Oh - hello, a dialogue tag! (crap, so you mean the narrator hasn't actually been speaking since the chapter started? I so thought that he was, thus the Uncle Colm comment)

So from a standpoint of simply viewing the text - skimming over it rather than comprehending it - I can see an aesthetic appeal to leaving the quotation marks out. It does lend a sort of journalistic crispness; if you were just looking at the pages rather than reading them, I for one would be inclined to jump to the conclusion that this was a recounting of something real that actually happened. Not fictional.

But as I actually read, this crispness falls away. There's a bland flatness to the dialogue; it feels like I'm reading a tv script rather than a book. Immediately I'm picturing 2d people on a TV screen as I plod through the dialogue, rather than 3d people in a 3d setting as generally happens for me when I read, and it leaves me tense and uncomfortable. It feels like Rooney doesn't want me to get too involved with her characters or her setting; like I'm being pushed away, held back, but instead of going to the trouble of actually writing cold, distant characters she plonks down this artificial plexiglass shield instead.

As well, introducing this level of writerly conceit (by which I mean "a strange technique that the writer seems really invested in," not her opinion about herself) three pages into the first chapter seems like a really Foster Wallace or Eggers in the aughts thing to do. Wanky, not in a sexual sense but in the "look at me I am a Serious Writer and I Don't Care About Your Rules."

again: three pages into the first chapter.

Okay, ma'am. 🙄 I'll let you cook for a while to see if you're actually going somewhere with the insistence on this - I've barely started this book, it's possible you could be. But let the record show right away that it strikes me as silly and affected.