‘Normal people’ – a book review

by The Flamingo

Normal people by Sally Rooney was my latest read and I got to say it impressed me deeply. I rarely find books that I want to read twice and that leave that kind of mark on me. I read a lot, I expanded over the years with a lot of new genres and I am not what you call “a snob reader”. That allows me to find hidden gems, where I hadn’t thought of before, books that I find fascinating for different reasons and that bring out my pleasure for reading. Normal people is this kind of gem. 

Sally Rooney is a young Irish author, very praised for her two published books. Normal people was even picked up by BBC and turned into a TV series. So if BBC is involved, you know it’s good and it would turn out terrific. I haven’t seen the series yet, I just wanted to read the book first and make up my own mind about it before watching.

Normal People is based on the love story of a young couple throughout high school and college. It’s not a romance, it’s not cheesy, it’s not easy, it’s terrifying, passionate and humbling. The main characters, Marianne and Connell, are what we consider today to be the new “normal”, people who struggle with mental health, who struggle to fit in, to be accepted, to seek the approval of others, to be well thought of, to conceal parts of themselves that they find lacking, to not feel the way they feel. People trying to be normal and happy. Throughout their struggles they are holding on to each other, even if they seem broken apart or in different relationships, they still have that special bond.

I liked Sally Rooney’s writing style the most. She succeeded in turning this “normal” story into something unique. Her writing is cold and cerebral, very detailed and precise, clinical, like a surgeon’s hand…not even trembling a bit. I was amazed by how much passion and pain she expresses through her cold manner. She is well versed and knowledgeable, has an intellectual and political discourse throughout her story. She made me feel and made me recognize myself in both of her main characters.

I selected 4 fragments from the novel that I thought they speak for her writing style and for the story itself: two for each Marianne and Connell.

Connell:

“He saw Marianne in the vestibule when he arrived. She looked like a piece of religious art. It was so much more painful to look at her than anyone had warned him it would be, and he wanted to do something terrible, like set himself on fire or drive his car into a tree. He always reflexively imagined ways to cause himself extreme injury when he was distressed. It seemed to soothe him briefly, the act of imagining a much worse and more totalising pain than the one he really felt, maybe just the cognitive energy it required, the momentary break in his train of thought, but afterwards he would only feel worse.”

Marianne:

“She takes her hand from her pocket, blows on her fingers and presses the buzzer. He answers, in English: Who is it? It’s Marianne, she says. Ah, you’re early, says Lukas. Come on in.  Why does he say ‘you’re early’? Marianne thinks as she climbs the stairs. The connection was fuzzy but he seemed to say it with a smile. Was he pointing it out to make her appear too eager? But she finds she doesn’t care how eager she appears, because there is no secret eagerness to be discovered in her. She could be here, ascending the staircase to Lukas’s studio, or she could be in the campus library, or in the dorm making herself coffee. For weeks now she has had this feeling of moving around inside a protective film, floating like mercury. The outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside. So whatever Lukas’s reason for saying ‘you’re early’, she finds it doesn’t matter to her.”

Connell:

“Connell lives in his scholarship accommodation now and doesn’t see much of anyone anymore. Last night he spent an hour and a half lying on the floor of his room, because he was too tired to complete the journey from his en suite back to his bed. There was the en suite behind him, and there was the bed, in front of him, both well within view, but somehow it was impossible to move either forward or backwards, only downwards, onto the floor, until his body was arranged motionless on the carpet. Well, here I am on the floor, he thought. Is life so much worse here than it would be on the bed, or even in a totally different location? No, life is exactly the same. Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head. I might as well be lying here, breathing the vile dust of the carpet into my lungs, gradually feeling my right arm go numb under the weight of my body, because it’s essentially the same as every other possible experience.”

Marianne:

“Things started to turn against Marianne, she could sense that before she left. At first it was unsettling, the way eyes turned from her in a room, or conversations stopped short when she entered; the sense of having lost her footing in the social world, of being no longer admired or envied, how quickly it had all slipped away from her. But then she found it was easy to get used to. There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality. It depressed her to think people were so predictable. Whether she was respected or despised, it didn’t make much difference in the end. Would every stage of her life continue to reveal itself as the same thing, again and again, the same remorseless contest for dominance?” 

Connell and Marianne are definitely one of the best and solid fictional couples I read about until now. It’s not a story for young readers, although you would think having the characters as young adults would somehow imply that. I think it takes some life experience and personal inner awareness to really understand this story. I recommend it, it’s depressing at times, but not always; sometimes it’s also cheerful , but not too often. It’s like normal life itself, lived by people trying to be normal. 

Photo from Flamingo‘s archive.