Somebody saw me carrying Sally Rooney’s new novel, Normal People, and asked me what it was about. In the moment I was a little stymied. This person was just looking to make casual conversation in an elevator, not hear my detailed analysis. I wound up just telling him it was about a rich girl and a working-class boy and their on-again, off-again relationship. Despite being true, that’s woefully inadequate.
So here’s what Normal People is about: It’s about all the ways we hurt other people and ourselves. It’s about miscommunications and misunderstandings. It’s about betrayal. It’s about love and how love sometimes isn’t enough to overcome the barriers between people, including the ones we put up ourselves. It’s also just about the best damn novel I’ve read in a really long time.
Marianne Sheridan lives with her brother and her widowed mother in the biggest house in her small Irish town. No one at school likes her very much and that doesn’t bother her since she’d rather be left alone. She discovers an unlikely bond though with Connell Waldron, a fellow student and the son of her family’s cleaning lady. Connell’s the star of the school football team and one of the most popular boys in his class. He’s also smart and sensitive, though he doesn’t like to let on about it at school.
When Connell and Marianne begin sleeping together they do so without telling anyone, meeting in private and ignoring each other in school. At the start it’s something the both agree is for the best, but as their connection deepens the reasons for this secrecy shift and become confusing and hurtful to one or the other. When they’re alone together everything seems perfect but as soon as anything from the outside world enters into the picture things get complicated.
Rooney follows Connell and Marianne through years of back and forth, into university and beyond, through minor disagreements and major life events. Rooney has a great sense for the massive reverberations of seemingly insignificant moments. She can break your heart in record time. At one point Marianne asks Connell a four-word question and it will be a long time before I stop thinking about it.
It’s easy to resort to cliches when talking about a book like Normal People. It’s “finely wrought” or “exquisite.” To me the best thing you can say about a novel is that it just felt true, and that’s certainly true of Normal People.
