thoughts on Sally Rooney's "Normal People"

I just finished reading Sally Rooney's novel "Normal People," set in Western Ireland, near to where my ancestors hailed from, and Dublin. I'd forgotten how healthy it is for me to read fiction in balance with nonfiction, keeps my imagination afloat and gives me some alternate stories to reality.

Initially, I didn’t know if this angsted-out straight relationship would hold my interest, but it did, mainly because of the quality & insightfulness of the writing, and the intrigue of the class dynamic between them, which influenced how they felt they ‘belonged’ in the different spaces of the book. It was at its most gripping to me in the moments in which Rooney elucidated some societal commentary through either Marianne’s or Connell’s read of a situation or phenomenon.

One of my favourite of these moments was following a literature talk that Connell attends: “Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. 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. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.” (221-2)

It’s part cogent critique from what I presume to be something she experienced studying literature at Trinity, part self-drag, as she became one of those writers who becomes part of the 'literary establishment,’ going through the motions of book tours and talks. It reminds me of the movie “The End of the Tour” about David Foster Wallace’s final days—he killed himself just after giving a book talk in Minneapolis, and, through the whole rigamarole of interviews & publicity, was openly critical of the way that artwork is commodified & peddled to the masses for profit. Kind of sucks the soul out of it.

The psychological approach & urban chic reminds me of Virginia Woolf and her London—modernism with a self-awareness & self-deprecation of pretension.

Rooney’s prose is affectedly flat, cool, & quick-witted, so streamlined & well-tooled that you glide through it with minimal awareness of the level of the text—the story is just there. Roland Barthes wrote about the ‘degree zero’ of literature, that there is no such thing as an absence of style. It’s like accents: you might say that one place or another in the United States is the ’no-accent’ version of U.S. English, but of course to anyone outside of that arbitrarily-chosen dialect, there is a perceptible difference that would be read as an accent. That Rooney’s prose reads so smoothly is a sign that she has captured well the diction of well-heeled young people of our time.

In the end, the book has me feeling a bit like Connell after the talk: that was cool, but what is the purpose? Is this book resisting against anything, and does it need to be in order to be a ‘worthwhile’ contribution to the world? At the very least, it got some gears turning in my brain, and this post is a testament to the benefit of art for art’s sake, something against which to bounce your brain off of.