How Should a Millennial Be? Madeleine Schwartz. The New York Review of Books

“The great millennial novelist”—the mantle has been thrust, by Boomers and Gen Xers alike, upon the Irish writer Sally Rooney, whose two carefully observed and gentle comedies of manners both appeared before her twenty- eighth birthday (...) Cozy in scope and romantic in spirit, the novels are mild and tender portraits of Irish college students in the recent present. In the ﬁrst, Conversations with Friends, Frances and Bobbi, two best friends in their early twenties who used to date and occasionally sleep together, fall for Nick and Melissa, a couple in their thirties. Frances begins an affair with Nick, threatening her relationship with Bobbi and allowing her to ﬁnd some independence. (...) Normal People halves the action. Instead of a romantic quadrangle with two couples, we have “the chemistry between two people who, over the course of several years, apparently could not leave one another alone”: Marianne and Connell, whose courtship, chronicled from high school through college, is fraught because Marianne’s family is rich and Connell’s poor. (..) Both books take place around Trinity College, Dublin, and are populated by witty and sensitive students who e-mail a lot. Both books feature scenes with cynical, distinguished male novelists and in both, one member of the loving pair is plucked for literary success by a kindly, more established person who submits their short story to magazines. The protagonists of both books are young women who have violent fathers and cut or hurt themselves. (...) Rooney is primarily concerned with social relations: How do people have power over one another? (“Power” is a word she uses often.) Her novels are attuned to the small differences of class and its millennial sister, privilege: the girl who wears thrift store clothes because it’s cool versus the girl who wears thrift store clothes because that’s all she can afford. (...) Her protagonists often analyze their own statuswhat it means to wear a necklace from the cheap British catalog store Argos or to drink milk directly from the bottle. (…)

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