Review: Normal People, by Sally Rooney (2018)

Go to therapy so you won't end up like these two.

Rooney, Sally. Normal People. New York, NY: Random House, 2018.

Marianne and Connell are two Irish heterosexuals that are both sorely in need of twice-a-week therapy. They meet as teenagers because Lorraine, Connell's mother, is the cleaning lady for Marianne's wealthy mother. From that one coincidental meeting, their lives are irretrievably intertwined. Instead of going to therapy, they fall in love with each other and repeatedly abandon, help, hurt, misunderstand, exclusively understand, and reunite with each other, even after they both leave their Sligo village of Carricklea.

I've seen the book given the appellation "psychological" a few times (psychological romance, psychological thriller, etc.) and I really do hate that title because it generally means nothing. In this case, I think it's appropriate because I emailed my therapist immediately after reading this.

Rooney's writing style takes a moment to get used to (she doesn't put dialogue in quotes, for instance, it's just on the page like narration), but once you do get used to it, it lends something to the storytelling. Perhaps it had this effect on me because I was so surprised by the fact of the change of pace rather than the value of that change, but I think it was likely a mixture of the two. Rooney’s capability to weave in and out of the interior and exterior of the characters is impressive.

The book is structured as alternating POV chapters from Marianne or Connell, written in third person/present tense. 3rd/present may sound weird (and it was), but like the dialogue, it worked. The conceit of the book is that Marianne and Connell will drift apart and return to each other over and over and over in a Sisyphusian cycle of self-sabotage. Because of this, 3rd/past would have given a stale effect to the story— kind of like a fable, where you know the ending at the start— and 1st/present or 1st/past would have put us at the mercy of Marianne and Connell’s incredible incapacity to see reality.

That’s not to say that the perspective is distant third person, however. It’s quite close. Rooney puts just enough distance between the narrator and the characters, however, to avoid the reader feeling that they cannot trust anything. Instead of something like, “Marianne makes an angry face,” she writes something like, “Marianne makes a face that looks angry to Connell.” In a Connell chapter, we may not get to know whether Marianne is angry or not, but in a Marianne chapter, she may well be feeling something completely different. More often than not, though, Rooney uses these opportunities to stress the miraculous capacity of two people so deluded about the other’s thoughts to stay in sync emotionally. The delicate balance of that relationship is what makes the book so special.

That two people can understand each other more than any others while simultaneously being completely incapable of communicating is astounding. Marianne and Connell aren’t together, or even in the same place, for whole sections of the book and even hundreds of miles apart or when they aren’t speaking, Rooney tends dutifully to their connection. And I do think that in this instance, it’s appropriate to think of the author as a gardener, rather than a creator or a puppeteer. Marianne and Connell are like dying plants that shouldn’t be alive anymore. The climate is all wrong and their owner is too busy with work to remember to feed them. But then here comes Sally Rooney to bring them back together and, suddenly, things start going a little bit better.

That’s another reason to praise Rooney. There’s an old joke that I love about Wuthering Heights: Charlotte Brontë said, “We can fix each other,” and Jane Austen said, “Talk to me when you’ve fixed yourself,” but Emily Brontë said, “We make each other worse.”

The two don’t necessarily make each other worse, but they definitely don’t fix each other either. They can barely hold together a relationship that is so obviously (even to them) what they want. Something in their personalities makes it impossible for them to ask the other to stay. But at the same time, they can recognize (individually) that they are worse apart.

When I finished this book, I had the feeling like someone had just shown me a “cursed” video. Something like “you didn’t have to show this to me!” But about a week has passed since I finished the book and a new feeling is creeping up. I think it’s close to the feeling that you get after the embarrassment of a mistake fades. Marianne and Connell were so powerfully real that their struggles made me reexamine how I go about my own life. I don’t want to end up like either of these two not-so-normal people.

So, when you do pick this book, make sure to do some self-care first. And don’t commit to an opinion after finished until you’ve let it marinate for a while.

References:

Giavaldi, Elena and Molly Bounds. Normal People US Cover. 2018. Illustration. Normal People (US), cover. 2018.

Rooney, Sally. Normal People. New York, NY: Random House, 2018.

Sorry this is late/short, I’m moving right now.