Normal People Book Review
One of the first things I liked about Sally Rooney’s Normal People was how she chose to express the duality of thought that her characters experience.
In many forms of fiction, if a character is certain that they have a particular feeling for another person, the writer might decide to hint at some second thoughts until it all bubbles up to an important revelation. However, in Normal People, Rooney establishes the contradictory feelings of her male protagonist, Connel, from the outset. He is both attracted to the female protagonist, Marianne, and revolted by her at the same time. Moreover, Rooney does this simply by describing each feeling in detail, then plainly stating that Connel does not know how to resolve the two. It’s a straight forward method that on the surface might not seem out of place in a young adult novel, but because the emotions are so acutely observed by Rooney and because they exist at such polar ends of the spectrum, it feels a lot more mature than that. A review blurb from Elle magazine, in fact, even goes so far as to say that the millennial generation would be happy to accept her as its spokesman, and while I’m inclined to cringe at any article that attempts to draw strict lines between generations, I can see why she’d be a fitting choice for the title. Because if there’s one quality I’d ascribe to people raised within the past few decades it would be in their access to a more sophisticated set of tools to understand their emotions. That said, in some ways, the book does skew towards kids of the twentieth century rather than those of the twenty-first.
Normal People charts the relationship between Connel and Marianne over the course of four years in Ireland. When we first meet them in 2011, they’re close to finishing school and are preparing to set off to university. Though in 2011 I myself was a little bit older, their experience actually felt quite close to my own, in part because Rooney sidelines social media as a core part of teenage life. It’s difficult for me to say exactly when the likes of Facebook and its successors became such an integral part of the coming of age experience, but when I look back over those years, I know that it was already a bit of a sensation back in 2009, which makes it feel a bit lacking in a story that utilises peer pressure among a young group of friends as a main source of tension. The truth is, Rooney could have set the story five years prior and it would have felt more true to life than it does now, wherein she only ever gives slight nods to the online world. This is an extremely minor gripe though and I only mention it because of how interesting it is to acknowledge the monumental changes that occurred in society over such a short span of time. Really, the main point I want to make is that I was actually taken aback by what it was like to see a similar experience to my own reflected in the book.
Most coming of age stuff I experienced as a kid had been American. In movies like The Breakfast Club, Dazed and Confused, American Pie, and Super Bad, I was familiarised with a sheltered suburban world that was largely divided between jocks and nerds and where coming of age generally meant a neverending search for beer and the chance to get laid. Well, in Ireland, you’re legally allowed to drink alcohol at the age of eighteen and it’s kind of socially acceptable to experiment with it a few years prior. Indeed, at the beginning of Normal People, the kids are organising the details of their prom over a couple of drinks in a night club. Moreover, Connel and Marianne are sexually active from the getgo. On one level, it was just surprisingly refreshing to see a world I was familiar with. I hadn’t really noticed how little of it I’d seen in my choices of media over the years. On another though, the differences are also interesting in how they highlight the stale formula that many coming of age stories have come to rely on in their focus on these cultural landmarks that are supposedly important in the development of young women and men. You know, something like losing your virginity can be seen as this dividing line between your childhood years and adult ones. But when you strip away its status as this universal right of passage, you get to see these young minds mature in a much more complex manner. The majority of the book, as it happens, is actually set during Connel and Marianne’s college years and follows them as they break up and get back together again on a number of different occasions. As the plot develops, it would seem they’re stuck in a neverending loop, but each time they reunite you get to see how much they’ve changed in the interim.
I suppose the book falls on the literary side of things, so I don’t want to give you the impression that it’s all that easy to summarise. I’m probably simplifying things far too much by only describing it as a coming of age story, but for me, that really was the stand out feature. This duality of thought Connel experiences as a teenager is a stage we all go through at some point. The question as he leaves school and progresses into college is whether he’ll be able to resolve them. To some extent, this is literally just the developmental process of a young person’s brain, however, it also becomes a question of whether he’ll be mature enough to really examine his own emotional state and decide what it all means. Marianne too has her own problems and whether she’ll actually be able to find any value in herself as a person is a major question of the book. All told, everything I’m saying here is probably just a small part of the novel’s success. Normal People is an incredible years-long romance. I talk about Connel and Marianne separately here, but I think much of the fascination you’ll experience on reading it will be with the qualities that emerge anytime they’re brought together. Of course, If you’ve already read it then you probably know what I mean and might enjoy another book along those lines, in which case you should check out my video on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
