Book Review: Normal People by Sally Rooney

I can totally understand the hype surrounding Normal People by Sally Rooney now. I did watch the hulu series a couple of years ago with some friends, which I regrettably thought was influencing my reading when I started the book, but before I got halfway through, the novel was standing on its own two feet. Of course, I couldn’t get the physical representations of Daisy Edgar-Jones as Marianne and Paul Mescal as Connell out of my head, but after finishing the book, I think they were extraordinarily great casting choices. They embodied the characters and gave them a new dimension of life.

The first part of the novel, when the two protagonists are in high school, is probably the least delightful out of a steadily delightful narrative. It’s definitely not bad, though to be fair, I probably would have judged the beginning more harshly if I didn’t have prior context and didn’t know what was coming. High school dramas and their inane superficiality doesn’t appeal to me, though that was another point of the novel, and the book is far more than a frivolous high school romance. It’s just that the novel and the character study gets infinitely more complex as it continues. I read the first part, put it down, and then the last two-thirds of the novel engrossed me so much, I read it in one sitting.

The novel explores an interesting dynamic between two individuals whose complexities are written so incredibly well that you feel like you can just reach through the pages and touch them. They are that real and that flawed. I had the same experience with this novel as I did with Atonement by Ian McEwan: I watched the film version before I read the book, and I discovered I understood the characters and their motivations so much more when reading their internal intricacies. 

Even the structure of the novel added to the realism and helped the story along. The timeline jumps and then backtracks a bit, jumps and then backtracks a bit. Often in relationships, you see a person as they are without necessarily knowing how they got there. In the novel, you jump to the aftermath, and then you are gifted with the process of being brought there. It gives the process part a more intimate quality, and somehow more raw. 

Rooney also wrote with the subtlety I like in novels. She didn’t scream the character’s emotions at us, but placed them in their mannerisms and actions, every one of which have weight and meaning. Particularly with Connell, who was definitely not an effective communicator like Marianne. Which I related to so much, by the way. On goodreads, a lot of people who disliked the book mentioned Connell’s terrible communication skills, but I thought that was part of what made his character so realistic. I’m fairly similar.

And Rooney has a gift of putting things into words that I never could. And so succinctly and accurately too. Whenever an author can do that, I’m awestruck. 

Here were some of my favorite snippets:

“his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others”

“she’s never adequate in her attempts to describe them, that she oscillates between exaggerating their behavior, which makes her feel guilty, or downplaying it, which also makes her feel guilty, but a different guilt, more inwardly directed.”

“they had the same unnameable spiritual injury”

“That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her.”

“they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.”

A little side note about something I noticed when reading: Numerous scenes in the book take place in Connell’s car, and the author repeatedly writes, “He indicates,” which always stood out to me, because, at least in the South, we just call it “signaling.” But I realized that the sound of Connell indicating from the hulu TV series was such a poignant memory that snuck into my subconscious while reading. And I can’t help but admire how well the people behind the series production caught the little elements of the novel. Now I have to watch the TV series again, because while it isn’t as good as the book, it’s so well done.