Book Review: Normal People by Sally Rooney
I heard about Normal People last year and all the praise and acclaim it received so naturally, I wanted to read. It was even on Barack Obama’s annual list of books! My naive little brain thought maybe it will be a light-hearted love story. And boy was I wrong. There is nothing light-hearted about Normal People. Except maybe the cover of the book, although on second thoughts even that is not it.
The two protagonists, Marianne and Connell live in a small Irish town and go to the same high school. They develop a reluctant friendship when Connell comes to pick up his mother from Marianne’s house where she works as a cleaner. In school, Connell is popular and highly intelligent. Outside of it he is poor and scared. Marianne on the other hand is smart, rich and extremely lonely. She doesn’t have any friends and has a lot of pride. Both of them form an unlikely bond and start a relationship in secret because Connell is afraid of what his friends might think in school.
The book echoes an acute psychological poignancy and Rooney is impeccably observant. I have rarely read dialogue that is so natural and convincing and I think that is what drew me in deep. To be honest it’s a very frustrating book and left me quite miserable after I finished it. The writing of the characters is very sharply observant and equally sad.
When Marianne and Connell start studying in Trinity College, Dublin they become very different people. There’s a smattering of themes on class conflicts and social standings that intensifies when Marianne starts dating a rich, pompous guy and befriends a group of rich people, whereas the previously popular Connell finds it hard to adjust to his fast changing surroundings. Marianne and Connell weave in and out of each other’s lives while being with other people and living separate lives, that somehow keep converging together. Normal People has lingering themes of depression, abuse, sexual sadism, suicide and suicidal tendencies. It’s a pretty heavy read but also, as is synonymous for me, a pretty great one.
Favourite quotes from the book:
1) Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind me.
2) It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.
3) If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.
