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Normal People, by Sally Rooney (spoilers included)
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As Sheila noted elsewhere, this book has also been made into a TV series through a collaboration between BBC and Hulu, although I haven't watched it.
Just in case you want the bio info from the New Yorker but can't get free access, I've copied it here:She (Rooney) was born in Castlebar in 1991. Marie Farrell, her mother, taught math and science and spent two years volunteering in Lesotho in the eighties. Eventually, she became the director of the Linenhall, a community arts center in Castlebar. (“A lady with no airs but an abundance of graces Marie Farrell eschews the stereotype arty image betimes associated with the discipline,” a tribute in the local newspaper read.) Kieran Rooney, Sally’s father, worked as a technician for Ireland’s state-owned telecom company. (It was privatized in 1999.) He and Farrell took Sally and her two siblings to church, but they were more passionate about passing on socialist values. Marx’s dictum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” was the household catechism. During the financial crisis, which ravaged Ireland’s economy, Kieran took an early-retirement package.
Farrell recalls Rooney as a quickly frustrated child who wouldn’t countenance anything that didn’t interest her. (Rooney says that the trait endures, and claims “excessive laziness at anything I’m not good at.”) High school, at St. Joseph’s Secondary School, an all-girls institution where Rooney had to wear a “blue sweater, gingham shirt, and lumpy gray pinafore, which I loathed,” was a particular trial. “I just found it kind of baffling, the whole institution of school,” Rooney said. “I was, like, Does no one see that this is repressive, and that there are more of us than there are of them?” She boycotted homework. “My parents were very much, like, Fight your own battles,” she recalled. She spent hours online, “more comfortable with text than with actual personal interactions.” She said, “I was someone who, in a very disorganized way, was thirsty for knowledge. I liked having access to anything I wanted to know. I still find myself using that aspect of the Internet a lot. I usually have ten open tabs on my phone browser, and they’ll all be, like, ‘What is the boiling point of gold?’ Or ‘frogfish chameleons.’ I saw a frogfish on a nature documentary, and I wanted to know if they are genetically related to chameleons, because they have similar facial characteristics. I don’t think I found anything conclusive.”
Rooney began writing stories as a teen-ager. She says that they were terrible (“possibly my understanding of human beings was just not that sophisticated”), but she was already drawn to certain scenarios. “Couples, triads,” she said. “If you took something I wrote when I was fifteen, it would be the same, plot-wise, as now.” At eighteen, she published two poems in The Stinging Fly, a Dublin literary journal, which she now edits. One of them, “Tírghrá,” began:
I sit in my grandmother’s living room—
the patterned carpet, spools of thread
the 1994 hunting trophy, dried flowers
china ornaments, a chipped ashtray—
and she talks about her childhood.
I am dreaming of industry, art galleries
of fashion, sex and cocaine
and the distance between you and I
east across the colourless Irish Sea.
In 2009, Rooney moved to Dublin to attend Trinity College. She hoped to do a double major in sociology and English, but was accepted only into the latter program. She found herself in proximity to a social milieu that she hadn’t known existed: the classmates in “waxed hunting jackets and plum-coloured chinos,” as she writes in “Normal People,” whose parents had “not figuratively” caused the financial crisis that claimed her father’s job. “What I wasn’t prepared for was encountering the class of people who run the country,” she told me. “I had a feeling, on one hand, of being appalled, but on the other hand a real sense of wanting to prove myself to people, to prove I’m just as good as they are. I don’t know why—it would have made a lot more sense to just let them be—but it’s a fascination that’s not purely revulsion.”
In her third year at Trinity, Rooney fell in love with John Prasifka, who is now a high-school math teacher, and with whom she lives. “I didn’t write any good fiction until I met my partner,” she told me. She won a scholarship that gave her four years of tuition and room and board, and also ratified her sense of belonging. She spent a lot of time eating soup and writing: a master’s thesis on “Captain America” and post-9/11 politics, as well as various permutations of the story that would become “Conversations with Friends.” Like her “culchie” characters—milk-drinking provincials, in Dublin vocabulary—she was aware that her class status was in transition, that her intellectual and sexual capital was intersecting with real money in ways that were hard to make sense of.
“Almost no paths seem definitively closed to her, not even the path of marrying an oligarch,” Rooney writes, of Marianne. “When she goes out at night, men shout the most outrageously vulgar things at her on the street, so obviously they’re not ashamed to desire her, quite the contrary. And in college she often feels there’s no limit to what her brain can do, it can synthesise everything she puts into it, it’s like having a powerful machine inside her head. Really she has everything going for her. She has no idea what she’s going to do with her life.” Rooney has been compared to the novelist Rachel Cusk because of her cerebral first-person narration. She says that she admires Cusk, and was surprised that people read her recent review of Cusk’s “Faye” trilogy—“Sometimes I had the sense that the chatty characters who populate these novels were just gamely trying to amuse our austere narrator, who was guaranteed to miss the joke every time”—as critical-in-a-bad-way. She loves Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner. Her writing can occasionally bring to mind Michel Houellebecq’s in its deadpan deflation of consumer society and our helplessness in the face of its predations. Frances, never having “fantasized about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role,” has decided that it’s ethically indefensible to make more than sixteen thousand one hundred dollars a year—the amount that you would get, according to her Wikipedia reading, if you divided the annual gross world product by the number of people on earth.
In the hierarchy of Rooney’s literary identities, millennial is greater than Irish, but post-recessionary may be greater than millennial. Her writing emanates anxiety about capitalism, which purports to be a meritocratic system but actually functions as a diabolical inversion of communism, redistributing wealth and privilege at the whim of the people who already have those things, “for whom surprise birthday parties are thrown and cushy jobs are procured out of nowhere.” If Rooney’s characters aren’t especially ambitious, if they have low stress thresholds, if they prefer foreign vacations to office jobs, forgive them. The game was over by the time they came of age. Rooney is writing novels of manners about an era in which the expectation of caring for others no longer obtains, in which it’s easier to wreck a home than to own one. “I’m trying to show the reality of a social condition as it is connected to broader systems,” she said. “You would hope that by trying to show those things in process you can say, It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Hello! It's been a long time since I joined in on a discussion, but I was excited to see this novel on the Reading List. I saw the BBC series as I read this, so I was constantly comparing Rooney's depiction with their interpretation and seeming revision of the story, to make the characters less frustrating and to allow a hint of personal development at the end, in their understanding of their connection to each other. I apologize that my interpretation of the book is compromised by my understanding of it through the differences in characterization. That said, I find it a useful lens through which to see the quality of Rooney's portrayals--showing characters as they are, not as we hope them to be--and the frustrations we might experience from this--the characters not behaving.
A lot of the complaints about the book are about Millennials and their way of relating to each other, but as someone who is part of this generation (though a relative elder), I found it incredibly satisfying how this novel captured life as it is experienced by many.
It's good to see you here, Yulia! I was just thinking of you recently when I saw a picture from our convention in NYC. It will be interesting to have your perspective of having both read the book and watched the series.I think it was challenging to understand the characters' behavior, especially since they appeared to change so much when they went to university. On the other hand, when I was teaching college, I had lots of experience with Millennials like Marianne and Connell.
Do you think that the Irish location/culture made a difference or could this just as easily have been set in the US or the UK?
I read this one a few months ago for a local book club.It was an interesting read. My favorite character was Connell's mother (and that she knew he was being an idiot and told him so when he was sleeping with Marianne but invited another girl to the prom instead).
I saw growth in the character of Connell through the years, but I never quite bought the character of Marianne. She seemed so self-possessed and confident in high school, then we learn that underneath she is supposedly very messed up and insecure due to abuse...these things didn't quite jive with me. I liked her character at first (an oddball who knew herself and what she wanted).
Lynn wrote: "It's good to see you here, Yulia! I was just thinking of you recently when I saw a picture from our convention in NYC. It will be interesting to have your perspective of having both read the book a..."So much of the generation crosses borders and felt relatable, but I'm not familiar enough with Ireland's economy and culture to pick up on the cues that made the work distinctly Irish. The truth is, as I read it, I didn't regard the characters through the lens of their Irishness (culturally, economically): I focused on how they interacted one-on-one and within groups of friends.
When they did discuss politics, which was quite often, I was struck by how engaged they were in issues beyond their shores. They were true world citizens. It was certainly more the case with them than my peers, but they are a decade younger.
As for class dynamics, they are the focus of much of the tension in the novel--including who was from where in Ireland, what students can afford to do on vacations and how they approach their travels, whether they need to take a job alongside their studies, whether they have second homes (or villas) and what kinds of wine glasses they're familiar with.
I sometimes thought of it as a contemporary novel of manners. But again, I'd have to know more about the economic state of Ireland during this period and social mobility available to those born in rural areas and cities there, as it can differ quite broadly within the same country. But again, I was struck how much they discussed these matters both openly and obliquely.
I enjoyed reading Rooney's bio, so thanks for that. I enjoyed the setting in Ireland, but only thought the story was okay. I've always found that unless there's something extremely important at stake for a character, he/she never quite climbs out of the realm of sort-of-interesting.That felt like the case in this book. Neither Connell nor Marianne has much at stake. Neither their physical lives, nor internal worlds, seem threatened in any way. They go along in life, experiencing normal ups and downs.
Lynn thanks for posting the bio. I didn’t know that much about her. It was good to read.
Martha, I found your comment about what makes a book more than "sort of interesting," fascinating. I think there's something huge at stake for Marianne: her recovery from a childhood of abuse. For me that would include her ability to be vulnerable to and intimate with another human being. I read the book a year ago and have just begun to reread. The essay you shared, which is essentially an editorialized interview was fascinating. Growing up in any era, in any culture, is challenging. I was academically smart, but emotionally a wreck when I entered college in 1967. My father had died suddenly nine months before, and my mother was rushed to the hospital four months after, in shock. This time I was the one to ride in the ambulance with her. She survived after extensive surgery, but while she recovered, I was the caretaker for my younger siblings...four of them, including 5 yr. old twins. That trauma, stunted me in certain ways, and finally broke free when I was 21, and went to a college far from my family. The 70's were the time when I actually came of age. I love the way Rooney's writing weaves the time, the place and the trauma and loneliness that Marianne experiences into her experience both in high school and later in college. There's a kind of flatness and matter of factness to her relationship with Connell. I think they pretend they don't have much at stake, but I thought the book was drenched with their longings, and their desire not to reveal how vulnerable they each were.
Jane, you nailed some of how I felt about Marianne and Connell when you wrote "I think they pretend they don't have much at stake, but I thought the book was drenched with their longings, and their desire not to reveal how vulnerable they each were." In particular, their desire not to reveal how vulnerable they were. The title "Normal People" said to me that they both wanted to be "normal", but gradually began to figure out that there's no such thing as "normal". Most people that we think of as being normal are probably dealing with something we don't know about.
Hello, Yulia! It's so wonderful to see you back at CR!If anyone is interested, here is a review from The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain...
Jane, your own personal story is so tender, and it's easy to see why you felt a connection to the idea of a young person finding her true self at college.
I read this book in June, during my Covid Crush of reading - which I'm still in - and I did't remember too much of the details until I started reading the reviews and the discussion here. I do remember liking it though. I'm going to have to slow down, make notes, and savor the books more. What's the rush? I'm not going anywhere, anyway.
Hello, Mary Anne! It's nice to be back. :)Thank you for the Atalntic review. I liked its reference to "love under capitalism." Though the politics of the characters often struck me as a disruption from the book as I read it, I can see now how it relates to the tension between Marianne and Connell, the politics of love in the city states of high school and college. I wonder, though, if the politics of the class differences might have been less heavy-handed.
It was a powerful moment when he couldn't just ask her if he could stay with her over the summer, when he'd been all but living with her already. The miscommunication was both so avoidable and inevitable. It highlights the power imbalances that come with different socioeconomic positions, whether between those dating, hooking up, some complicated mix of this (as with Marianne and Connell) or platonic friends.
It is a novel about being included or excluded or having these roles turned in a moment. That is why I didn't find the differences in their popularity and social ease striking between high school and college. These are different city states. So much of personality is situation-dependent, so much so that some psychologists reject the notion of stable personalities. It's hard to say how much a new environment changes a person or simply releases and emphasizes qualities that were hidden before.
I was close with someone like Marianne, so she was a very plausible character to me. As for Connell, he reminds me of school classmates who had been there since kindergarten and were confident in their place in the hierarchy. But when they went off to boarding school or college and saw their social capital suddenly diminished, I imagine they had to reckon with how much of their popularity depended on the small set they'd been familiar with, who knew their place in the stacking order. Who gets to be included or excluded is always shifting in this book.
Jane wrote: "Martha, I found your comment about what makes a book more than "sort of interesting," fascinating. I think there's something huge at stake for Marianne: her recovery from a childhood of abuse. For ..." That's a very interesting addition, Jane! I suppose what it comes down to is whether an author can make you deeply feel that sense of privation early enough, which Rooney didn't do for me here. Now contrast that with your story, where I instantly felt that sense of deep internal change, which must have been so harrowing. Thanks for sharing. I'm glad you came out the other side!
Lyn wrote: "I read this one a few months ago for a local book club.It was an interesting read. My favorite character was Connell's mother (and that she knew he was being an idiot and told him so when he was ..."
Lyn, I too found Connell's mother a most interesting character, so grounded, sensible and astute compared to the others . I should say I passed on reading this book after watching the TV dramatisation which I felt captured the ecstacy and agony of first love really well, with some subtle and delicate acting by the leads.
It has been great to dip in here to read everyone's impressions of the book.
I'm really struggling with my feelings about this novel. I expected to like it a lot and read it quickly. However, when I reached the ending, I was underwhelmed. I'm still exploring why I feel like that when the book got so much attention and good reviews. I think my feelings might have to do with the political views that were interwoven. The Atlantic article does a good job of highlighting that though she finds it positive. I actually do feel positive about those views. But, I rarely like fiction that centers on any political views, whether I find them positive or negative. It usually detracts from the writing.Also, the relationship between Marianne and Connell seemed to work itself out too quickly at the end. I couldn't figure out how it got from their situation in July of 2014 to where they were in February of 2015. They covered a lot of ground emotionally in 7 months but she didn't tell us how they got there. Obviously, Connell is going to New York and there will be more developments but they seem infinitely more comfortable with each other than they were in July. How did that happen?
A friend on goodreads commented when I first started it that he wanted to know if the title was sarcastic. I told him when I finished that I thought it referred to the fact that both main characters felt so outside the mainstream. There are multiple times when they comment that they don't know why that can't be like normal people. In February of 2015, Marianne is described as being "a normal person now." Those feelings of not being like everyone else are certainly familiar to me. I remember them strongly at the same period of my life that Connell and Marianne are experiencing. Then, it was somewhat uncomfortable and strange. Now, it actually feels positive to me.
I was ambivalent when I read this last winter, especially about the ending. That's why I nominated it for the Reading List, because I knew that the discussion here would help me explore why I felt that way. I appreciate all the responses so far!
This is a very interesting discussion, and I am enjoying it. Like Sheila, I saw the miniseries, but have not read the book. The miniseries is on Hulu in the U.S. The acting was really first rate, and the story telling was compelling. I recommend it.I had intended to read the book but in this time of Covid it is almost impossible to get popular books with a lot of holds from the library. They keep automatically extending the due dates by a month so there is very little turnover. Our libraries are finally fully reopening some branches, so hopefully this will change soon.
Like “Conversations with Friends,” it is basically a romantic tragicomedy. The point is not so much the plot as the characters, and the heady relationships in and out of which they move “like figure-skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronization that it surprises them.”
The New Yorker article also contains biographical material for those who are interested.