Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Hogarth (2019), Edition: Later Printing, 288 pages
Description
"At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He's popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne's house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers--one they are determined to conceal. A year later, they're both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other" --… (more)
Original publication date
2018-08-30
Media reviews
[T]he idealized reading experience Rooney casts for her young writer is a magnetic mingling of literary minds that sharpens an intelligence capable not merely of imagining others but of imagining how to be close to them, even how to live with the responsibility of their happiness and dreams.
[U]pon critical reflection, the novel’s territory comes to seem like more fog than not. Which is to say: it’s a novel about university life, but without collegiate descriptions or interactions with professors or references to intellectual histories or texts; about growing up, but without any
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adults [. . .]; about Ireland, but without any sense of place, national history, or even physical description (if Joyce wrote Ulysses in order that Dublin might be reconstructed brick by brick, you’d be hard pressed to even break ground using Normal People); about Connell becoming a writer, but without any meaningful access to his interior development, or any sense conveyed of how his creative “passion” inflects his life; and, finally, about Marianne and Connell’s intertwined fate where we are only intermittently given access to sustained moments of intimacy. Show Less
Rooney's slivers of insight into how Marianne and Connell wrestle with their emotions and question their identity in the process made it one of the most realistic portrayals of young love I've read. Their relationship is rife with mistakes, misunderstandings, and missed chances that could be
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simplified if only they communicated and didn't subconsciously suppress their feelings, as millennials are wont to do. Show Less
Here, youth, love and cowardice are unavoidably intertwined, distilled into a novel that demands to be read compulsively, in one sitting.
[W]hile Rooney may write about apparent aimlessness and all the distractions of our age, her novels are laser-focused and word-perfect. They build power by a steady accretion of often simple declarative sentences that track minuscule shifts in feelings.
[T]he individual, in , is a microcosmic social structure, made up of webbed relationships and collective agreements. This might be the premise of any young adult novel—a cautionary tale about the dangers of allowing your personality to be governed by peers. To allow others to construct us can be
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destructive. But Rooney doesn’t settle for this conclusion. Show Less
Rooney is always starting chapters in the aftermath of something else, filling in the necessary details later. This is simultaneously frustrating and an important part of what makes the book so compulsively readable.
This striking observation about what makes their love transcendent is the freshest in this remarkably timeless novel. True love is what admits no spectators and permits no display, a thing so precious and rare we’ve almost forgotten that it exists.
The miracle of this book is that the romance and the analysis aren’t in opposition to each other. Instead, each amplifies the other, bringing the whole to a roaring crescendo. It is impossibly intellectual, impossibly tender. Impossibly beautiful, too.
People can change, for better or worse, Rooney argues in this book, especially young people.
Normal People proposes that a merciful and just country can still exist, even if only in the space between friends.
Some of the plotting feels heavy-handed and expedient. Her characters cry perhaps more often than you will cry over them. This story can tip over into melodrama. But, then, what is young love without that?
Rooney posits that true intimacy leads to self-annihilation, a fate that Marianne desires and Connell resists. Rooney calls our bluff when we say we want love. Look, she gestures, is this really what you want?
Normal People has the feeling of having been either rushed into publication following the success of Conversations With Friends or a draft for Conversations With Friends. It’s most useful to read them together, as one book or project.
Restrained but precise, such scenes place Rooney among a cadre of authors who have renewed the realist novel by doubling down on its capacity for rich psychological description.
In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy.
Rooney crafts a devastating story from a series of everyday sorrows by delicately traversing female and male anxieties over sex, class, and popularity.
And, whatever the reality or otherwise of the dangers around them, however many times they have absurd quarrels or, conversely, seem to meld and share an identity, that pleasure, of being touched by great art, is to be had in reading the story of Connell and Marianne, just because Rooney is such a
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gifted, brave, adventurous writer, so exceptionally good at observing the lies people tell themselves on the deepest level, in noting how much we forgive, and above all in portraying love. Show Less
What’s remarkable is the extraordinary pitch of Rooney’s writing, the way it shimmers with intelligence. Each sentence is measured and unobtrusive, and yet the cumulative effect is a near-unbearable attentiveness to the emotional dimension of human lives, the quick uneasy weather.