I think it’s going to shed her a lot of fans, particularly those acquired via the TV adaptation of Normal People (and who will also certainly love the forthcoming tv series of Conversations with Friends), who liked the air of cool, the precise prose, the absence of backstory, the edgy, beautiful young students going to cool parties and going to Italy or France, and shagging or not shagging while being all clever and mournful.
This one is also about two ‘will they or won’t they end up together?’ couples, but they’re all around 30, so less edgy and more ‘Is this what life is like?’ anguished, and it’s a whole lot more humdrum — grim house shares, working at Leinster House, literary festivals, changing the punctuation of WH Auden and selling books while working for a literary magazine — and the two couples are only in the same place interacting as a foursome for a few chapters towards the end.
The oddest thing is the narrative style — it’s omniscient, but external, so we are told something like ‘Eileen pushed her hair behind her ears. She got up and walked out of the room. Simon looked after her till the front door shut, then got dressed and went to Mass.. neither of them contacted one another for a week.’
We don’t know what’s going on in either head. That is saved for intervening chapters I imagine quite a few readers will skip, which consist of long, anguished, digressive emails between the two female characters about climate change, goodness, Marxism, happiness, fame, Jesus, relationships etc.
Which does make you wonder why she didn’t just write in these preoccupations into a more conventional main narrative. Why show us from outside a character looking up her ex’s social media in bed, and only several chapters later have her tell her friend in an email what she feels? Or a novelist ambivalent about her own fame?
And the two male leads — who never get any emails — are pretty much ciphers, because the only time we know how they feel or why they behave in a certain way if if they speak the truth in dialogue.