Normal People: Sally Rooney’s eye for young romance

Just her second book, Sally Rooney’s Normal People is brilliant and has already been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Detail from the cover of Normal People, by Sally Rooney.

Last year Sally Rooney was the buzziest of buzzed-about new novelists, deservedly praised for her incendiary debut Conversations with Friends.

The wildly accomplished book from the then 26-year old ­sparkled with irrepressible energy, wisdom, and razor-edge dialogue that demolished the pretensions of moneyed, arty elites in Dublin and was hailed as an instant addition to the Irish literary canon.

When news surfaced that we could expect a new novel from Rooney this year, we critics began sharpening our poppy-scythes and ­rubbing our slimy mitts together in anticipation of an old-fashioned sophomore take-down of this bright young thing.

No such luck, I’m afraid. Normal People is brilliant. It has already been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In a deliberate pivot from her extroverted, dialogue-driven debut, ­Rooney has produced an intensely introspective narrative concerned with a will-they-or­-won’t-they love story.

At a glance, this seems more like a debut novel than Conversations with Friends: less plot driven, more concerned with an intimate study of character and emotion and the interior landscape of youth.

The titular normal people are Connell and Marianne, teens when we meet them, who grow up in the same small town in western Ireland, but in very ­different worlds.

Marianne is a cerebral loner who lives with her wealthy but emotionally distant family while Connell lives with his mother, a sole parent who works as a cleaner in Marianne’s house. Connell, smart, handsome and popular, is something of a home-town hero. Marianne is just as intelligent, but socially an outcast.

“In school he and Marianne affect not to know each other. People know that Marianne lives in the white mansion with the driveway and that Connell’s mother is a cleaner, but no one knows of the special relationship between these facts.”

They talk, start sleeping together, and don’t tell anyone. He is too embarrassed to be sleeping with a loser and she tacitly agrees not to say anything. When Connell asks a different, more socially acceptable girl to the graduation ball, Marianne is distraught enough to stop speaking to him and stop attending school.

Six months later they run into each other at Dublin’s elite Trinity College, and find their situations are reversed. She is popular, with an ­instinctual understanding of how to fit in with wealth and privilege, and he feels provincial and awkward, racked by anxiety and guilt.

They are kept apart by their own insecurities, foibles, the vicissitudes of circumstance. As time passes, the pressures of class and economic reality weigh heavily on ­Connell and Marianne in the same way coolness and popularity once did.

Through a series of vignettes, we zoom in and out of their shared lives as they hook up, break up, fight and reunite.

As far as plot goes, it’s rather sketchy and threadbare (romance is not a subject that’s ­historically been neglected in literature), but elevated by the sheer virtuosity of the writing. Rooney’s seriousness and sensitivity in telling a love story rebukes and reminds us not to ­dismiss the material. Indeed, what could be more important?

Rooney paints love as a giddy and somewhat dangerous fairground ride. For four years we follow the two young lovers as they orbit each other, are flung closer or farther apart, occasionally colliding with and maiming the other.

Rooney has an astonishing eye for the ­intricacies of young romance. She maps out the battlefield of adolescent and young adult relationships, and the damage we do to each other, with the cool, forensic eye of a crime scene investigator.

Starting from the first emotional wounds inflicted and suffered in high school, Rooney explores a spectrum of abuse, from innocuous-seeming embarrassments to deep-seated pathologies.

She articulates profound truths: youth is not carefree, the damage we do to each other while growing matters, trauma compounds and is built into the personalities of the adults that teenagers will some day become.

The energy of the writing suggests the book was written quickly, but it contains few of the flaws that typically accompany that dynamism. It takes immense talent to write this well and make it look so easy. In certain moods, Rooney recalls the young James Joyce and his Dubliners, marooned to loneliness by paradigms both personal and social.

While Joyce’s talent bloomed (see what I did there?) in an Ireland that was sloughing off Catholic hegemony and reeling from the resulting social cataclysm, Rooney’s characters stagger under the weight of the financial crisis, during which the glowing future promised to Irish youth was snatched away by hubris.

Rooney has a great feel for the capricious nature of fate: how a life can turn out happy or miserable based on the impact of one sentence spoken in anger, or never spoken at all out of fear. Every few chapters a line of dialogue is misunderstood, misheard or simply never spoken, and the consequences are disastrous for Connell and Marianne as they churn through unhappy relationships in an effort to forget each other.

Rooney explores all this with glancing, ­deceptively playful prose. She handles melancholy, melodrama and rueful, playful humour with the same compulsive, driving rhythm.

This is a novel that one enjoys like comfort food, with delight, all in a rush, and only once it has been consumed does one realise how formidable and nourishing it is, how heavy it sits inside you, a treat that you’ll be digesting long after you leave the table.

Liam Pieper’s most recent novel is The Toy Maker.

Normal People

By Sally Rooney.

Faber, 228pp $29.99