This post is about Sally Rooney's book Normal People and it's in two parts. I'll start with a no-spoiler review, but after the break I will be setting out some longer thoughts arising out the book and in doing so I will give, if not exactly spoilers (it's a will-they, won't-they get together? book), then at least so much of the flavour of the book as might ruin it for people who haven't yet read it. If you haven't read it and think you might want to then please stop at the break.
I came to Normal People with few preconceptions. I have not seen the TV adaptation, for example, and if I read the reviews when it came out then I have forgotten doing so. But I was aware of the book as a cultural event - the kind of thing that features in Books of the Year lists - and there is a vestigial impulse in me to keep abreast of modern literary fiction, a feeling that being oblivious to the latest 'serious' books is akin to being unaware of who the Prime Minister is. Why do I mention this? Because Rooney makes fun of people like me at one point in the book (when a character attends a literary reading) and I feel it only fair to mention that perhaps Rooney is indicating that her book is not aimed at me. But here goes anyway.
My copy of the book is festooned with the kind of excessive praise that appears only on literary fiction that has caught the zeitgeist: The Guardian describes it as a "future classic", for example, while The Times' reviewer apparently "finished the book determined to look at the world differently", whatever that means. It has won more prizes than you did at the end of primary school. Unsurprisingly, it is over-rated and over-hyped: there's no smoke without at least a hint of fire, true, but in my view the book is ultimately a minor one.
The strengths of the book are twofold. First, its story-telling is well-paced and direct. It proceeds in chronological order from beginning to end, with chapters that have nice clear headings of the kind "Three Months Later (July 2012)", but it does so in an interesting way, with the characters (or a free indirect narrator) going back over episodes and looking at them a little differently from time to time. Nothing tricksy - no radical re-casting of past events of the kind that (for example) Sarah Walters might do - but just a nicely done adding of depth and texture by gently circling back.
The other strength is the descriptions of the characters' thoughts and their appreciation of their relationships with others. Rooney has put a lot of work into this and I thought it 'came off'.
Any notable reasons why you might want to avoid it? Sadly, yes.
- It's depressing. The main characters - and most of the minor characters - are depressed and depressing. The world it depicts is atomistic, anomic and sad.
- The dialogue is disappointing. I'll say more about that below.
- No speech marks. It might not bother you, but I didn't like it. I think it's a pointless affectation - like writing a menu in pence - and I don't see why it was done: it's always clear when someone is talking and when they're not if you read to the end of the sentence or paragraph, so why not use the conventional punctuation marks that help us get there more quickly?
Anything else to mention? Well, there is a lot of sex in it. Mostly rather depressing, I thought, although I suppose, as the characters in the book perhaps show us, tastes can vary. At any rate, Rooney was probably right to think that the book is not for me.
The book is about the on-off relationship between Connell and Marianne, two young people we first meet when they are at school and then follow through university and into young adulthood. They are meant to be together but, in traditional romantic novel fashion, they are kept apart - although what it is that keeps them apart is something I will have to come back to.
I don't claim to be an expert in romantic novels, but it is surely not terribly controversial to say that in order for a book of this kind to 'work' we have to understand why these people are attracted to each other. And here we have a problem.
Marianne is posh, clever, thin, damaged, a bit odd, occasionally elegant or even glamorous, and she smokes. All of which is to say that we have seen her like before in books, on films and perhaps even in real life. I imagine her as looking a bit like Eva Green, with something of the young Kristen Scott Thomas from Four Weddings thrown in. She's not every man's cup of tea, but that combination of features will be a potent cocktail for many, and I have no difficulty in believing in the fascination that she holds for Connell.
But when it comes to Connell's appeal for Marianne, doubts start to creep in. Connell is working class, popular at school and good at football. He is determinedly normal: he watches football, plays computer games and drinks milk. The most popular girl at school likes him - fine. But what does Marianne see in him? I'm not sure.
Is it something physical? Rooney gives us an early scene in which she watches him play football and finds him elegant, but I can't find that at all plausible other than as telling us that she already loves him and her love casts a flattering light on everything he does: I don't think Rooney has any more appreciation of football than Marianne. And the footballing quickly dies away (even though it might have helped Connell to find some more friends at university). On a couple of later occasions, Connell's physicality is used to good effect to protect Marianne from some of the unpleasant men in whose company she often seems to find herself: I accept that that is a romantic plus point, but it all happens well after she has formed her early and enduring attachment to him.
The real appeal must be, I suppose, his intelligent and sensitive nature. And here we come across a strikingly odd feature of the book. Our two main characters - and indeed a fair number of the incidental characters - are very clever. No doubt about it: we get their exam results and everything. But they don't tend to say anything very clever. We, the readers, can see into their minds but you'd be hard pressed to spot from their dialogue that we are in the company of the brightest minds of an island famed for verbal - and specifically conversational - brilliance.
Let me give you an example. Here is Connell discussing "The Patriarchy" with Marianne and a friend.
As Rooney points out, despite Peggy's laughter, Connell is not saying anything interesting. His chat reads a parody of a young Irishman trying to be inoffensive in female company. This is not the sparkling brilliance surely necessary to capture the heart of a young, posh, damaged, brilliant, vulnerable, smoking, prominently-collarboned (did I mention damaged?) woman?
The contrast with The Glittering Prizes, another book featuring brilliantly clever undergraduates, is remarkable. TGP may lack many things that NP has, but it does not ask us to believe that its characters are brilliant merely because we have seen their scholarship results. Here, for example, is an undergraduate in TGP doing something as utterly mundane as entering a restaurant.
Implausible? Perhaps. Insufferable? Certainly. But surely a fair bit more interesting than bland nothings of the "It is what it is" and "I agree with the point" kind. One feels that any Marianne would rather know what was going on at Denis' table than at Connell's.
I suspect that the tongue-tiedness of Connell must be deliberate: one of the things that is keeping our characters apart is their inability to communicate clearly with each other. But at points this just gets silly. Take this exchange:
Quite frankly, I don't think "the music was quite loud" is good enough as a plot device in serious literary fiction.
But back to The Patriarchy. Another very striking - and again surely deliberate - aspect of Normal People is the fact that Connell lives in perhaps the closest known approximation to an Actually Existing Matriarchy. His mother is a single parent (his father is unknown and irrelevant), and even Marianne's father is dead. The other person who gives him direction in life is Marianne (who persuaded him to apply to Trinity College Dublin). At school, we are told that the social life is run by girls and that a girl called Rachel is the most popular. At one point, one of his erstwhile teachers attempts a kind of sexual assault on him - and even she is a woman. His first story is published (and badly edited) by a woman. When he suffers from depression he sees a female counsellor. There are no men who have authority or even sway over him. His male friends are generally hopeless and, indeed, one (an alcoholic who is desperate to fit in) commits suicide. Men have no status or agency in Connell's world: the potentially male-dominated Irish institutions one thinks of (the Catholic Church? employment?) are simply irrelevant to Connell's life. And yet at no point does he seem to question the idea that The Patriarchy runs things.
Indeed, we are repeatedly shown that Connell has thoroughly internalised up-to-the-minute feminism. When he is discussing the suicide of his school friend with a counsellor, he mentions that he found the friend's poor behaviour with girls to be "alienating", for example, and he cannot hit Marianne even when she asks him to (in the course of sex).
Perhaps even more odd is the treatment of abortion (which, we should recall, was illegal in Ireland at the time that the book is set). There are three references to the topic that I can recall. At one point Connell is delayed in meeting Marianne by a protest and he mentions the protest as an inconvenience that delayed him. She asks whether it was an abortion protest and he feels guilty that he had not spotted what the protest was about because (of course) if it was pro-choice then he should not have treated it as an inconvenience but instead expressed more sympathy, so he says that it was about something else. Second, after having worried that Marianne was pregnant, he says that he would have supported her whatever she chose and then thought "Marianne seemed like the kind of straightforward person who would arrange the whole procedure herself, and at most maybe he would go with her on the plane". Third, when his mother tells him that an ex-girlfriend of his is pregnant, he replies "I don't know why she's keeping it ... Do you think she's one of these anti-abortion people?". This prompts his mother (a single parent, let us recall) to question whether a "backwards political view" is the only reason not to have an abortion. One might guess that he would back off a little at this point, but instead he doubles down by asking whether his mother would not have had a better life if she had not had him (she was a teenage mother). In short, he finds it hard, even in the face of his own mother's life (or should I say "lived experience"), to imagine a woman not having an abortion if pregnant when young.
We see, therefore, that no matter how elevated Connell's emotional state, he does not lose his feminist instincts: he is not putting it on for show - it's part of him. But his wholesale and unthinking feminism causes him to speak ill of the dead, create awkwardness at an intimate moment with Marianne and annoy his mother.
I am not entirely sure what we are to take from that. But Connell's obliviousness to the world in which he lives is of a piece with the characters' wider lack of interest in the world. On an early occasion in the book, Connell takes Marianne to a 'ghost estate', an unfinished estate of houses abandoned as a result of the 2008/9 crash. They walk around an unfinished house that is much bigger than the small house Connell shares with his mother. He asks, genuinely not knowing, why they don't just give away the houses if they can't sell them. Marianne, also not knowing, says that it's "something to do with capitalism". They agree that is the problem and the matter drops. But this is a question that has an answer! It's "something to do with capitalism", sure, but so is a question like "why do cucumbers get wrapped in plastic?" and each is a question with a proper answer. Our characters vaguely wonder about the world, but take no steps to understand it. Capitalism itself - in the form of an internet search engine - can help them!
Even Marianne, who has a little more about her than Connell, is oblivious to the world around her. At one point she gets a job which is paid in cash and, when asked who is employing her, says that she thinks it is some kind of property developer. (Perhaps she could have asked him why the unfinished houses weren't given away.) I think having this job is meant to represent a bit of progress for her understanding the world since, earlier in the book, when talking to one of her (nicer) friends who had a job, she had said that she didn't "buy into the morality of work ... you're just moving paper around an office, you're not contributing to the human effort". But having a job which is incomprehensible to oneself does not strike me as constituting much progress. Perhaps the job is simply another meaningless episode in her life.
I said I would come back to what keeps Marianne and Connell apart. Leaving aside the loud music issue, the big problem for them is the social structures in which they live; or rather, their inability to see through the way these structures appear to them. It is their obliviousness to the world around them that has caused their problems.
So, for example, in school, Connell is popular while Marianne is a weirdo, which means that he cannot acknowledge her openly and this causes him to treat her badly (to the anger of his mother). She accepts that these are the rules too: she knows that she has to keep quiet for fear of ruining his reputation. That all makes sense: love across a social divide that must be hidden from the world is not new to fiction. But we learn at the end of the book that this was most likely nonsense and his friends knew that he was involved with her all along: he could have held her hand her openly without losing caste, so to speak. Connell was trapped in what he thought the world demanded of him - and Marianne was prohibited from making any claim on him for the same reason.
I mentioned above that there is a lot of sex. Marianne and Connell have sex early on in the book and carry on doing so over the years that follow. And I think the ready availability of sex also serves to keep them apart: they are stuck in the social structures in which sex without commitment is normal. Think back to Peggy's comment in the discussion of The Patriarchy - that's how they see the world, as one in which commitment can neither be required nor expected. Or think of Connell's inability to consider anything other than abortion as the response to pregnancy. If Connell and Marianne had thought that they had to get married - even if only because pregnancy would mean that Connell would have to become the good father that neither of them had ever known - then they would have got married at the beginning of the story, and much unpleasantness and unhappiness would have been avoided for both of them.
The book is called Normal People. The overt reason for that is that at one point Marianne asks why she can't be "like normal people". But surely the real reason is that Rooney is telling us that Connell and Marianne, for all their glittering exam results, are normal people? And is it not likely that Rooney sees their continual and almost tragic inability to surmount their circumstances (an inability not entirely resolved at the end of the book) as the normal lot of normal people?
All of which leads me to wonder whether it is possible that Rooney's book is really (even if it was not intended to be - Rooney apparently considers herself a Marxist) an extended and highly conservative satire on the well-educated, politically-conscious young of today. Could it be a satire on the people who march to protest about Gaza (Marianne, we are often told, is really interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict) while oblivious to the power structures influencing their own lives? The people condemned to live in single-mother matriarchies suffering from male suicides and depression, while simultaneously railing against a non-existent Patriarchy? Those kept apart from happiness with each other by the freedom to sleep with each other? The gilded youth possessed of highly developed academic brilliance which sadly cannot be directed into interesting conversation or critical appraisal of the world around them?
Unlikely, but not impossible. Rooney is certainly able and intelligent enough to have written a book that has more than one plausible reading. But, whatever the best interpretation of the book might be, I find it hard to imagine that it presents a cheerful view of the world of normal people in the modern world.
Sorry to end on a bit of downer. As I said, I don't think Rooney meant the book for me.
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