Anton Chekhov built entire short stories around the things that nobody says. Raymond Carver spent a career writing the moment just before or just after the significant event while carefully avoiding the event itself. Teju Cole wrote Open City in which a man walks around New York and Brussels thinking about history and loss and colonialism and the plot, in the conventional sense, does not exist.

Ambiguity as a literary mode has a long and respectable history. Sally Rooney's contribution is bringing this mode into the centre of contemporary literary fiction and making it feel like the most honest way to write about young people and the very specific mess of being one.

The ambiguity in her work goes all the way into the structure, which is part of why it comes off as unsettling to people who are used to fiction that clearly signals its intentions.

Sally Rooney does not use quotation marks and this has a specific effect on the delivery of her work. In Conversations with Friends, when Frances and Nick speak, what is said and what is thought occupy the same space. We are never quite sure where the character ends and the narration begins. Naoise Dolan makes the same choice in Exciting Times and in so doing, achieves a closeness to the narrator's interior that punctuation would actually interrupt. The ambiguity is embedded into the sentence before the story even gets going.

Then there is the narrator situation. Frances in Conversations with Friends is one of the more unreliable narrators in recent fiction. She reports her own feelings with a clinical detachment that seems to function as self-protection. Her affair with Nick accumulates and deepens and she processes it at a remove and her emotional reality leaks out sideways rather than being stated. You have to read against her to find what is actually happening. Ottessa Moshfegh does something adjacent in My Year of Rest and Relaxation portraying a narrator in very obvious ruins who narrates as if she is conducting a science experiment on herself. These writers are betting that the reader will do the work of reading underneath and find the thing the narrator cannot bring herself to say directly.

It is in the middles that Sally Rooney does some of her most interesting work. Conventional plot has a shape. Something happens, tensions escalate, a climax arrives and that climax justifies the entire journey. Sally Rooney's work drifts in a different direction. In Beautiful World, Where Are You, what gathers force is mood, correspondence and the texture of how these people understand their lives. Virginia Woolf did this in Mrs Dalloway by removing a dramatic arc and capturing just consciousness moving through time. Claire Keegan's Foster works this way too. Very little happens, in the plot sense. Everything happens, in the only sense that matters.

The beginnings are worth paying attention to as well. Beautiful World, Where Are You opens mid-correspondence, mid-friendship, mid-everything. The same thing happens in Naoise Dolan's Exciting Times where Ava arrives in Hong Kong and we are placed inside her perspective with no preamble. This is an old modernist trick, Didion used it, Carver used it and in Sally Rooney's hands it creates intimacy. The feeling is like walking into a room where everyone already knows each other and the conversation has been going on for a while. You catch up or maybe you don't but either way you are already inside.

In Normal People, Connell and Marianne's ending is quiet. They go their separate ways and the novel lets them. Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These closes on an implied moral weight rather than a stated one and we are handed the final piece and trusted to place it. This is the point of ambiguity as a tool. The writer is extending trust to the reader.

Some readers experience this as frustrating and that is a completely reasonable response to have. A lot of fiction has trained us to expect delivery. Sally Rooney and the writers working in this register are writing a different kind of contract. One that is closer to the experience of being in the middle of something you do not fully understand yet, which is, if we are being honest, most of life.

Chekhov knew that. Carver knew that. Rooney knows it too.

Editor's Note

My name is Tosin. I founded Taxi Editorial, which is an independent publication covering culture in ways we think are interesting and this is In The Backseat with Taxi, our newsletter. Every week a different member of the team writes about something. This week it was me. Next week it will be someone else and hopefully they bring snacks.