Conversations with Friends

The novel’s title indicates the centrality of communication to the story, but much of Conversation with Friends is premised on miscommunication. This motif can most easily be seen in action between Nick and Frances, but on some level it occurs between every pairing of the novel’s four central characters. Nick and Frances’s communication is continuously stunted by the fact that neither of them wants to seem more invested in the relationship than the other. Nick is wary that too much honesty and sincerity will scare Frances off while Frances is wary that honesty and sincerity will give Nick all the power in the relationship. As a result, much of what they say to each other is sarcastic and vague.

To take one of dozens of such examples scattered throughout the novel, in Chapter 9, Frances asks Nick, “So is this just sex, or do you actually like me?” Nick replies, “I think you want me to say it’s just sex.” Then Frances narrates, “I laughed. I was happy he said that, because it was what I wanted him to think, and because I thought he really knew that and was just kidding around” (77). Here, Frances assumes a level of unsaid communication between herself and Nick that even two people who have known each other for decades might not be able to achieve. She wants Nick to think that she hopes he will say they’re just having sex, and then she thinks Nick realizes this is what she is thinking. The multiple layers of this sentiment are difficult even to parse in Frances’s narrated sentence, let alone for Nick to intuit from a laugh. Yet she assumes that he does. Likewise, he himself never answers the question of whether he likes her, yet they both move on as if the conversation has been resolved in some way.

These breakdowns are compounded by the difficulties of electronic communication. When Nick is working in Scotland, he and Frances’s email and instant message communication becomes so indirect and laden with irony and sarcasm that the eventual miscommunication leads to a temporary breakup. When Melissa sends Frances a long email after she has found out about Frances and Nick, Frances examines it for writerly affectations, suspecting that Melissa is trying to show off what a good writer she is by employing an unnecessary stream-of-consciousness style. Bobbi and Frances generally have more successful interactions over email or instant messenger, but they often use such platforms to discuss ideological topics like race or class rather than to discuss actual feelings. While all four central characters in the novel are intelligent, that intelligence sometimes gets in the way of direct and honest communication as they frequently think they know what one another is thinking when they do not.