A critique of “Normal People,” by Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney has done it again. Her first book, Conversations with Friends, introduced the reading public to the psychological novel of the 21st century. Like its predecessor, Normal People captures the hazards facing twenty-somethings in a world without moral markers.

At 28, Rooney is herself a millenial. She is smart, well-read and able to probe deeply into the ambiguities of living for people of her generation. In Normal People, she puts the friendship of two soon-to-graduate schoolmates, Connell and Marianne, under the microscope. We watch them through a series of tightly focused events and conversations that hop-scotch through their next four years as college students. Their deep attachment to each other propels them to an unsettling understanding of the “normal” of the book’s title.

Rooney keeps to her familiar setting: western Ireland, Dublin and Trinity College.

Conversations with Friends is narrated as a stream of conscience foray into the inner life of a 21-year-old student and performance artist. Normal People, narrated in the third person, distances the reader from its two main characters.

We know from the beginning that, though they both are top performing students, Connell and Marianne are as different in demeanor and class as any two in their small town of Carricklea could be. Lorraine, Connell’s mother, cleans house for Marianne’s mother, a solicitor. He’s from a “loving home,” the only child of an unwed mother. She’s from a family of well-fixed professionals, dismissive and unfeeling.

Connell is outgoing, popular and conventionally handsome; Marianne is standoffish, solitary and considered odd by her fellow students. We learn how much Connell cares about how others see him and how little Marianne does. Yet each is cloaked in secrecy. He wonders if he is normal sexually. “Any time he has had sex in real life, he has found it so stressful as to be largely unpleasant, ” Rooney writes. Marianne is mistreated physically by her brother and mentally by her mother. Her cold disdain for conventionality is a coverup for her sense of unworthiness.

They make a pact to keep secret their relationship as it deepens. To say that Rooney writes beautifully about sex would be an understatement. As in the first time they go to bed together: “When he touched her that night she was so wet, and she rolled her eyes back in her head and said: God, yes. And she was allowed to say it, no one would know. He was afraid he would come then just from touching her like that.”

The word “normal” appears again and again throughout the book: “He couldn’t summon up the energy to act normal”; “He looked in the rearview mirror like it’s a normal day;” Connell “finds he is curiously eager to impress on Lorraine how normal their relationship is.” “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Marianne says. “I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.”

Though we spend some time with Marianne apart from Connell, it’s mostly to understand better how damaged she is. This is Connell’s story and Connell’s struggle with coming of age. It is through his growth we experience how knowing another person can transform your life. A couple of key events illustrate how interdependent they are on each other emotionally.

Rooney prefaces the book with a citation from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda

It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation til some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.

There is something peculiarly nineteenth century about Sally Rooney’s sensibility in Normal People. It made me want to go back and read George Eliot or a little Henry James.