Normal People by Sally Rooney Review

Oooof. Alright - a disclaimer before I start. Normal People by Sally Rooney is superb. I’m gonna gush about this one (warning to those in the splash zone!) and I honestly feel that the less you know about it, the better the experience will be for you. So, to those of you who’re thinking of reading it, don’t bother with any reviews about the book - just read it. It’s a contemporary story about a boy and a girl who fall in love. That’s all you need to know. And when you’re done, come back and we can hi-five each other in joy over its excellence!

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Why did I begin with “Oooof”? Because I genuinely feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. Repeatedly. This is such an emotionally exhausting and draining read! Sally Rooney’s created a remarkably compelling pair of characters in Marianne and Connell and I felt their love so intensely it was like I was experiencing it with them.

Which makes it sound like a romance, and it has some of those elements, but if it’s anything it’s a classic Bildungsroman (just a fancy word for “coming of age” story). Marianne is the awkward loner in high school, brainy but socially isolated. Connell is the good-looking popular boy, inexplicably drawn to Marianne - star football player falls for nerdy girl. The two begin seeing each other secretly - god, it sounds sooo fucking cheesy doesn’t it? I promise you it’s anything but. From there it’s a rollercoaster of emotions as the characters grow and develop. I loved it pure and simple.

Here are some critiques to anyone who didn’t enjoy the book: Marianne’s brother Alan is a laughably one-dimensional villain. There’s no plot (which is very typical of this type of story) - the story just starts and then ends. The occasional phrase feels hammy and clichéd (stuff like “so few people have what we have”). Connell is written as this genius but he does some super-dumb things - and if he is so brilliant, would he care so much what others thought of him? Also, given how unbelievably connected Connell and Marianne are on every conceivable level, the number of times they misunderstand one another seemingly purely for dramatic purposes could be seen as contrived as fuuuuck.

And, though I know almost nothing about Rooney, it feels like a very autobiographical novel - most young writers tend to write about themselves to start with, after all. She’s a young Irish woman who went to Trinity College, Dublin, on a scholarship, like Marianne, and the novel ends with the characters in their mid-20s, which is the same age I suspect Rooney was when she stopped writing this (she’s now 27 years old). In that regard you could say it’s somewhat unimaginative.

Listen: none of that matters. I noticed those things and I didn’t care. Because it’s so well-written, so damn compelling, so enthralling and honest and… real. If I gave this anything less than the highest possible rating, I’d be lying about how much I enjoyed this book.

It’s also impressive that she didn’t shy away from writing the sex scenes given how tricky they are to write with most writers publicly embarrassing themselves. She’s such a confident and skilful writer – already, at such a young age! - that she pulls them off admirably and, yes, sensuously.

If you’ve ever heard someone trying to convince someone else to start reading books, one of the points they’ll make is that you get to live lives you never would. Most books do this on a superficial level but Normal People actually achieves this viscerally. This is one of those books that effortlessly draws you into it and lets you experience the intensity of Marianne and Connell’s heart-achingly, tender, complex relationship in a totally believable way - it’s powerful stuff. Truly, I felt more and more anxious as the book went on until I was actually dreading the end - this novel turned me into a wreck!

The Guardian review, which drew me to this book in the first place, mentioned something like “this is a novel for and about the Millennial generation” but it’s not really. In a literal sense the characters and author are Millennials but besides that there’s nothing about this book that makes it distinct for this specific time - it could easily be set at any point in the last 50 years and still work perfectly.

I’m not really sure what the book was trying to say - if anything - but it’s left a deep impression regardless. Maybe that’s it - the whole labelling of generations is a fruitless exercise in misnomers, we’re all the same and love is a complicated, weird thing for all of us? Maybe it’s trying to define what “normal” is for this generation but isn’t that something every generation goes through? And I’m not exactly sure what conclusions Rooney comes up with could be uniquely ascribed to Millennials.

I’ll leave it with this because I’m spent: Normal People isn’t just the best novel of the year, or even the best novel of the last few years, but it’s one of the best I’ve ever read in my life. Maybe I’m just a sucker for coming of age stories? W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage told a similar type of story that left me just as devastated - but in a good way (sort of). A beautiful powerhouse of quiet, extraordinarily potent sensations that indelibly captures an important part of the human experience, Normal People has made me an instant fan of Sally Rooney’s - and thank you for writing it.