The little flirtations and many emails that lead to this muddle are presented in great, near diaristic detail, and it’s here that Rooney bears a resemblance to Knausgaard. Frances rationalizes her part in it by figuring his marriage has gone cold, that as an older man he’s the one in control, that she’s helpless before his good looks, and that he doesn’t really love her anyway. Nick is a 32-year-old actor and Frances soon enough finds herself checking out shirtless photos of him online, and they begin an affair. Frances and Bobbi meet an older couple, Melissa and Nick, and rectangular romantic tensions soon become obvious.

The central question of Conversations With Friends is how much of an actor Frances is in her own story, whether it’s her struggle or the case of a passive onlooker being jostled by stronger personalities. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am.” There’s a useful plasticity to Frances’s persona, but of course a narrator can’t just smile and remember things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality,’ but she said she meant it as a compliment. “I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. “This meant a lot of smiling and remembering details about their work,” she explains. When Bobbi acts too cool for school, as when the pair are smoking outside Dublin bars with male poets, Frances does the talking. At a high-school dance, Bobbi “was radiantly attractive, which meant everyone had to work hard not to pay her any attention.” Like Ferrante’s women, the pair are of the left, but their communism, however firmly professed, is mostly gestural. Like Ferrante, Rooney puts her narrator in awe of a brilliant friend: Bobbi, Frances’s classmate from convent school, first love, and now spoken-word-performance partner. Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes, and it’s hard to imagine Conversations With Friends appearing without Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Tetralogy” and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series as immediate antecedents. None of their struggles are out of the ordinary. They aren’t transgressive like Ellis’s pretty monsters. Frances and her friends, at age 21, are a little too old to be precocious in the manner of a Salinger character, nor are any of them desperate cases like Seymour Glass. Salinger, but those signals indicate little more than that you’re opening a novel about young people written by a young person.

The novel’s blurbs and marketing materials invite comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis and J. D. They watch Greta Gerwig movies, and like Gerwig’s most famous character, the narrator is named Frances.

The narrator and her friends are fans of Twitter poet laureate Patricia Lockwood. The first novel by the 26-year-old Irish writer Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends, wears its influences on its sleeve.

Patricia lockwood sally rooney