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Normal People, by Irish author Sally Rooney, is both acclaimed and polarising. Set in the fictional small town of Carricklea in the North West of Ireland, and later, in Dublin, the novel follows Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan, two intelligent, introspective loners (of sorts), through their shared adolescence and early adulthood.

There's something about Normal People that prevents me from labelling it as a romance, despite the fact that at its core is a love affair between Connell and Marianne over several years. It’s more a quiet character study of these two people, bound by some strange, intangible bond, ‘sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.’

Indeed, it’s the dynamic between Connell and Marianne that drives the novel. It opens when the pair are in their final year at school: Connell is a football star who, at least on the outside, is well-adjusted and has settled into an easy popularity, whereas Marianne is a social outcast from a wealthy family, and happens to live in the extravagant house that Connell’s mother cleans. The difference in their stations, both social and economic, creates a tension that lingers just beneath the surface of their friendship. Their similarities and shared worldviews are undermined by a basic inability to communicate at critical moments, leading to a cycle of misunderstandings and misgivings. Things implode when Connell asks someone else to the school dance, devastating Marianne, who subsequently ceases all contact with him. Connell’s failures, particularly in high school, feel painstakingly real, and Rooney aptly captures how so often, those who are fuelled by the self-assured knowledge that they are, more or less, good people, are allowed to move throughout the world without ever examining the casual ruin that they cause. This is where Lorraine, Connell’s spirited mother, comes into play; chastising him for treating another person so poorly against his better judgement. It’s a refreshing glimpse at how people, particularly young men, can learn to scrutinise their behaviours and resist the structures which typically reinforce those behaviours. 

Roles are reversed when Connell and Marianne migrate east to Dublin to attend Trinity College. Now, it’s Marianne who is popular, admired by her artsy, cosmopolitan peers, and Connell who hangs at the sidelines, finding it difficult to make friends. It’s here that the two reconnect, and Marianne introduces Connell to her friends – the sort of precocious, wordly teenagers who read Proust and Marx and debate whether or not money is a social construct. These are all things that would have enthralled me when I was sixteen but, now that I’m in my mid-20s, strike me as almost funny. But perhaps that was Rooney’s intention – to include turns of phrase that angsty, cynical eighteen-year-olds would use, because, after all, they are only eighteen, and in Connell’s own words, ‘were coming into college every day to have heated debates about books they had not read.’ Through this lens, Rooney imbues her characters with a degree of self-awareness, demonstrating an astute perception of the journey from adolescence into adulthood and that pivotal age when you’re emboldened by a false superiority and a need to assert your sophistication.

Review continued in Part 2.