Normal People

After reading the reviews and the high praise about this author, I was excited to get this book. The next great young writer, they said. Waste of time. The characters are flat, the content (there really is no plot) is boring and insipid, and the mechanics of her writing are so rote it becomes more than an annoyance. I absolutely hated this book and hated that it sucked hours of my life reading it. I kept hoping it would get better but it just droned on. If this is what millennial writers have to offer, I will begin re-reading the classics or authors from previous generations who knew how to write. Ugh. Horrible.

What an absolutely gutting (in a good way) book. The impact of ppl on one another, the way we carry our baggage from place to place adding more with every relationship like the worst possible souvenirs, how we fail to communicate who we are and what we want, how we dont know those things bc we dont always know ourselves, how we can become redeemed in the love and loving of another person. Im not sure Ive felt more seen by a book. It somehow had the emotional resonance of every intimate conversation Ive ever had and my entire body hummed with the familiarity and anxiety of those moments while reading it. I couldnt put it down.

Do you ever consider the profound impact significant others have on your life? Decades ago, when our son was toddlerish, my husband and I took him into the country for a weekend. We rented a tiny, Eskom-free stone cottage in a dark valley. One night, with the boy asleep, we sat outside, dazzled by the night sky, and drank a bottle of wine. Wed been a couple for more than a decade by then and somehow began talking about how being together had shaped us as individuals and influenced our life decisions. It was a gentle, but remarkably illuminating discussion for both of us and about both of us. It’s a conversation I regularly replay to myself to remember how lucky I am.

I thought a great deal about that night as I read Sally Rooneys novel, Normal People last week. Normal People tells the story about Marianne and Connells relationship, which begins when theyre at school in a small town in West Ireland and continues on and off for another four years while theyre at college in Dublin. Its a tale with so many layers that, while my experience of reading it bordered on compulsive, I find it difficult to analyse suffice to say that its not about the plot; its about the characters and their inner lives, and the writing.

Rooney, who is 27-years-old, is widely feted as the next best thing, one of the most exciting voices to emerge in an already crackerjack new generation of Irish writers, and a Salinger for the Snapchat generation. I dont dispute the praise. Her writing is extraordinarily elegant. Confident and uncluttered, it conveys an immediacy and ingenuousness that drew me in and held me from beginning to end, which came too soon. The story, I felt shocked to discover I’d reached the final full stop was unfinished, there were loose ends to tuck away. But, once I recovered, I realised the way it ends is part of its magic. Real relationships are forever evolving, eternally incomplete, and so it figures that a novel about relationships will be too.

Normal People is told from both Mariannes and Connells points of view. It reminded me how, no matter how well you think you know a person, your perceptions and understanding of what they say and mean can be skewed. The novel also shows how our identity, self-esteem and who we become as adults are bound to our upbringing indefinitely. Marianne is from a wealthy, but unloving and dysfunctional family. Connell is from a poor, but loving family. It largely shapes who they are and how they relate to the world. The novel also examines the impact of bullying both on victims and perpetrators.

Ironically, I might not find the book easy to analyse, but I could go on forever, waffling about the many layers in Normal People. I darent though because then you might not feel compelled to read the book yourself, which would be a pity. A huge pity. Heres a tiny sample of the writing to demonstrate what a humungous pity it would be:

Helen has given Connell a new way to live. Its as if an impossibly heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe fresh air. It is physically possible to type and send a message reading: I love you! It had never seemed possible before, not remotely, but in fact its easy. Of course if someone saw the messages he would be embarrassed, but he knows now that this is a normal kind of embarrassment, an almost protective impulse towards a particularly good part of life. He can sit down to dinner with Helens parents, he can accompany her to her friends parties, he can tolerate the smiling and the exchange of repetitive conversation. He can squeeze her hand while people ask him questions about his future. When she touches him spontaneously, applying a little pressure to his arm, or even reaching to brush a piece of lint off his collar, he feels a rush of pride, and hopes that people are watching them. To be known as her boyfriend plants him firmly in the social world, establishes him as an acceptable person, someone with a particular status, someone whose conversational silences are thoughtful rather than socially awkward.”

Im not sure I feel changed after reading Normal People, but I do feel upgraded. And reminded about how life is a series of relationships, and how a few of them help shape who we are and how we live our lives. And that thinking about that and acknowledging those who positively influence us is important. And yes, Sally Rooney has a fan in me. My current read is her first novel, Conversations with Friends.

I can see the talent here, and it is (sort of) raw, as some readers say. But the perpetual circling, round and round in the same dance, of two people who clearly love each other, without clear reason why they don’t admit it and become a pair in their mutual suffering, is repetitive and very tiring. It feels like the author keeps it going simply to keep the book going. I can understand that there’s a class issue at the heart of their obstacles (I guess — it’s never dealt with head on, only vaguely mentioned in passing), and a depressive self-loathing that they seem to share, but neither seems reason enough, as they grow older and more mature, and as they lose themselves in college and with other people, to keep them apart. This book is maybe better for younger readers. (I would read her next book, though. Curious where she’s headed.)

I read the rave literary reviews so I bought this. This was a very quiet book. The story of Marianne and Connell, who meet as high school classmates in a small County Sligo town. Class differences announce themselves almost from the beginning. Marianne is from a well off family, Connell is not. The book meanders through their burgeoning , yet hidden love affair, and then their lives at Trinity College and beyond. Nothing actually happens. Marianne and Connell aren’t particularly endearing or likeable as characters either. I didn’t find much to recommend this story. Writing was okay, not the lauded talent as described in many reviews.

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