Normal People – Critical Review

Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, is an astute and stark exploration of contemporary relationships. Centred around two characters, Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron – adolescent friends on polar ends of a spectrum of class and social relationships. The novel explores their dynamic as they transition into university life. The distance between them characterizes their interactions; Marianne is a middle-class, unpopular but intellectually astute young woman and Connell has a more typically working-class background, coming from a single parent household. He has a strong social standing in his community. Although both come from County Sligo, they have wildly different experiences in that community, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where the main body of the novel is set. They are separated by their experience of class; this is typified in their failure to communicate across that boundary. The novel deals with contemporary issues, primarily gender and class politics – although these are dealt with in the peripherally through the interpersonal relationship of the two main protagonists. 

        Rooney’s prose is measured and straightforward, her sentences are detached, her writing style omits basic punctuation, such as quotation marks, and her sentences are direct, which gives her writing a blunt and immediate quality. This in itself is a departure from her debut novel, which is more fragmentary, using messages and email as a modern epistolary equivalent. Rooney herself has noted that her “a lot of critics have noticed that my books are basically nineteenth-century novels dressed up in contemporary clothing.” (Collins, 2018). Normal People therefore sits firmly in a tradition of novel writing that explores power dynamics and passivity in relationships, although this trope is subverted by placing the power and high-class status with Marianne. Rooney’s style is also a reflection of this exemplified by the use of free indirect discourse and third person narration. Normal People is equally concerned with gender politics and power dynamics – Marianne notes, “when you look at the lives of men […] they control the whole social system and this is the best they can come up with for themselves?” (p96). Marianne is expressing a disdain for conventional patriarchal values, the scene is set in a wider context of how comfortable she is expressing herself intellectually in a middle-class environment. 

       A pervasive sense of alienation permeates the characters in Normal People. Connell awareness of himself as separate from his socially ingratiated peers is referenced frequently. At Trinity College he notes that “his classmates are not like him […] they just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them, and he knows the will never understand him.” (p68). This disconnect is emblematic of how Rooney constructs her characters in opposition to their surroundings. Connell’s remarks here demonstrate the lack of the integration experienced by working class characters in the novel. 

     Rooney has been accused of gestural politics in her work; there are surface level allusions to major political events in Normal People. However the primary focus of the novel is interpersonal relationships, and the ways in which these external events prohibit moments of genuine connection in a late-capitalist environment that values individual consumption and a transactional approach to social dynamics. Ultimately Normal People is a stark and direct novel that encapsulates the emotional distance that surface in relationships across class divides.

References

• Rooney, S. (2020). Normal People. S.L.: Hogarth Pr.
• Collins, L. (2018). Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head. [online] The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/sally-rooney-gets-in-your-head.