Book Review: Normal People by Sally Rooney
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Publisher: Hogarth
Publication Date: April 16, 2019
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins.
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
Normal People is the story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t.
Normal People starts when Connell and Marianne are in high school in a small town in Ireland. Although Connell poor (his mother cleans Marianne’s mother’s home), he is athletic and popular in school. Even though Marianne comes from a wealthy family, she’s kind of a weirdo and doesn’t have any friends. She and Connell strike up a friends with benefits type situation but Connell insists they keep their relationship a secret, worried that if it gets out he’s sleeping with Marianne, it will lower his social status.
They both head to Trinity College, an elite private school in Dublin. There the tables are turned. Marianne fits in with the other wealthy students, while Connell feels like an outsider. My favorite line in the book is Connell’s observation of the other students at a party:
“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
Throughout college, Marianne and Connell break-up and get back together a few times, dating other people in-between. Their break-ups are usually precipitated by some sort of misunderstanding. The kind that makes you want to jump in the book and shake them. Just communicate with each other for goodness sake!
Some of the reviews I read after reading Normal People indicate that its theme is class. While that didn’t jump out at me as the theme while I was reading it, looking back on it now, I can see that it is about class to some extent. Marianne and Connell are definitely of different classes and it does have an effect on the way they each see the world and relate to one another.
Normal People has also been called the first great millennial novel. Speaking as a Gen Xer, I can see why it’s been called that but I think that anyone can appreciate it, although maybe not as much as a millennial might. My book club that is made up of mostly baby boomers were lukewarm on it overall. I enjoyed it enough that I plan to read Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, which is supposed to be fairly similar and just as good, if not better. Normal People has been made into a limited series on Hulu which I also plan to check out. I’ll keep you posted on what it’s like.
(I received a complimentary copy of this book for review.)
