Book Review: Normal People
20.09.2021
Book Review | Normal People by Sally Rooney
For a couple of years now I’ve heard people gushing over Sally Rooney novels, obsessing over the BBC adaptation of Normal People, and getting into tit-for-tat arguments over whether her books deserve the celebrity status they’ve been afforded. Whatever people believe, they tend to have pretty strong feelings on Rooney’s writing. So, reading my first - Normal People - was quite a strange experience. I tried to forget both the hype and the negativity, grateful that I actually knew very little about the plot itself, and just read the book in as much of a vacuum as I could.
Ultimately my experience was surprisingly uncomplicated. I really enjoyed Normal People, I found myself picking up the book whenever I had a spare moment, genuinely looking forward to reading onwards, but was also left confused by why it’s become such a phenomenon. It’s easy to read, intelligently written and the ever-changing relationship between the two is compelling. Still though, the characters aren’t hugely fleshed out and I found it sometimes difficult to visualise what they each looked like, moved like, sounded like. That so many readers instantly felt these characters come alive for them somewhat surprised me. When I realise how old Rooney was when she wrote this (26 ish) it does alter things for me a little bit. As someone plowing through their own (hopeful) debut, I can’t help but be impressed by the convoluted emotions and urges she portrays, the messiness she manages to somehow make neatly into a well-structured story.
The book is such a pacy, enjoyable read that it surprises me to sit and think now of all the interesting ideas Rooney has stuffed in there. There’s explorations of family abuse, consensual and non-consensual sex, mental illness, political leanings and class differences. Somehow though the book never felt particularly gritty, the narrative of two people consistently making their way back to each other firmly holding my attention above all else.
A downside to this perhaps is that I didn’t think very deeply about some of these issues. I particularly struggled to understand Connell’s shame at publicly being seen with Marianne. While I absolutely understand the reasoning behind it - Marianne isn’t well-liked at school, his mother works for her mother, status and popularity are important at that age - I still failed, in reading the book, to get a real sense of why it may have been so terrifying for him to take her to the school dance or for it to be known that they were sleeping together. Despite her unpopularity Marianne was gently being semi-befriended by a couple of the girls and Connell was already popular enough. Later in the novel Connell recognises that his thinking was skewed and derides himself for his actions so, perhaps had a larger portion of the book been set during their school days, his thought process may have naturally become clearer to me, the strange hierarchy and heightened fears of school life given a little more time to unfold and permeate.
I absolutely loved the back and forth of their relationship and I think that this is where much of the appeal in this novel lies for so many. Lots of us have found ourselves in relationships where you return to someone over and over again or where miscommunication is rife. There was a part of me that was again frustrated by Connell’s inability to express his feelings to Marianne, by the way the two tiptoed around their feelings for each other while being very openly essentially a couple at university. Regardless, there’s something incredibly realistic about the messiness they create between them, loving feelings intertwined with something more desperate, constantly questioning whether they’re actually good for each other.
Mental illness is touched upon regularly throughout the novel, both explicitly and implicitly. Connell seems to struggle with a sort of low-level anxiety generally, although I felt that this wasn’t consistently well communicated to the reader, which blooms into a heavy depression after the suicide of a friend. I thought this depiction of a man wrestling with his mental health was mostly well-done, particularly the latter section, and I felt quite heartbroken watching him fill in the questionnaire at the therapist’s office incorrectly so as not to seem too mad. I found Marianne’s situation a bit more interesting and multi-faceted. We see right from the beginning that she is badly treated at home, with an abusive and controlling brother and a mother who permits his behaviour. Her father is dead, people are generally horrible to her at school and Connell refuses to be seen in public with her. It all comes together to create a character who is intelligent, independent and yet broken in some way she doesn’t quite understand. Even while she’s at university it appears her family are bankrolling the experience, providing her apartment at least, and so she still regularly returns to the house she’s obviously so unhappy in. It’s easy in this light to see her attraction to Connell and to understand why she allows him to treat her any way he wants, with very little in the way of boundaries.
While there was a discomfort to seeing Connell take advantage of how emotionally vulnerable she makes herself to him, he doesn’t generally mistreat her outside of simply being uncommitted. Throughout the novel, and during periods that the two aren’t together, Marianne’s sense of brokenness is much more dangerous when she comes into contact with other men who are keen to take advantage of how willing she is to be used. Here there’s a conflation between BDSM and nonconsensual violent sex which I couldn’t always separate. I know that some readers are disappointed by this, displeased that BDSM is shown as a dangerous activity and mostly craved by the abused and mistreated women of the world. Personally I liked this conflation because I felt it mirrored Marianne’s own mindset, unsure what she wanted and what she deserved, brought up with violence constantly directed at her. People can, and certainly do, enjoy violence in their sex lives but I got the feeling that Marianne just moved towards it because it was what she knew.
I haven’t read a lot of books set in Ireland and I enjoyed the places, turns of phrase and situations that were uniquely Irish. The atmosphere was always extremely well drawn and I felt right there with them in each place they visited. The pacing of the novel was also great. I often obsess over how to structure pieces of writing and this was a simple yet effective method of moving through the story, jumping a few weeks or a few months at a time and catching the reader up on what had been missed.
For all the nastiness and darkness in the novel, there’s also a great deal of love. Namely between Connell and Marianne but also from Connell’s mother Lorraine who is constantly kind to Marianne, in Connell’s other relationship with Helen and between Marianne and her friend Joanna. I won’t share any spoilers of course but I will say that I was moved by the ending. I thought it was realistic, sensible and a little sad all at the same time. Now, which Sally Rooney do I read next?
PS. When I listed Normal People on my Goodreads page, I flicked through the reviews and saw this absolute blinder. It made me laugh because I had genuinely attempted to do the suppressed sigh thing as well and couldn’t quite get my head around it.