NORMAL PEOPLE
SALLY ROONEY
Faber, 266pp, £14.99, Oldie price £10.48 inc p&p
After her wildly acclaimed fictional debut Conversations with Friends, expectations were in overdrive when, a year later, Sally Rooney published her second novel, Normal People. Most reviewers were just as awestruck as they had been first time round. In the Guardian, Kate Clanchy loved this tale of two students, lovers from the same town but very different backgrounds. ‘Rooney is such a gifted, brave, adventurous writer, so exceptionally good at observing the lies people tell themselves on the deepest level, in noting how much we forgive, and above all in portraying love,’ she wrote. Julie Myerson in the Observer was blown away. ‘It’s rare that a first novel elicits such ferocious and unmitigated awe from just about everyone you know, whether male, female, millennial or middle aged. It was hard to believe that the author was still in her 20s and even harder to imagine that she could ever write anything better. But she has. In fact, in almost every way, this new novel leaves that first book in the shade.’ Myerson loved the ‘haltingly tender, endlessly misfiring conversations and even more tenderly misfiring sexual encounters’.
Over at the Independent Online, Catherine Humble found ‘an effortlessness about the writing, as if the stories simply pour through her like liquid gold. She writes anguish like nobody can. There’s nothing normal about Rooney. She’s exceptional.’ In the Irish Times, Anne Enright swooned: ‘She takes themes
‘There’s nothing normal about Rooney. She’s exceptional’
of passivity and hurt and makes them radical and amazing.’ And in the New
Statesman, Olivia Laing thought it ‘magnificent, painful, a meditation on power’. Only Claire Lowdon in the
Sunday Times was left standing upright. ‘We just have Connell, then Marianne, then Connell, then Marianne, in earnest, airless repetition, endlessly analysing themselves and each other. Because the narrator has access to both their minds, an expectation of distance is created; but the authorial voice sticks so closely to the characters as to be indistinguishable.’