Normal People

I don't know what's wrong with me, says Marianne. I don't know why I can't be like normal people.

Her voice sounds oddly cool and distant, like a recording of her voice played after she herself has gone away or departed for somewhere else.

In what way? he says.

I don't know why I can't make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born.

Lots of people love you, Marianne. Okay? Your family and friends love you.

For a few seconds she's silent and then she says: You don't know my family.

I remember how excruciating it can be to be young: to feel like a half-formed and flailing oddball; to wonder when real life would begin; when the real me would begin. With Normal People, author Sally Rooney begins by capturing something very real and honest about this time of life, and for the first part of this book, I felt really touched by her characters and what they were going through. But as these characters age four years and go through university together, I became a bit frustrated by their lack of real growth and connection – even that conversation I opened with happens near the end of the book and I had to wonder, “In four years of friendship/courtship it's never really come up that Marianne thinks her family hates her?” Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and widely lauded as the future of Irish fiction, smarter people than I got more out of this book than I did; still happy to have received an ARC from the publisher ahead of this year's North American release. (As always, I shouldn't quote from an ARC and these passages may not be in their final forms.)

Connell is silent again. He leans down and kisses her on the forehead. I would never hurt you, okay? he says. Never. She nods and says nothing. You make me really happy, he says. His hand moves over her hair and he adds: I love you. I'm not just saying that, I really do. Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she's aware of this now, while it's happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.

High School student Marianne lives in a big mansion in a small village in the West of Ireland with her widowed-but-professionally-successful mother and her sadistic older brother. Marianne is a social outcast at school: not conventionally attractive, intellectually superior, and confrontational with teachers, she spends her lunch hours at a table by herself, reading Proust and ignoring bullies. Connell is the son of Marianne's house cleaner and he is tall and handsome, a football star, and effortlessly popular. These two are the top students in their class, and when their paths continue to cross as Connell picks up his mother from her job at the mansion, familiarity breeds a kind of attraction that leads to a clandestine relationship – because both of them understand that no one at school must ever find out about them. Connell is far too concerned about what other people think of him, and while Marianne has no such concerns, she has such low self-esteem that she acknowledges that she must be a dirty secret: the joy and turmoil that both of them go through over this period was heart-wrenching to me. They both decide to go to Trinity College in Dublin, and in addition to not being a couple anymore, their social statuses reverse: the basically shy Connell finds himself with no friends and the opinionated Marianne finds a following (it doesn't hurt that she comes from the right sort of family, like the rest of the Dublin crowd; Connell doesn't even realise that he has a “culchie” accent that others laugh at). Over the next four years, Connell and Marianne will get back together and break up several more times – often over trivial misunderstandings – and while it seems obvious to the reader that they are better off together, the point ultimately seems to be that whether or not they end up together, each has played an integral role in forming the other from the rough clay of adolescence. 

I was consistently surprised that the omniscient narrator that swings between Marianne's and Connell's perspectives spent so much time telling-not-showing; the reader is always being told what is driving these characters' actions and emotions – and while on the one hand this felt like a reversal of “good writing”, I was often grateful for the information. There was a weird freshness to this technique, and in the end, I wonder if that's what the prize juries were responding to? A sort of example of what I mean:

By now the unspoken consensus is that Helen and Marianne don't like each other very much. They're different people. Connell thinks the aspects of himself that are most compatible with Helen are his best aspects: his loyalty, his basically practical outlook, his desire to be thought of as a good guy. With Helen he doesn't feel shameful things, he doesn't find himself saying weird stuff during sex, he doesn't have that persistent sensation that he belongs nowhere, that he never will belong anywhere. Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.

Connell studies English at University and eventually starts writing stories. Because of this, he spends a lot of time thinking about and reacting to literature, and I always find this to be a tricky thing to pull off in a novel. I like when he has an emotional reaction to Jane Austen's Emma (that leads him to the epiphany that “the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understanding real people”), but bits like the following come off as too clever to me:

He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.

This was an uneven experience for me – I loved the start and then it fizzled out – and I can see that all of the nuance of Irish class and status was lost on me. I didn't understand any of the secondary characters (but newspaper reviews tell me that's a brilliant technique for keeping the focus on the two main characters; okay), and while for the most part I liked the dialogue, Connell responded to Marianne's most pointed questions with a few too many “Hmm”s for my taste. Again, something probably went over my head with this, but I do think that Rooney has much more to say about modern Irish life; I'll look for her again.

Man Booker Longlist 2018:

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:

The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman 

* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *