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Style of the Times: Sally Rooney’s Normal People

I wrote about the Irish writer Sally Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, at the beginning of this year. I didn’t think it was a bad book, but I wasn’t sure how far I agreed with the treatment of politics in it, either. I’ve now finished Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, which has recently been made into a TV show, and as before I’m left pretty unsure of what to make of it. Rooney has a huge amount of talent, especially for realistic dialogue and the little details that make life in the 2010s life in the 2010s. But I’m struggling to escape the feeling that all these little details don’t actually add up to a cohesive, worthwhile, package. I’m a little worried that Normal People is like a grand façade on an ancient building that a tourist excitedly enters, only to discover there is nothing inside but dust.

Below I want to explain what I mean.

The title card of the first episode of the Normal People TV show. I haven’t seen it, but I’d like to.

Hero and Heroine: Connell and Marianne

The first thing I noticed about Normal People is that we have two point-of-view characters, rather than the one of Conversations with Friends. Connell is from a working-class background – he doesn’t know his father, and his mother works as a cleaner at the house of the second character, Marianne. Marianne is our heroine, the daughter of two solicitors, and at the top of the socio-economic pecking order in the small village in West Ireland where Marianne and Connell go to school. The arrangement is effective, in part because Rooney draws both characters well.

By having a working class main character Normal People positions itself to go for a class critique, but by also having Marianne as a representative of a higher class Rooney can dispel, within the context of the novel, certain extreme views that a class-based viewpoint can tend to create. For example, Normal People takes pains to show that though Marianne has money, that doesn’t mean her life is smooth sailing – and not only because she’s weird and non-conforming, but also because of factors outside of her control, like a violent brother and a violent (though dead) father.

The plot of Normal People takes us from the end of the two’s time at school, right up to the end of their time at university. During that time they grow as people, both apart and together. At times they are in a relationship, at times they are barely speaking. Normal People is the record of their changing fortunes, faced with a world that doesn’t see either of them as normal, and of their attempts to fit in.

Class and Language

Normal People is a book that has a lot to say about language in it, just as Conversations with Friends did. Rooney has a great ear for subtleties. On the first page, when we meet Connell, who is the best in their group at school, his simple comment that “Marianne did pretty good too” is already enough to tell us that he is not on the same level in terms of class, however clever they both are. Another time where language serves to convey differences in position is when the two of them discuss how Marianne’s mother employs Connell’s mother, Lorraine. “I don’t think she pays Lorraine very well”, says Marianne. “No, she pays her fuck all”. Even though the language is simple, Rooney does a good job of showing resentment within it. Marianne is only intellectually affected by her mother’s decisions; Connell is directly, financially, touched by them.

Unlike Conversations with Friends, Normal People does not rely too much on text messages and emails. I think this is a good decision, not because we don’t communicate by them, but because they do reduce the immediacy of things that can be done in person – after all, it’s the job of the author to arrange their characters in such a way as to make the story lively. Too much veracity is always a bad thing. At one point, Connell thinks of writing a novel using only emails, but dismisses the idea. He decides, quite rightly, that it would probably be too gimmicky. Unfortunately we don’t use emails like we once used letters, and trying to pretend otherwise would be foolish.

Trinity College in Dublin, the most prestigious Irish university. It is not Connell’s natural environment, not by a long shot. But for Marianne, who’s been brought up in a world of privilege, it’s easy for her to fit in.

The Lads and Sex

Normal People also has a lot to say about sex and violence. That’s probably good, because these things are rather important. One thing I liked is that Rooney does a lot to show that men can suffer from sexual violence, just as women can. Early on in Normal People we hear about a schoolteacher, Ms Neary, who has kept Connell back after class a few times, and once touched his tie. Connell feels he can’t talk about it with anybody, though, because “people will think he’s trying to brag”. Just as women often can’t talk about sexual assault for fear of their concerns being dismissed, so too can men struggle to be taken seriously. Connell later meets Ms Neary again, after his graduation, and she attempts to sleep with him. He manages to escape, but it’s a horrific moment in part because we know how alone he is against her.

Connell is part of a group of lads his home village and it puts him in an awkward position, especially once he starts meeting more intellectual people in Dublin, where he and Marianne both go to university. At one point a friend is showing him naked photos of someone they both know without her consent. Connell is forced into awkward silence, and when he doesn’t actively approve of his friend’s action the friend attacks him for it, saying “you’ve gotten awfully fucking gay about things lately”. Among the lads, of course, a misogynistic view of women is normal, and the response shows how much pressure someone like Connell is under to accept it – the alternative is being cast out. But again, things are more complicated than “boys just being boys”, because the same lad, Rob, dies later on, an apparent suicide.

There’s no defending his sexism. But as with elsewhere in Normal People we’re reminded that our outward expressions can be ways of hiding uncomfortable truths about ourselves. I remember at school when it occasionally turned out that the people who insulted others as “gay” the most were those most in danger of turning out to be so themselves. I don’t mean to say that Rob was gay. Rather, even though he wasn’t portrayed a good person, all the same we should understand that he would have had depths we could not see.

Violence and Humiliation

Rooney’s pared-down, numb style is particularly good at dealing with violence, thanks to its directness. When Marianne’s brother grabs her arm, there are no flowery metaphors to get in the way of the sheer unpleasantness of it. But far worse than that is when Marianne is assaulted at a bar:

Let me get you a drink, the man says. What are you having?

No, thanks, says Marianne.

The man slips an arm around her shoulders then.

The man eventually squeezes her breast, in public, without her permission. It’s a difficult thing to read because its easy to imagine how it was.

Marianne eventually ends up in a few equally nasty relationships involving humiliating sexual acts. The first is to a rich kid, Jamie. I was pretty disappointed with him, because unlike Connell and Marianne, Rooney’s depiction of the confident right-wing student was cliché-packed and depthless. Concerning a man who robs Connell, Jamie says:

“He was probably stealing to buy drugs, by the way, that’s what most of them do”.

Being someone from the same background as Jamie, I know plenty of people like him. I know plenty of people who think like him, but I do not know anyone who talks like him. In a sea of well-written characters, he sticks out as being a lazy caricature.

Marianne also has a sexual relationship with a Swede while she is on an exchange. This relationship also involves him humiliating her. Both of these relationships are the result of Marianne’s idea that she is a bad person and therefore deserves to be punished. Her sex with Connell is notable because of the absence, at least from his end, of any desire for violence to be involved. He is aware of the violence he, as a man, could wield against her, but the thought causes him disquiet rather than pleasure.

Time and Style

Normal People has a particular structure to it, one that I came to appreciate by the time that I finished it. Each chapter begins with a moment setting the stage for some event. For example, Connell is interrailing and he knows he will soon arrive at the place where Marianne is staying. Then we go back into the past, for a kind of flashback. These flashbacks all serve to add tension to the moments, to set the stakes. For example, why is their meeting likely to be awkward?

I think this has a particular advantage over a linear chronology. In a linear chronology we usually either have to wait to get to moments of great friction, or we end up reading a work that strains credulity through a clockwork use of scenes of scandal. Generally, our lives just go on smoothly. Representing this in a realistic novel would lead to a boring work. But by jumping forwards to a moment of crisis and then going back to explain why it is significant Rooney makes every chapter feel useful.

Except, this only goes so far. Eventually you’re left feeling dislocated, like you’re being jerked backwards and forwards on a broken-down train that’s trying to start running again. Rooney’s habit of making the time between chapters huge is also not something I like. It’s hard to feel close to people when we meet them once every three months. And it also kind of undermines the overall structure of the book. A bit like Nabokov’s Pnin, each chapter of Normal People feels more like a short story than a continuation of a novel. Connell’s relationship with Marianne is also so on-off that it feels you could mess up the order of the chapters and still get a workable novel out of it at the end. Perhaps that says something about modern relationships, though. Whatever the case, it doesn’t make for a particularly enjoyable reading experience.

And that’s in part why I haven’t spoken about the plot, because there isn’t really one. Connell dates a nice girl called Helen, but they fall out and break up (off the page! – another thing I don’t like is that Rooney uses time-skips as an alternative to actually writing important moments). Connell gets depression. Marianne goes to Sweden. Marianne has a fight with Jamie. Connell writes a story. People drink a lot and sleep around. The order isn’t quite right, but who cares. It’s not particularly interesting, and the fact of the time shifts means even serious topics, like depression, feel kind of temporary, something that we’ll forget about as soon as the chapter ends.

Conclusion

I get it. Normal People is the zeitgeist. People who are cool and I like have recommended me the same books that Rooney namedrops here – The Golden Notebook, The Fire Next Time. Normal People is also extremely difficult to criticise because a lot of the criticisms can be reasonably attributed not to the book, but to us. The jerky sense of time, the vapid content, all reflect a kind of modern condition. The book wouldn’t be popular if this hadn’t touched a real nerve.

But we need to move beyond describing our problems, and think about their solutions. Rooney’s language, I think, gets in the way of finding them. It is singularly incompatible with any kind of higher feeling. When we’re told, in a football match that,

Everyone screamed, even Marianne, and Karen threw her arm around Marianne’s waist and squeezed it. They were cheering together, they had seen something magical which had dissolved the ordinary social relations between them.

This is telling, not showing. The style doesn’t leave “showing” as a possibility. Real emotion, from the characters rather than us, demands either longform or dialogue. Rooney’s dialogue is fantastic, but not every experience can be spoken. Some can only be felt. The style is extremely limiting in this regard.

In the end, I suppose I liked Normal People, just like I suppose I liked Conversations with Friends. But I was left wanting something more. People need something more. I hope one day Sally Rooney will write a novel which will provide just that.

Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, by Richard Holmes

I was recommended Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by my friend James, who was so impressed by it that his recommendation came to me all in caps. I don’t know what exactly the book is – Holmes himself calls it a “mongrel book” – but it’s awfully good. It is both a work of biography and a work of autobiography, and because of the approach to biography that Holmes takes, it is also a book of travel too. For the “footsteps” of the title are no measly metaphor, but real tracks in the ground. Holmes sees biography not merely as the result of months and years spent absorbed in dusty tomes, but as the fruit of reliving the life of a dead, retracing their steps through the places that had once charmed them so much.

It is this approach that makes Footsteps so special. For what the book really shows is a different way of reading to the usual, casual, one of reading and moving on. Holmes’s approach is marked by a passionate relationship with the author and his or her works. It somehow turns reading from a passive activity into an active one, a tussle with the past. Reading Footsteps, I thought back to the times when I myself had felt great passion for authors – for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Conrad, Foster Wallace and Pynchon and many others – and I found myself wanting. I had not fanned the flame of my own desire, not dug deep into either the books or their authors, but rather been content to glide upon their surfaces. Most importantly, I had not slowed down. Following an artist’s footsteps forces us to stop, to breathe, to focus and enjoy.

Reading Footsteps, I saw how I should be reading. In some sense, the book and its approach are an antidote to the pressures of our time and our relentless rushing about. That’s why it’s so worth reading.

The Structure of Footsteps

Footsteps is divided into four parts, each taken from a different part of Holmes’s life and detailing his encounter with a different writer. These are: Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and finally the French poet Gérard de Nerval. I can’t describe myself as “knowing” any of them well. I had read a story by Stevenson, a few poems by Shelley, and nothing by either Wollstonecraft or Nerval (the latter I’d not even heard of). But a familiarity with the writers is not a prerequisite to enjoying Footsteps, not at all. For Holmes is not offering an appraisal of their works so much as their lives. He uses their works, letters, journals, to emphasise the connection between the writers and the places they’ve been. He anchors each writer in their experience of a moment and place, rather than trying to grab hold of all of them at once.

Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the heroes of Footsteps. Holmes does an excellent job in making us interested in people we’d never been interested in before.

In each section of Footsteps there is a different question obsessing Holmes which he hopes to find the answer to. In Stevenson’s case, for example, Holmes soon discovers that some apparently simple travel writing about a journey in France is much more complex than it first appears. Instead of simply following Stevenson around, Holmes is forced to follow him into his heart, as the writer faces down his doubts about his love for a married American, Fanny Osbourne. In Percy Shelley’s case, Holmes wants to understand the nature of the relationship between the poet and Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife, Mary, during much of their stay in Italy. In the case of Nerval, by contrast, who went mad and committed suicide, Holmes wants to try to salvage some kind of fact from the mass of fabrication and incoherence left in the poet’s wake.

These questions and focuses keep Footsteps from getting out of hand, as is perfectly possible with biography. (Holmes’s full biography of Percy Shelley is over 800 pages). Even in these comparatively short pieces we are introduced to a bewildering array of characters, and each of them seems deserving of detailed investigation. Holmes, who absolutely has done his research, is always able to approach his problems from multiple angles, through multiple voices. Alongside his physical tramplings, this polyphonic approach makes the past come alive not just as a single reanimated authorial figure, but as a vibrant crowd. It makes us aware of just how interesting even a minor figure is, and how we all fit together into a whole.

Mr Holmes

Holmes is a wonderful guide, though not just because he knows his stuff, is passionate, and writes well. He’s also a great guide because of his own almost confessional tone. Just as in Footsteps he draws us near to the dead men and women, so too does he draw us near to himself. It is this that makes the text feel so alive. When he cracks a puzzle, like why Wollstonecraft describes herself as seeing something from her rooms in Paris that ought to have been geographically impossible (it turned out her rooms were on the roof, not the fashionable front rooms biographers expected her to have been given), we share his joy. Likewise, when he is struck with grief – for example, when finding the bridge that Stevenson had crossed “broken, crumbling, and covered with ivy” and being forced to accept that he cannot follow him forever – we share that too.

His openness about the process of biography is part of this. Before Footsteps I had read very little biography, and never thought seriously about the form, especially in respect to other genres. Holmes readily describes the challenges of producing “the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact”, and the way that unlike a novelist, “ordinariness… family intimacy, is the very thing that the biography… cannot share or re-create”. He made me aware of the genre’s limitations – for example, a happy couple will be mostly together, and less likely to write journal entries because each member will have each other, leaving a blank space where the biographer was hoping to find material. Then there is “the fatal past subjunctive” (would have), when the biographer is forced to claim what evidence cannot provide. All things I’d never considered.

Past and Present

Holmes’s active role in Footsteps is also important for another reason. It draws together the past and present (or at least, the latter 20th century). Holmes, who was in his twenties during the May 1968 protests in France, uses the experience of Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley in and after the French Revolution to illustrate his own generation’s ambiguous feelings towards the protests and what they achieved and failed to. Like any historian, Holmes naturally finds connections, and because of his focus on the personal over the general, these connections seem much more fresh and relevant, even to the modern reader, whose hopes for revolution may long have turned to ashes. They make the past immediate, and remind us that reading history is more than a school exercise, but rather gives us a new lens through which to view our own time.

In seeing how writers responded to their times, Holmes also gives us a new way of looking at more modern writers. How does Pynchon’s treatment of the 1960s and disillusionment compare to Shelley’s or Wordsworth’s once the French Revolution was done and dusted? Without biography, it can be hard to ask such questions – we don’t know where to begin.

A photograph of the poet Nerval, one of the subjects of Footsteps
Gérard de Nerval, a French poet whose madness alas was more permanent and fatal than that of Holmes’s. While I found the lack of translations frustrating, Holmes’s own increasingly deranged quest to understand Nerval more than made up for it.

Nerval – journey into madness

The treatment of the character of Gérard de Nerval – for where does the man Gérard Labrunie end and Nerval begin? – was for me the unexpected highlight of Footsteps. The poet himself I can’t say I encountered in any serious way, thanks to Holmes’s unwillingness to translate French quotes. What was interesting, however, was the way that as Holmes pursued Nerval through masses of confusing and often contradictory evidence, he himself began to feel that a normal biography would not be able to make sense of Nerval. Instead, there was an “overflowing of the irrational into the normal forms of biography”, in which Holmes began to believe that it was Tarot cards which held the key to the mystery, rather than books or facts.

In his search to “save” Nerval, Holmes finds himself “slipping further and further into a peculiar and perilous identification with my lunatic subject, as if somehow I could diagnose Nerval by becoming him”. When he finally finishes, he has seven different notebooks in seven different colours, like a kind of talisman. But he has found no answers. He has only succeeded, thankfully only temporarily, in losing himself. It is a final warning for us, that biography, like everything else, must be enjoyed in moderation. We should not seek to become our quarries, only to draw level with them. Otherwise we risk losing our very selves.

Conclusion – Following in Holmes’s Footsteps

I was recently at the museum-house of the poet and painter Max Voloshin, on the coast of the Black Sea. I had not heard of him, but at the museum we were given a detailed tour. He had built the house himself, and it is an insane mass of staircases and doors and secret passageways. One detail I loved was that the windows in Voloshin’s study were arranged so that the sunlight would get in his eyes at exactly midday, as a warning to the artist that it was time to take a break. I left that evening, determined to read him when I had the chance.

The next morning my girlfriend and I decided to visit Voloshin’s grave, which lies above the town at the top of a hill. The tradition is to bring a stone from the seashore up to him, and we both did. The walk took two hours as we fought sweltering heat and tumbling rocks to get to the top. But in the end we made it, and were met with his grave, covered with stones and pebbles, many of them signed with messages for the poet. We both added our own, then we went a little further, and sat down to enjoy the view.

The grave of Max Voloshin
The grave of Max Voloshin, covered with pebbles from the beach below. I was glad to make my own small literary pilgrimage, following in Holmes’s own footsteps.

I was glad, so soon after finishing Footsteps, to put into practice, in a small way, the ideas implicit in Holmes’s book. In climbing that hill I had made my relationship with an author, even one whose works I have not read, personal and active rather than simply passive. As I sat on the hill, looking out over the sea, I stopped, I thought, I breathed. And I felt grateful that I still have plenty of authors to love and plenty of time to love them. Read Footsteps, and then read everything else in the world!

Evgeniy Baratynsky – Four Translations of his Poetry

Evgeny Baratynsky is one of the great poets of the Golden Age of Russian poetry, but he is generally overshadowed by A.S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov, both of whom are more accessible, in part because of their prose works, and in part because of their easily-digestible content. Baratynsky is a solitary figure compared to those others because of his pessimism, comparable to that of Leopardi in Italy. Where Lermontov might look sadly upon his generation, he nonetheless lived a life of action, of active revolt. Baratynsky often gives the impression he doesn’t think it’s worth even trying. He is bitter, but what makes him interesting is that he is also intellectual in vision, where other poets are more emotional. He is not always easy to read in Russian, but teasing out his meanings is a pleasant exercise. Each reading leaves you feeling you’re a little closer to understanding him.  

These translations are only my first attempts at trying to pin down the poet’s soul. I like Baratynsky enough that I can see myself returning to him later, but for now I’ve only prepared these four pieces. After each poem I’ll leave a few words, describing the poem and anything I found interesting about it.

A sketch of Evgeniy Baratynsky
Young and unhappy, as most of us these days are, Evgeniy Baratynsky spent some time in Finland as a soldier, married, then died in Italy at the age of 44, which is pretty old for a Russian poet.

The Poems

Prayer

Lord of Heaven, grant your peace
To a soul ill at ease.
For the errors I've seen
Send oblivion's dark screen;
And to rise to your height,
Give me strength to do right.

This is short and sweet, the kind of prayer that you really can mumble to yourself going to bed. Baratynsky doesn’t seem particularly interested in God – He’s rarely mentioned elsewhere – but I still like this poem. It seems a prayer for our own times, with its sense of anxiety and unease. The divided hopes of the poet – both for strength and for forgetting – reflect his ultimate lack of confidence. An alternative translation for comparison is here .

The unusual anapaestic “- – / – – /”meter and rhyme are the same as are used in the original.

“O thought…”

O thought, your fate’s that of the flower
Which calls the moth with every hour;
Draws in the golden bumblebee;
To whom the loving midge does cling
and whom the dragonfly does sing;
When you have seen your wonders flee
And in your turn have faded grey -
Where then those wings that blessed your day?
Forgotten by the host of flies -
Not one of them has need of you -
Just as your failing body dies
Your seeds bring forth another you.

Baratynsky here shows an interest in the nature of thought. However much an idea may hold interest, that interest often turns out only to be temporary. Ideas come in and out of fashion. But what those who look beneath the surface see is that even a brief contact with an idea can be enough to lead to the creation of a new one from out of the old, so that even apparently forgotten thoughts are never truly in vain.

To a Wise Man

Carefully between our lives’ storms and the cold of the grave, o philosopher,
Hope you to find a safe port - "Calm" is the name that you give it.
We, who are called from the void by the tremulous word of creation
- Our lives are worries alone: life and our worries are one.
He who’s escaped common turmoil will think up a care
For himself: palette or lyre or the words of a pen.
Infants, the world’s newest entrants, its laws as if sensing,
Cry in their cradle the instant they’re born.

This is probably my favourite of Baratynsky’s poems, but of course that doesn’t mean I’ve successfully translated it. The theme is the suffering of existence. We may try to find calm, but ultimately all of us will struggle, whether from our own minds or from the external world. That’s all there is to it, probably. The meter is weird and Classical though, which is cool.

Baratynsky spent a formative period in his youth up in Finland. The picture shows part of Karelia, now Russian but once partially Finnish. The landscape is the same on both sides of the border. I was there last week.

“What use to those enchained…”

What use to those enchained are dreams of being free?
Just look – the river flows, and uncomplainingly,
Within its given banks, according to its course;
The mighty fir is powerless before the force
That binds it where it stands. The stars above are caught
Within the paths an unknown hand believes they ought
To go. The roaming wind’s not free – for it a law
Dictates the lands in which its breath has right to soar.
And to the lot which is our own shall we submit –
Rebellious dreams accept as dreams or else forget.
We, reason’s slaves, must learn obediently to bind
Our deep desires to all those things fate has in mind –
Then happiness and peace shall demarcate our time.
What fools we are! Is it not boundless freedom’s sign
That gives us all our passions? Is it not freedom’s voice
We hear within their torrents? O how hard’s for us the choice
To live while feeling in our beating hearts the fire
That rages in the bounds set by our fate's desire!

Another particular favourite of mine. Baratynsky here does not argue for freedom, as do those rebellious Romantics. Instead, he sees us as failing to follow the subservient example of nature, which happily obeys the limits it has been assigned at birth. But are doomed to suffering precisely because this is something we cannot do. We have passion, which fights against our fate, leading us to our downfalls. This poem is fun because of its form and punctuation and whatnot.  Baratynsky shows how enchained nature is by controlling when he begins and ends the sentences, relative to the line.

Conclusion

Anyway, I like Baratynsky, just as I like Leopardi. Both of them went against the grain with their pessimism, but I like it as an antidote to the baseless optimism we sometimes encounter in our own days. There is a kind of glamour in despair that both capture, and though it is dangerous to wallow, there can certainly be some pleasure in spending time in the poets’ company.

Here are two articles providing more information about Baratynsky. This one includes a translation of Baratynsky’s awesome long poem, “Autumn”, which I could not possibly attempt to translate myself. The other, meanwhile, compares two recent book translations and gives some information about Baratynsky’s life.