Book Review: Normal People by Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney makes being a writer look remarkably easy. She has published short stories, poems, and two novels (the first being Conversations with Friends) to wild acclaim. Normal People won almost every prize it could when it came out in 2018. The Guardian declared it one of the best 25 novels of the 21st century. She has been heralded as the voice of her generation. She isn’t yet 30.
It would be fair to say, therefore, that I came to Normal People with high expectations. I wasn’t disappointed. The novel is in many ways closer to a novella. It is short and spare. The focus remains tightly on the lives of two people, Marianne and Connell. It follows them as they transition through the tumultuous few years that take someone from being a child to an adult without allowing much time to work out how to do it.
The action takes place in Rooney’s native Ireland, starting in Galway, and then moving, with her protagonists, to the unfamiliar world of Dublin, university and nascent adulthood. One of the real successes of the novel, I felt, was its ability to be simultaneously rooted in a place and time, and yet also timeless. The character’s vocabulary is inflected with the phraseology of rural Ireland. Each new chapter comes with a date and timestamp. The characters are dealing with the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis and its crippling effect on the Irish economy. They move through real places. Trinity College, in all its mythic glory, is a character in its own right. And yet if you’ve never been to those places, or have any connection to those events, it doesn’t in the slightest bit matter.
It doesn’t matter because what Rooney has really done is created a story about growing up and being in love that is relatable to everyone who has done one, or both, of those things. The novel is shot through with all the uncertainty, the emotional angst, the sudden confidence, and the intensity that comes with being 17. There is a section in the second half of the book in which the two characters communicate mostly by email. The medium is modern but the rhythms of it are straight out of the epistolary novels of the 18th century.
A large part of this universality is achieved by Rooney’s decision to let her reader float in and out of the minds of her two main characters. You are there as they grapple with the changes within and around them. She dispenses with many of the signifiers you might ordinarily find. There are no speech marks; no “he said, she said” instructions for the reader; not much punctuation to speak of at all. You’d expect the whole thing to crumble into an indecipherable stream of consciousness. But somehow it doesn’t. Instead, Rooney manages to perfectly capture the hesitating, halting rhythms of teenage speech and thought. Other characters are there but you’re never allowed in their heads. This is the world according to Connell and / or Marianne. Connell as he transitions from popular local boy to a cripplingly shy, but academically brilliant, outsider in a city he doesn’t understand. Marianne as she moves from pariah in a world she reflexively dismisses to the apparent freedom and acceptance of urban cosmopolitanism.
Normal People isn’t the perfect novel. There are characters that are caricatures. Even in a short novel it perhaps takes a little long to get to a point where you really care about the fate of those involved. I came away feeling a deep sense of understanding Connell but still a little confused by Marianne. But they are minor criticisms in the face of such accomplished work. I’d definitely recommend it, I’m very intrigued to see how it translates to TV later this year, and I’m looking forward to what I hope is Sally Rooney’s long literary career.
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