Novel of manners for millennials
Normal People is packed with awkward class differences, cruel parents and hidden love
Like cilantro, Sally Rooney is either to your taste or she’s not. Critics of her fiction aim little darts at her youth (her author bio opens with the fact that she “was born in the west of Ireland in 1991”). Some also contend that this winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award is just writing about herself (if that’s a problem, a whole lot of novelists should be cancelled). What is it about Rooney that gets under the skin, for good or ill? It’s her next-level honesty, which is in full force in her sharp, painful, and fine new novel, “Normal People.”
Honesty is the main characters’ big problem. Toward the end of secondary school, popular Connell and oddball Marianne fall into a secret relationship, with Connell unwilling to risk his reputation. This sets the course for a reversal when Marianne takes flight at Trinity College Dublin, while Connell initially flounders. So far, so “High School Confidential,” yes? No. They keep coming back to each other, only truly at home in the weird privacy they share.
But plot summary can’t do this book justice. Rooney is fully aware of the conventions she’s playing with. The meat of the story is psychological, and here Rooney is as good as that great Victorian, George Eliot, whose “Daniel Deronda” she quotes in her epigraph. “Normal People” riffs on this 19th-century novel, equally packed with awkward class differences, irritating gender strictures, absent or cruel parents, and hidden love. (Surely the female protagonist is a nod to Eliot’s real name, Marian Evans.) Both books open with a young man looking at a young woman, trying to figure out her effect on him. Both have two main perspective threads, and both are deeply sympathetic to the struggles of early adulthood.
At the same time, Rooney’s novel feels entirely new, and not just for its references to Kanye and the Great Recession (Marianne’s friend’s dad “was one of the people who had caused the financial crisis — not figuratively”). The author’s great skill is her ability to make the crises of youth reverberate hard and personally in readers, from social ostracism to loss of virginity to the heavy desire to feel like — you guessed it — normal people.
Connell and Marianne haltingly grow out of that desire, and as they do, Rooney’s character portraits become increasingly outstanding. Trying to understand Marianne’s unwillingness to defend herself, Connell imagines her soul as something “like waiting for a lift to arrive and when the doors open nothing is there, just the terrible dark emptiness of the elevator shaft.” In the end, this crushingly beautiful book is a naked examination of how difficult honesty can be. George Eliot is often misattributed as the source of the line, “The last thing we learn in life is our effect on other people.” It could have come from Sally Rooney, who gives a fresh schooling in that fact.