I posted this photo on instagram today mentioning that I had finished reading Salley Rooney's Normal People. which has won many awards and is on the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist, and most people were more curious about what I thought of the book rather than offering a suggestion for what I should read next. So see above photo for the stack of books from which I am now considering my next longlist read.
Sally Rooney's writing has garnered much acclaim and her books have won awards and I do think they are much deserved. I had been wanting and meaning to get to her work and the longlist gave me the nudge to do so. So, what did I think of her second novel? I liked it very much, and I found a lot to appreciate about it, but I liked it with reservations. I love her writing, I like that pared down, crisp prose and I think she has a lot to say about love and relationships and class and how one must navigate the world today. The beginning totally drew me in and I liked the ending, but somewhere halfway through the story it sagged for me and I found myself getting impatient with the characters. It was so angst-ridden and the characters were often so very self-absorbed that I started losing sympathy for them. And there were moments I cringed when Marianne allowed men and family to mistreat her.
This is a book that has been much talked about, so you likely already know the premise. The story opens with Connell coming to pick up his mother, who is a cleaning lady, from the home of a classmate. Connell is smart and attractive and well liked by his peers, but he comes from the wrong side of the tracks so to speak. His mother is a single mom who had a child out of wedlock and they are not from the wealthier part of Carricklea, which is in the western part of Ireland.
Marianne is opposite in many ways, though in some of the essentials they are quite similar. Her family is wealthy and she is also quite bright, at least as much so as Connell. She is not in the popular group at school, as a matter of fact she is often maligned as being a little too quirky. She is content to be on her own, but she is very much an outsider. It's hard to tell at first if she minds as she seems to cultivate this, yet her classmates (as kids can be) are at times very nasty to her. Later in the story we see that her family is not much better.
The two, however, do seem to share common ground. They like each other and can talk on a level that is intimate and friendly, but being teenagers, they both know those unwritten rules when it comes to how they deal with popularity and social hierarchies that come along with high school and adolescence. The pair embark on a relationship that is essentially clandestine. In private they get on well, but in public they stick to their roles. Connell is perhaps the one who most pretends yet Marianne lets him. He knows it’s wrong, they both know, but they leave that part of their lives unspoken. Connell's mother sees it and finds it reprehensible (yet she is always supportive of him even as she is critical), and Marianne's family is somewhat aghast that she would have a relationship with the son of their cleaning lady.
So fast forward a bit and they both go off to Trinity College in Dublin and things flip. By now they have broken up, their relationship unsupportable as they are managing it. They are both unknown in Dublin and on new ground. Marianne finds her feet and appears to be a success and Connell finds it hard and doesn't quite jive with the rest of the college community. Where Marianne was a loner in their hometown, now Connell doesn't quite fit in.
The story follows them over the course of a few years as they come together and fall apart. More friends than lovers at Trinity, but at that they are more wary of each other. I won't say more than that--as you can see there is a lot to mull over in this story and I like how Rooney riffs on the idea of what is "normal". It's a great book to discuss.
But. I wonder if I am just not quite the right audience? This is a story of Millennials. It's a different world for them than it was for me. In many ways, that angst is much the same and those feelings of inadequacy and not fitting in are what we all go through and nit only as teenagers but also adults. I wish there had been more--something else. There was this constant circling of each other and endless rehashing of the same situation. Maybe less of the constant navel-gazing, and more growth of the characters. There were moments I wanted to tell Marianne--please, please just walk away. Don't let him (and him being all her romantiv partners) do that to you. She would eventually, but there were some painful moments. Somewhere past the middle mark I just wanted to be done with the story--if that doesn't sound too awful. I am happy I read it, and I will read more of her work, but I was not sad to finish the book and drop it back in the library slot.
So, have you read it? Did you love it, or maybe less so? I am curious to know what others think. Did I miss something important? I am ready to move on to another book from the list now, however!