Text Messages and Millennial Adultery: On Sally Rooney’s ‘Conversations with Friends’
by Mark Cecil
Aug 31, 2017
3 minutes
Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney’s bracing, miraculous debut, starts out typically enough, laboring in that old vineyard of novelists—infidelity. Set in Dublin, the narrator Frances is a 21-year-old poet invited to the home of a magazine writer, Melissa. Melissa’s husband is the handsome Nick, “a failed actor whose marriage is dead,” and who at times seems “embarrassed to be alive;” in other words, a man ripe for an affair.
Things build precipitously. Rooney has a gift for pacing, and the illicit builds with each chapter: The
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