Normal People by Sally Rooney
I may be late to the party with Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’, but my goodness, what an amazing party.
Within the story fuelled with sex, friendships, family struggles and years of self-realisation, Rooney’s refreshingly simple trademark of writing works to tell a new-age story without being cryptic. She just tells it as it is. In anticipation for the series adaptation (Stan, Hulu and BBC Three: https://youtu.be/fsKmjOuPq9A), I finally retrieved the novel from my overflowing bookshelf and found myself devouring it in one evening. There is an infinite amount of discussion within this story, but I find myself not wanting to divulge too much to the world. As a fictional story about unmoving love, fragile relationships and a connection between two people that extended beyond the confines of self-awareness, I found so much more then I believed possible. Essentially, I discovered myself having my own journey as the novel progressed.
The principal characters, seemingly to the world whom are meant to be ‘normal people’ (but yet still find themselves simultaneously always isolated, picked out, ignored or the subject of gossip), Marianne and Connell epitomise the growth of teenage relationships into that of one of young adults in a 2000s Ireland. Their connection is clearly something distinctly special when Rooney launches straight into the story, both characters expressing their curiosity in the deeper meaning behind each other’s existence, rather than taking them in for who they seemed to be, or what the worlds of high school and college wanted to define them as. With Rooney’s blunt and well-paced story-telling, launching from close timeframes, to flashbacks, back to the “current scene”, as readers, we are given a chance for a greater appreciation (or if you like, disgust), for how quickly the world moves around us; how easily a moment can become a memory for Marianne and Connell, or us, learning about their relationship. As soon as we think we understand their struggles, we are launched into a different moment in time, disorienting our comprehension once again.
It’s all so simple though, really. We are at-the-bat given a time, setting and characters without having it spelled out for us; forced in the middle of these people’s lives. We are never truly told what our characters look like, it being left up to us to decide how we want to envision our fictional stars and starlets. We are thrown back and forth between moments in the timeframe, having to piece together how irrelevant some facets of life in-between can be in Marianne and Connell’s self-discovery, whether they may be together or apart this time. We are made to willingly accept the circumstances that have made these people who they are, rather than reject them for the choices they make that defy the norms of young adult/adult literature. We, as readers, can do this because Rooney has created real people, not one-dimensional characters. True, there is nothing overly innovative (spoilers ahead) about the young boy growing up with a single mother, who was pregnant at young, scrambling to make ends meet, or the girl who is born into privilege and money, but is also struggling, this time to garner attention, affection or any sort of ‘love’ from her family (also missing a father who used to be abusive, attending to and possibly explaining some of her private, sexual desires). The popular, well-liked boy and the weird, loney girl (these social positions changing later on when they transition from high school to college) is, again, not a new feat.
You could even find yourself sighing at this shift, wondering why Rooney would apply such an inane change, but it’s important. It is really vital that Marianne and Connell go through so many changes in their lives because they otherwise wouldn’t have grown and found some sense of self-identity they approach at the end. Connell was well-loved, and well-lost, at the commencement of the novel, but he leaves us with a certainty in his future — who he truly loves, and how his next choice in life will play out. As readers, we’ve learnt what to expect from the couple, and we don’t need Rooney to tell us what will happen to them after the novel ends, because, if they have truly become the people they believe they are now, we already know how it will eventuate. As someone who really detests stories that involve what I like to call ‘characters wasting time apart when they could be together’, Rooney’s story made me feel like that this time, it was going to be okay. Instead of screwing it up all over again, they end finally at the stage when we know that they will do right this time, not just by each other, but for themselves too.
Love across disparate social class, and mental health, as well, aren’t new topics to be discussed in modern, or traditional, literature, but the relevance, and the way Rooney elegantly, yet also brashly, ventures through the moments that describe these themes, is really well done. She finds ways to discuss delicate (yet, very important) topics; suicide, mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, domestic abuse, insecurities, and so, so much more. I found myself holding on to the pages of this book because of the hope embedded within me that Rooney could heal her world (and mine) of all of these problems. But she didn’t. What she did assure me was that despite living in this flawed macrocosm, where racism, socio-economic class differences, confusing sexuality, politics, and more, abound, Marianne and Connell turned out okay. So maybe we all can too.
The word ‘bittersweet’ (one that I’ve learned not to hate, for as sad as stories that define this word make me feel, I’ve grown to deeply appreciate the rawness, the emotion and the realness behind what it means to be ‘bittersweet’) truly encapsulates the main themes and concepts of ‘Normal People’. If this book was the first swish of that new red wine that Rooney poured into my glass, upon that sip, there’d an acrid taste left on my tongue, with notes of rejection, undertones of insecurity, a coating of self-loathing on my gums and a loneliness from the feeling of self-rejected worth. But as the wine travels down my throat, it warms my lungs with sweet hope and love. It fills my chest with a new-found belief in destiny and the prospect that sometimes, the journey we go on will be worth the pain that comes along with it.
Rooney, ‘Normal People’ is a really damn good wine and I cannot wait to drink it again.
