Normal People by Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney’s Normal People is a hugely successful and very widely read novel about millennials. It concentrates on the relationships that develop in a group of school graduates as they transition from school to university, concentrating on and then majoring in their sex lives. It does this not to the exclusion of all else, but its preoccupation is overt and is as all-consuming for the reader as it probably was for the characters.

At the novel’s core are the ongoing, developing, changing, breaking, tortuous, steamy, lustful, intellectual, repeated, animal though never committed relationships between Connell and Marianne. They are from Sligo, went to school together and then migrated together to Trinity College, Dublin. So much for their similarities.

Amongst the differences one is of paramount importance. Connell is male and Marianne is female, a contrast that sees them come together fruitfully and often in combination to qualify several of the adjectives that described their relationship in the last paragraph. Important amongst the differences, but largely unexamined in the novel, is the fact that Connell is working class while Marianne is middle class. Connell’s academic interests are in literature, whilst Marianne specialises in politics though, it must be recorded, largely without focus, except for occasional side-forays into issues related to the Middle East. Both high-flying students seem to spend more time sleeping that is not sleeping and drinking that is drinking than they devote to reading, or indeed the thought of it.

Connell’s mother cleans for Marianne’s household and apparently is not overpaid. Strangely, though we never learn many of the details, neither Connell nor Marianne has a father in attendance. Connell’s mother might just have got pregnant on a short fling of youth, while Marianne’s father died, presumably some time ago, because she never really shares a memory of him. Whether this common heritage might have had some psychological effect on either of the two adolescents, we never learn.

Connell and Marianne come together, drift apart, take up with others, break off, re-encounter. It’s rather a procession at times. What seems to form a thread is that both always seem to be more worried about how their behaviour affects themselves rather than others. Noone ever seems to know what they themselves want, though everyone seems to get precisely what they ask for. There’s plenty of booze, plenty of sex, a change of personnel and more of the same. There’s an excursion to Sweden with stereotypical kinky photo shoots, more bust ups, arguments, reconciliations which never seem to refer to the past and occasionally there seems to be a kind of sincerity, though all without speech marks.

All pretty normal, perhaps, but always engaging.