Sally Rooney’s novel NORMAL PEOPLE is a twisting tale of on-off-on lovers, told over several years in a series of haltingly tender, endlessly misfiring conversations and even more misfiring sexual encounters. Its a generous novel, expansive and explicit.
Our story begins with high schoolers in 2011, following Marianne and Connell‘s four years of their young lives, where they are magnetically pulled together. They find that no other relationship in their lives seem to offer what they receive from each other. Connell is popular but quiet, and able to navigate adolescent turmoil. Marianne is an outsider, disdainful of all things related to high school and their town. A betrayal separates them at the end of high school until they reunite at university several months later, where their roles seem to shift. Marianne has found her groove and settles into uni life while Connell is struggling to find his footing. Repeatedly they are drawn to each other, to the detriment of anyother relationship.
Rooney questions whether or not their relationship benefits both. Or would they be better off cutting ties or accepting what pulls them together. The author’s narrative moves easily between two very different characters. Rooney stays in third person but is clear on whether we are viewing the world from Marianne’s or Connell’s perspective. She grounds the reader by beginning each chapter with the month and year highlighting how much time has passed since the last time period. Shifting between characters lets us see how they view the world and each other, seeing them more fully understand each other’s perspective.
The misunderstandings aren’t your bog-standard sort but ones based on social, economic and family differences predicated on the fact that different people communicate in different ways and sometimes even when you’re crystal clear, another person doesn’t hear the true meaning behind your words. Yet its the sex that ricochetes widely keeping Rooney’s hook in us, although one has to wonder, why the fighting was so glaringly obvious from page eleven! Structurally it is clever how the writing constantly loops back on itself; revisiting past moments, conversations and events, adding to their contingent confusion, regrets and anxieties. Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the lightning-shock of first love and the complex entanglements of family and friendships.
Some will enjoy her style, the way she juxtaposes ordinary moments with emotional discharges, ones with plenty of uncertainty, while others may find her style shallow, hollow, impersonal and predictable.
Marianne comes from a wealthy abusive family while Connell was raised by a mom with bouts of anxiety and depression. Some may find they have issues they can’t cope with but romantically their differences melt away. That’s why different opinions open up the conversations, don’t you think?…. The pair are self-involved, thats for sure.. One disappointment for me is that by the end of the story neither Marianne or Connell show any character-growth. That’s perhaps what makes the book both frustrating and exhilarating is Rooney’s dialogue which is whip-sharp and entertainingly smart yet sincere enough to feel at times pretentious, while she weaves astute commentary about class and socioeconomic status.
I like the way the book sometimes reads like a interpersonal train wreck with the author contributing the first 200 pages to miscommunication and its indirectness. She leaves Marianne’s character with so much unexplored and loaded with potential, considering that there is a lot of quality content in NORMAL PEOPLE about consent & power within sex, mental health and help-seeking. I wish there was more growth for these characters outside their relationship which could be seen as a profoundly lonely and a depressing love story. Despite the two being angsty and flawed, marred by unlikable characteristics, one cannot stop caring about them precisely because they are weird and awkward.
There’s plenty of irony here, and perhaps self-conscious posturing but also earnestness, truth and kindness, as well as our protagonists rebuild themselves transitioning in life which in the real world allows some to strive, while others to stumble.
People will be people in Rooney’s stories with passages of interest sandwiched between a lot of wooden dialogue and flat descriptions . I ponder on how people will feel by the end of the book. Guess what; at the conclusion, there is still miscommunication! In the end, its the complex relationship between the two, their incredible closeness and yet their dysfunction which maks Sally Rooney’s novel stand out.
