Author: Sally Rooney
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary
Blurb: At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal.
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.
Me: She finally did it, gals. After having seen Sally Rooney's name in every bookshop for the past two years, I watched the trailer for the new Hulu series and decided I needed to bite the bullet and try the books. And AHHHHH (coming from the excitement of binging the show right now)- I'm so glad I did.
The Ups: Maybe it's an internalized prejudice or preconceived ideas about the genre, but I have never really been drawn to romance on its own. While I get the fascination with seeing the will-they-wont-they back-and-forth throughout a book, it's usually not enough to sustain my interest for a whole story. At its core, Normal People is a romance- a story of two people trying to understand and connect with each other. I absolutely devoured it; I read it in about three hours and just kind of laid on my bed and tried to process afterwards. It elevated the idea of romance in a novel for me as an exploration of what it means to be human, what it means to want to connect, what it means to care about one person so much you learn to care about everyone.
The way Rooney writes all dialogue is spot-on and so entrancing. Each conversation had so much unsaid yet the chemistry was so clear, and each internal dialogue made me physically painful when I saw how close the two characters were to actually communicating their feelings. The world and setting changes around Connell and Marianne, but what's truly fascinating is seeing how they change and how in relation to each other, they also stay the same. Each of them wants desperately to be loved and understood in their own right, but they don't know how to express that or how to handle not feeling fulfilled.
It's astonishing that Rooney is so young (another infuriating young talent haha). I think she's been called (along with many others) a "millennial" writer, and I think in one way or another, it shows up in the book. The main phenomenon in our current world for young adults is that pressures and expectations still exist, they're just not explicit or clear anymore. Instead, relationships, careers, and inequalities are blurred so you don't know who to blame for feeling alone, unheard, and stuck. Seeing Connell and Marianne struggle with these forces was both so real and heartbreaking, and Rooney wrote these kinds of ambiguous barriers beautifully.
One last thing for me personally: my boyfriend jokes that all literature is just fanfiction about literature in general, and the parts about English and literature within this novel were incredible. Connell studies English and the descriptions of just how mesmerized he feels and also the frustration he feels at literature being turned into like an intellectual, elitist pastime were perfect.
The Downs: I did feel like the novel could have delved more deeply into the exploration of class and social differences between Connell and Marianne, and the respective places that they thrived in. The basis was there and I felt on occasion the complexities were beginning to be brought up, but I thought that the novel could have done more with the fact that Connell faced a lot higher stakes in his choices and that this presented an awkward but very real barrier in their relationship. Having the "poor" kid go to the best school full of rich, pseudo-intellectuals is pretty much a cliche, and I thought Rooney could have fleshed out Connell's experience even more.
I also struggled with the ending of the book. I didn't necessarily foresee one way it would end, but it just felt a little sudden and incomplete to me- like there should have been a few more chapters or something. I wondered if there was a better way to make it feel like the relationship was actually in a position where we could leave as readers.
Rating: 4 kisses!
It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.
Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.
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