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.
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.
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.