Normal People

May the Gods strike me down mid-sentence but... I'm just not sure I liked this.

I found Rooney's debut novel, Conversations with Friends, captivating and endlessly amusing, so much so that I gave it one of my coveted 5-star reviews. Normal People feels like a shallow retread of the same ground, with a literary style that turned out to be not something the author created for that deeply ironic, often epistolary novel, but in fact merely her way of writing books. And the bloom is, for this reader, off the rose. I usually annotate books fairly thoroughly; here I only made one note - and that was just to investigate where I can buy chlorophyll chewing gum!

Rooney is still fantastic at much of what she does; she vividly captures moments of show more pathos and bathos jammed together, our subtle self-delusions to which Time gradually draws our attention, and a certain detached air with which the characters regard their own lives. Both Marianne and Connell have moments of compelling insight, although I would say only the former truly emerges as a fully-realised character. But I felt more and more that the relationship didn't deserve this level of interrogation. I don't wish to commit the grievous sin of comparing a writer's second novel to their first - I really don't - yet much of the playful irony and rich naivete of Conversations' main characters has been lost and replaced by an endless yearning that didn't always feel earned by the context of these two young attractive people. Moreso the supporting characters felt empty (poor, neglected Helen), without the shading and authorial question marks found in the earlier novel. I'm also less convinced - still convinced but only just so - of Rooney's penchant for avoiding quotation marks. In an otherwise typographically standard novel, is it well-motivated? (And, while I enjoy Rooney's heightened dialogue and her self-consciously intelligent characters, I wasn't fully convinced by some of the subsidiary dialogue. Would a highschool student really call something "awfully fucking gay?" I accept that some uneducated kids ten years ago still used the word "gay" as a generic term for something rubbish, but I so strongly associate "awfully" with the kind of prep-school educated classes that the two words strike my ear unnaturally when employed in the one phrase.)

Most disappointingly for me, however, was that I never warmed to the narrative conceit of cutting to various moments in the characters' relationship. To be honest, it comes dangerously close to cheating. Rooney will skip ahead four months, surprising us with Connell and Marianne in a new status quo, only to spend half the chapter giving us flashbacks to what occurred during those four months. As the seasoned reader, I would like to do some of the work for myself; as the novelist, I would like Rooney to create some shadows, some lacunae in the text, with which the reader can do battle. Instead, the time-jumps simply feel like a "hook" for reviewers to discuss the work, creating an aura of structure yet explicitly revealing all that has taken place in the intervening weeks and months.

Still, no-one can deny the splash this novel has made, and it's damned impressive that Rooney has had two such well-received books before the age of 30. It's easy to understand why so many people enjoy her works. Reading her novels, I feel the same sense of generational frisson that I find when watching a TV series like Girls or Broad City: an ecstatic realisation that my generation are at last being represented accurately. No longer forced, as we have been in novels and films created by older artists, to awkwardly re-enact our parents' cultural, sexual, and social mores, but instead freed to be ourselves. That was almost worth the price of admission. Rooney is a writer to watch, and one whose next novel I will keenly await. show less

I read this book back in April but I've waited until now to review it because I wanted to watch the television adaptation and contrast and compare.

This is a beautiful story of Marianne and Connell who meet at school in Ireland. Marianne is bolshy, fierce, yet oh so vulnerable and at times naïve. She's essentially broken in many ways, not least because of her family. When they initially spend time together Connell is the popular guy at school and Marianne is the misfit. What's interesting as the book progresses is the way their roles reverse, especially when they go to Trinity College in Dublin. The power in the relationship switches between them more than once.

Make no mistake about it, this is a love story but it's a problematic one. show more No two characters need their heads banging together more than these two. And yet it's so achingly moving and tender it struck right at the heart of me. I'm a sucker for a story about star-crossed lovers and characters who are drawn to each other despite all the odds. It feels like Marianne and Connell are attached by invisible elastic which, no matter what, brings them back to each other.

I admit that when I got to the end of the book I felt disappointed. I wanted a different ending for these characters I had become so invested in. But having thought about it since, and having seen the adaptation, I think it's probably the only ending that would have worked. Where I initially wanted to stamp my feet at the ending, I'm now sagely nodding my head.

Most book lovers prefer the book to the film or TV version, me included. Having now worked my way through the series I have to say that I have rarely seen a more perfect adaptation. Little has been changed from the book and what has works beautifully. The acting is spot on and I honestly don't think any other actors could have played Marianne and Connell better or more sympathetically. Their portrayal is stunning and the whole series has a mesmerising cinematic feel to it that had me spellbound.

Normal People is a very special story. It's about peer pressure, fitting in, family, being a student, being a son or daughter, but above all else it's about love. Pure and simple love. It's wonderful. show less

Apesar de Pessoas Normais estar na posição 25 de melhores livros do século XXI do Guardian, sempre fiquei com pé atrás de lê-lo por sua hiperpopularização, mas acho que foi algo parecido com a Ferrante Fever: é excelente e merece ser popularizado.
Não lembro de nenhum outro livro ter me drenado emocionalmente tanto quanto esse da Sally Rooney, quanto mais eu lia, mais eu chorava, e quanto mais eu chorava, mais eu lia, tanto que tive que ficar alternando dias em que o lia compulsivamente, com dias em que me afastava completamente porque me esgotava de forma vertiginosa e não queria sentir tudo como se fosse me desmembrar.
Agora é ver a minissérie, a qual espero ser menos intensa.

This book will be with me for a while. It made me think, it made me cringe, and it transported me back to the time when I was the same age as the protagonists Marianne and Connell. I cannot say that I particularly liked either one of them, but at least Marianne had grown up by the end of the novel which is something that I cannot say about Connell. I am uncertain that Connell will ever know who he is because he seems to depend too much on other people and who they think he is. If Marianne tells him that he tries to deny it.

Of course, Marianne has many problems herself, but she is also the more interesting character of the two - at least in my mind. Although financially not worried because of her family background, she has experienced show more abuse, physically and psychologically, by her brother and neglect by her mother by not defending Marianne from her abusive brother. Nobody should be surprised that Marianne, while being strong and independent on the one hand, also has a very submissive side. However, she is still the one who chooses which people can see that side of her.

The language is probably what I liked the most about this little novel. Sally Rooney picked her words carefully, and they hit the readers hard and make them cringe. Her language is very precise and leaves little doubt on how to look at the situation she describes. At the same time, this straightforwardness reminds me a lot of how I looked at the world when I was the age of Marianne and Connell. There was very little gray, but a lot of black and white, and it took a few years to understand that the world is not that simple.

The author touches on many issues, such as socio-economic difference and their impact on people’s lives, peer pressure, coming of age, and mental health. I highly recommend this novel, but I am also saying it is not exactly happy reading. It will make you think, though, and is that not what a good book is supposed to do? show less

Simply put, this novel made me cry. I haven't found myself so attached to characters since my YA filled days of middle school. Rooney's characters are so broken but so loveable. These characters are so connected and drawn to each other that I feel connected and drawn to them as well. While I normally find excessive and drawn-out sex scenes unnecessary, they serve a purpose in Normal People. These relationships really do feel like those of "normal people," and I look forward to reading more from Sally Rooney in the future.

Perfect example of how someone can both love and hate a story. This book made me root for and against its characters at all different times. It made me angry as a woman, and compassionate as a lover scorned. It made me feel seen, and it made me feel invisible. This is not a love story in how anyone wishes to believe it... but it is a love story. The upsetting genius of this novel is its authenticity. The relationship, conflicts, betrayals and support between the two characters does reflect real life circumstances more often than we'd like to believe. What is love, and what is happiness, has evolved (or devolved depending on how you interpret it). Are they better for knowing each other, or worse? How much can our psyches, wants and show more truths be defined by the experiences we have with others? This book is a fascinating case study in psychology. show less

Sally Rooney returns to the well of Millennial ennui for her second bout of superficial mood-wrangling, providing her usual mix of decent prose crafting and by-now well-polished atonal voyeurism. This, bafflingly, is considered a recipe for both bestsellerdom and critical acclaim, which says more about us and about the publishing industry than it does about the objective quality of the author's work.

Normal People is just a higher grade of chick-lit; Catherine Cookson with a better press and the good fortune to emerge in a hyper-feminised society. Marianne, the protagonist, is the misfit girl who won't be bound by society's rules, who meets a popular, handsome boy who's also incredibly sensitive and he completely changes for her. This show more boy, Connell, is the self-projection, the safe vehicle for woman's self-worth, "big and gentle, like a Labrador" (pg. 119), who accepts his 'male privilege' (pg. 96) and defers to Marianne's rightness on political issues like Israel and austerity, while all the time staring at her longingly and yearning to talk about his feelings. (As a sidebar, perhaps women who complain about the 'male gaze' in fiction should consider the propensity for women to write similarly cheap male characterization, where male sexual prospects are either undeserving macho jocks or tortured Mr. Darcys who need women to save them from themselves. I also have yet to find a book where the man in question is unattractive, or less than attractive.)

Of course, Marianne and Connell break up, because men are pigs and people don't understand you, and the girl-fantasy continues as Marianne becomes pretty and popular after high school with a cool boyfriend, and Connell is lonely and repentant. Normal People then proceeds in a cycle of feminised dystopia, where the female way is invariably the right way and the male way is blundering. The two hook up repeatedly over the years, with little interest in behaving like mature grown-ups, and Rooney gives her girl-fantasy a free pass for everything. Marianne dates a bunch of guys, asking them to beat her and choke her and fulfil all her self-pitying sluttish fantasies (the Venn diagram showing the Rooney demographic and the 50 Shades of Grey demographic must be near enough a single circle), and when they do, she is a blameless victim, and it's patriarchy trying to 'break her' with the "aim of subjugating some force in her personality" (pg. 192). That's the victim narrative in a nutshell: indulgence without responsibility, but with plenty of hostility.

The book is the self-image of those wine aunts who are the self-appointed tastemakers of the contemporary publishing, journalism and blogging industries, and because it panders to all of their tastes, they elevate it to high literature. It is not enough to simply be a good piece of chick-lit; no, it has to be justified, so one can claim to be a patron of the arts without having to work too hard, like those Marvel fans who talk about the seventeenth or eighteenth superhero film in three years as though it was Citizen Kane. Rooney, surprisingly, goes off the reservation at one point (alas, only once) and skewers this mindset far more succinctly than I can:

"...a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured… It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything." (pg. 221)

My heart leapt. This passage, incidentally, is in the only patch of the book where Rooney really finds a gear, and any joy I got out of the book came from an extra-curricular recasting of it as a devilish satire on the very people whose self-esteem it overloads. I don't believe this is the case (as I wrote in my review of Conversations with Friends, I fear Rooney is genuine) but any flickering of self-awareness in the Millennial Room 101 is welcome, for its own sake, and with the author's legitimate potential I long for a future Rooney novel where the only annoying thing is the over-egged gushing of the reviews (which are, after all, beyond her control).

We're still a long way from that. Even if this book is right up your street, once the self-gratification buzz dies down and the wine starts to clear from your head and your social media post about it has stopped getting likes, it becomes evident that there are a number of problems with Normal People. Even if you accept unconditionally the book's conceptual framework that all men are patriarchal pigs (albeit unwitting ones), it is disappointing that Alan, Marianne's brother, is given zero motivation for hating her, nor is any of her family. This is where plot and characterisation are meant to intersect – for a good novel – and each would feed off the other. Rooney, in contrast, is fairly good at the characterisation of the two main characters (not least because she tells us, at great length, precisely how they are feeling after they go into psychoanalytical meltdown about every little thing) but she fails to tie it in any way to plot, theme or setting (Ireland is non-descript, as are colourless scenes in Sweden and Italy). She can cut onions, but hasn't prepared a meal.

The book is decent enough for what it is (even if that is lesser than what they say it is), and it is far from the nadir of the Creative Writing, networking-and-Master's-degree trend. In this environment, every man and his dog (or every woman and her cat) can show up to the workshop and if they learn the basics and explore their feelings then… Art, I guess. The problem is that this may well be crowding out genuine variety in the commissioning of novels. In pandering to the assumptions and prejudices of the established networks, this is the sort of thing we end up with en masse: literature for people grown up on a diet of YA. In Normal People, we get an extensive description of coffee and pastry (pg. 185), and absorbent characterisation (always a safe space for insecure readers unwilling to do a bit of heavy lifting in a novel), yet the book can mention Edward Snowden (pg. 156), austerity, communism and Palestinian liberation (pg. 47), and the issue of free speech on campuses (pg. 80), and yet never take them further than that. They are there for colour and identity, derisory texturing to a central soap opera that is devoid of the warp and weft of literary plotting, or even a sense of place, and Rooney is not even remotely interested in using her literary licence to approach such dangerous ideas. This is important, as she has the observational skills of a good writer, an ear for dialogue and a facility for sentence construction. But her glum, overcast schtick is going to wear thin, and if she wants to write literature as opposed to what the here-today-gone-tomorrow critics claim is literature (and boy, they'll show just how much their advocacy is worth when the inevitable backlash comes), then she'll have to find a braver canvas. Aside from one brief sally towards the end, where Rooney threatens to be interesting (opening a door into male suicide that she swiftly slams shut), she hasn't done anything 'astonishing', no matter what the Independent might say. Even if you like this stuff, and think my criticisms harsh or irrelevant, just consider – for a moment – how a female writer like Emily Brontë might have tackled this material, and wonder if we should perhaps not raise our standards a little. show less