Review: Sally Rooney, Normal People

This novel does get a lot better in its final seventy pages, but for a couple of hundred pages it is simply too normal and I did not want to turn those pages. It’s a regular, non-experimental novel, regular length, regular structure. It is dialogue-based between a small cast of main characters and the dialogue is fine, but not extraordinary. The characterisation is fine, but not exceptional. The plot is repetitive - that’s the point - though with  revelations introduced,  but perhaps not enough of them.

It’s a coming of age story or, more grandly, a Bildungsroman set in a contemporary Ireland from which the priests and the fascists have been eliminated and the currency is the €uro. It’s a novel which could only have  been written there in the fairly recent past; fifty years ago, it would have been banned even if conceivable and the author would have gone to live in a free country.

The core story of the on-off relationship between Marianne and Connell from school days to graduate studies is well developed, often delicately so, and only towards the end did I feel there were moments of authorial intrusion into their evolving consciousness - pages 198-99; p 221; p 239, for example. There are very few jokes and I suspect that the humour at page 235 where a man lays down the second half of a football match for his woman is unintentional.

For an older reader like me, there were a few puzzles. I get the bit about being interconnected via social media, but Rooney’s characters live in a world where gossip is the norm, and where people are very anxious about their current gossip-status. Is it really that bad? Is that what it’s like for normal people? Likewise, they cling to their groups, so that the school group lives on even after everyone has gone their separate ways. For some people, the rule is surely never to go back but rather to keep on moving away. In this novel, no one does that even if they travel and study in foreign countries.

The novel could be compared to Elif Batuman's The Idiot about which I wrote here on 24 June 2018, but whereas I did not finish Batuman's book, I did finish this one.

Books I Have Not Finished: Elif Batuman The Idiot

I review books here on the promise that I have read them cover to cover. So there is really no trace of the many books I have started but not finished, probably for many different reasons. Sometimes I have forced myself to finish a book in order to review it and for the past 150 pages I have been reading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot in that spirit. 

It started well enough: she is clever and funny and I bookmarked a few passages to quote. It’s easy to imagine how she is a successful staff writer on the New Yorker – though I remember that Jessa Crispin once called that publication “like a dentist magazine”.

The problem is the absence of plot. One reviewer quoted on the cover of my edition calls it “an addictive, sprawling epic”. I agree about the sprawling. The long drawn-out non-relationship relationship between Selin and Ivan seemed to be going nowhere except geographically at the point where I gave up on the book (page 269, shortly after a cast of new and re-assembled characters had been perfunctorily introduced and finally persuaded me to give up). 

It may well be that Selin comes of age in the 150 pages I am not going to read, but I am afraid that for this reader she is taking too long about it.

I suppose I should formally record Ceci n’est pas une critique du livre