praise from the newspapers and I'm sure you recall reading praise in the reviews when it came out. So now I'll go on to the caveats (which I present mostly just to show that I have retained some ability to criticise).
First, Rooney continues to be a massive intellectual snob. At one point, we are told that Nick was a child prodigy. The story is well-told and gives us a little insight into his character, but I think the main reason we are told this is because Rooney simply needs us to know that he is clever. You will recall that NP is careful to let us know how well everyone does in their exams, although it's hard to tell from their conversations. In CWF, we don't need their exam results to know that they are clever, as their conversations prove the point, but Nick is good-looking and an actor so, unless we are told that he is also terribly clever, just like all the top-flight students and literary types, Rooney worries that we might suppose that he was a bit thick, and she's having none of that.
Second, I mentioned above that Frances' father is hopeless. That is a symptom of a wider problem. Although the characters in CWF are better than those in NP, all the men in the CWF/NP Rooneyverse are hopeless in one way or another, even Nick.
Rooney deals with this issue rather better in CWF than in NP. She does so by restricting herself more closely to showing us only how the men present themselves to women (rather than what is going on in their own heads), so we are free to suppose that we are seeing appearances rather than reality.
As I was thinking about Rooney's hopeless men, I was struck by the contrast between Rooney and Zadie Smith. I think the comparison is a fair one: both are female novellists with great exam results and high-falutin' educations who achieved fame early in their careers before having much life experience outside education and literature. Yet Smith began her second book with a bravura extended passage giving us an all-male experience (as I described here), something which I'm sure would have been well beyond the Rooney of NP. I have a pet theory for why this is. My guess is that Rooney herself, like a Rooney character, will make it quite clear that a man who doesn't express the right views will be condemned in her eyes; although she meets lots of men who hold all the right views, they tend to be slightly concerned that she's ahead of them and might catch them out: the passivity and nervousness that we observe in her male romantic leads is therefore what she has observed in actual men who are trying to impress her while simultaneously being slightly afraid of her. Smith, by contrast, came to adulthood at a time when men were not so concerned about making faux pas of that kind and had a more disinhibited inclination to impress women; moreover, she seems to have a genuine sympathy for the distinctive differences of the male mind from the female; and I would also guess that men are just that much more able to relax in her company (as I speculated in my review of The Autograph Man) and show her what we are really like. It is notable that even if the men in a Smith book are deeply flawed in one way or another (as they notably are in On Beauty and The Fraud), they are not hopeless in the way they are in Rooney's books.
That's enough of the caveats too. Time to move on. I'll finish by explaining why I think NP got such good press despite being ho-hum.
The literary world read CWF first (because it came out first) and loved it. When they finished the book, they wanted more - more Rooneyverse! more hyper-intelligent Irish people who read the London Review of Books before having sex! more thin damaged beautiful young women! more romantic mis-communications ... before having sex! more serious left-wing politics, conversations with no inverted commas and then some sex! And NP gave them all of that, just when they wanted it (i.e., very shortly after CWF). NP was, so far as first impressions are concerned, more of the same and so it was propelled to success by the goodwill engendered by CWF.
The trouble is, it seems to me, that while NP ticks all of the superficial boxes that we spot in CWF, it does not replicate what made those boxes interesting. So, for example, there are romantic miscommunications in CWF too, but they are driven by the characters and circumstances of the protagonists rather than being pure devices like "the music was too loud" as in NP. There is plenty of left-wing politics in CWF, but (as I've said above) it comes up in the context of the characters doing something, whereas in NP it feels plonked in because Rooney thinks we need to know what the characters think. And so on.
To be fair, NP does have merits of its own, as I pointed out in my review. Those merits are also present in CWF. I suspect that that meant that the reader of NP was more firmly reminded of CWF and more well-disposed to NP. As an example, I give you Rooney's clever way of taking us back to previous events and looking at them slightly differently by giving us more information or a different perspective: that's something I noted in my review of NP and it occurs similarly in CWF.
I have three pet theories about what Rooney was trying to do with NP - or perhaps they can be viewed as theories about what a sympathetic reader, fresh from CWF, might have thought she was trying to do.
(1) NP might have been a deliberate effort to balance the female focus of CWF with an equal male character, mind and voice.
(2) NP might have been a deliberate effort to produce something 'purer' than CWF. Perhaps it was a deliberate challenge for her to reduce the story to just two people, rather than the four key people in CWF, while still maintaining the same interest and momentum, the same level of difficulty in communicating and minds meeting.
(3) Looking at the titles of the two books, I wonder whether Rooney thought that the conversations in CWF were too good to be true - too literary, too slick, too witty - and was aiming for something closer to reality. The conversations in CWF aren't The Glittering Prizes-level show-off-y, but they are more clever and quick than one tends to see in real life. Now, I consider that a point in CWF's favour - it's fiction! make it interesting! there's no need for lots of "ums", realistic though they be! - but NP pointedly does not aim for the same level of interesting dialogue. I quoted two bits of dialogue in my review of NP and I think they give a fair account of what to expect from that book as a whole.
How to follow up a successful debut novel is a well-known problem. Each of those three challenges is, I think, one that it was fair enough for Rooney to embark on in meeting that problem. However, they are, unfortunately, three of the ways in which NP falls notably short of CWF.
I'll finish with one further comparison between Rooney and Smith. In my view, each of them had a second book that disappointed compared with the first: the difference between them is that the reviewers spotted this in Smith's case.
In due course, I suspect I will give you all you need to know about Intermezzo too. In the meantime, if you want to read Rooney, my advice is to stick to CWF.
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