Fifty Books Project 2023

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Yeah, well, he says to Marianne.  I wasn’t that compatible with Rachel, I don’t think.

Marianne smiles now, a coy little smile.  Hm, she says.

What?

I probably could have told you that.

Yeah, you should have, he says.  You weren’t really replying to my texts at the time.

Well, I felt somewhat abandoned.

I felt a bit abandoned myself, didn’t I? says Connell.  You disappeared.  And I never had anything to do with Rachel until ages after that, by the way.  Not that it matters now or anything, but I didn’t.

Normal People is a very simple novel, telling the story of Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan and the viscitudes of their relationship over four years beginning in high school.  When we meet them they are in the Irish equivalent of twelfth grade, taking tests and applying to university.  Connell is the mildly handsome, popular, athletic son of a single mother who cleans houses for a living.  Marianne is nerdy, unpopular and unattractive.  She has no friends despite being from a wealthy family.  Her redeeming feature in the opening is that she is willing to keep her growing friendship with Connell secret so that he won’t need to reveal that they know each other because his mother cleans her mother’s house.  

Of course, he also won’t have to risk the social cost of befriending someone of such low standing and as their relationship develops into a seemingly loving sexual one, he continues to keep it secret, only occasionally admitting his true reasons:  he is insecure enough to fear social estrangement.  Marianne is submissive enough to let him get away with this for a time.  In fact, much of the novel involves Marianne getting over a serious problem with submitting to the whims of men while Connell learns to be honest with himself.

A friend who is a very astute reader dismissed the novel as “slight,” and the criticism is not unfounded.  The plot involves Connell and Marianne breaking up and getting back together four or five times over the course of 4 years.  He asks another girl to the Debs (apparently like an American prom) despite the fact that he is sleeping with Marianne and she finally dumps him.  But they both go to Dublin (their hometown is near Sligo in the west of Ireland) and when they meet again in college Connell is lonely and estranged by his poverty (he is on scholarship) while Marianne has taken advantage of the opportunity to start over, and is thriving away from her abusive family.  They meet at the party and renew their relationship.  From that point on the pattern is clear – if they are together at the beginning of the chapter, they will break up by the end.  If they are separated at the beginning of the chapter, they will get back together in that chapter.  

However, I found their relationship both moving and absolutely believable.  Rooney paints them as complex and compelling characters.  She has a great ability to capture the thinking of each character in compressed interior scenes combined with a great visual knack for portraying them as moving, talking, breathing in ways that illuminate their interior lives.  This externalization or dramatization of their interior lives is what really moves the book forward.  Though there is very little dramatic action, there is a great sense of theater in watching them circle closer and farther away from each other.

There is also a great old-fashioned sense that they belong together – even their earliest conversations are intensely emotional and honest.  The missed communication and immaturity that keeps getting in the way seems realistically frustrating and I sensed their relationship spiraling towards something rather than just repeating itself.

Throughout all this, Rooney gives us a fairly deep and realistic sense of their psychology.  Connell is the only child of a single mother who has never revealed who his father is.  While they have a healthy relationship, he struggles with a deep-seated sense of self-loathing that stems in part from his fear that his mother regrets having him.  Marianne’s homelife is full of physical and emotional abuse and she tends to get involved with men who dominate and abuse her – Connell’s secrecy being the least of it.  Her later relationships are frankly and openly sadomasochistic and whenever they are together Connell understands that he can do whatever he would like to her.  It is the tale of them learning how to deal with that dynamic that deepens and broadens the novel.

I enjoyed the book immensely and will miss these characters.  I know I have the mini-series to look forward to, but I think that – for her visual sense, her compression and her humanism, I will look into her other novel.