After finishing
Severance, I needed something completely different. I scanned my shelves and settled on Sally Rooney's
Conversations with Friends, which I had picked up right around the new year after reading and enjoying her
Normal People far more than I expected to. I didn't like
Conversation with Friends quite as much as
Normal People, but it did turn out to be just the kind of book I needed right now. Rooney's prose is wonderfully precise. Her characters face problems that are normal and small, but take on outsize proportion in the moment -- the way our own problems often do.
In a funny way, this book was maybe not so different from
Severance. Both are intensely of the present. And both feature disaffected and confused narrators who are grappling with ill-defined relationships of a very modern nature.
Severance asks what happens when this character is faced with actually earth-shattering events, while
Conversations with Friends follows its narrator through the, by comparison, mundane trials of regular life.
