Fiction Normal People

Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, £14.99)

Boy meets girl is an old story —perhaps the oldest—but it’s never less than fresh, fascinating and all-consuming to the parties involved. sally Rooney’s new novel offers a virtuouso rendition of this elemental human experience, exploiting its simplicity to question the rights, responsibilities and infinite complexities of love.

Beginning in 2011, Normal People charts four formative years in the lives of kindred spirits marianne and Connell. they grow up on different sides of the track —his mother cleans for hers— in small-town sligo, but, on the cusp of adulthood, discover an intellectual and emotional connection beyond the comprehension of others and, at times, themselves.

At school, marianne is ostracised for being clever, aloof and not pretty. By contrast, Connell is handsome and popular, but burdened with sensitivity. Insecurities fade when they fall in love, but rear up with a vengeance when he denies any intimacy, betraying his own feelings and scalding marianne’s.

At university in Dublin, they resume a fitful, fretful relationship, shrewdly observed and brilliantly internalised. marianne is now ‘cool’ and apparently under control; he is the outsider, raging at inauthenticity, but hobbled by doubt. they stumble towards an acceptance that each has moulded the other’s nascent identity. misstep follows misstep. It’s painfully good.

on the strength of her outstanding debut, Conversations with Friends, miss Rooney is promoted as ‘a salinger for the snapchat generation’. Warmer than its predecessor, Normal People better resembles a dazzling—if unlikely—collaboration between Jane Austen, that refined anatomist of growing up, and samuel Beckett, the great exponent of confusion.

Piercing the heart as it aims at the head, this is a tender comedy of manners wrapped in the belief that it is by embracing uncertainty that all lives, somehow, go on. Caroline Jackson