I loved Normal People. It'd gotten a lot of publicity and praise, and made it onto the "best of" year-end book lists. It came in second in the general fiction category after Margaret Atwood's The Attachments (the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale) in the Goodreads Choice Awards for 2019.
"Don't tell Mam about this," he says. Marianne shakes her head. No, she agrees. But it wouldn't matter if she did tell her, not really. Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if it isn't any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks "warmth," by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her. " (p. 68)
"Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense of the most basic premises. .. One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr. Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He's amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to to concern himself with fictional people marrying each other. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it "the pleasure of being touched by great art." In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr. Knightley kisses Emma's hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is not direct. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination that he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them."
"People in Dublin often mention the west of Ireland in this strange tone of voice, as if it's a foreign country, but one they consider themselves very knowledgeable about." (pp. 70-72)
In the closing pages surprising but wonderful.
Normal People reminded me of Eleanor and Park, because in both novels the couples are seemingly misfits who have little in common with each other; the woman suffers emotional or physical abuse at home; and the relationship offers the woman emotional escape.
I looked up Normal People in Novelist because I wondered which other books would turn up on the Novelist "Read-Alikes" list for Normal People. (Novelist is a readers' advisory database subscribed to by many libraries for use by their staff and library users; it offers information about authors, lists of their work, book reviews, and finally "read-alike" lists: suggestions for new reading that fans of the book in question are likely to also like.) Eleanor and Park was not on the list much to my surprise.
(The books listed were Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi; One Day, by David Nicholls; The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBridge; Daniel Deronda by George Eliot; Purity by Jonathan Franzen; Skippy Dies by Paul Murray; The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud; Eileen by Ottesa Moshfegh; and The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.)
I like this excerpt from the review of Normal People that appeared in the Kirkus Reviews online:
"Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become. Absolutely enthralling. Read it."
Having done everything I can to avoid talking about what I think of the novel it is this: Like the Kirkus reviewer, I love the the psychological insight that permits Rooney to "articulate everything that's going on under the surface,"; I love that Marianne believes that Connell's love for her has "redeemed" her, giving the healing power of love a little shrine; I love that Rooney has captured the strange psychology of teenagers; I love that, to me, both Marianne and Connell are refreshingly surprising. Both Marianne and Connell are more, and very different from, what they seem. Asserting the healing power of love is in no way new; but Marianne and Connell's particularity and vulnerability means to me that Rooney has successfully reworked an old theme and made it fresh.
"Don't tell Mam about this," he says. Marianne shakes her head. No, she agrees. But it wouldn't matter if she did tell her, not really. Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if it isn't any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks "warmth," by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her. " (p. 68)
"Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense of the most basic premises. .. One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr. Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He's amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to to concern himself with fictional people marrying each other. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it "the pleasure of being touched by great art." In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr. Knightley kisses Emma's hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is not direct. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination that he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them."
"People in Dublin often mention the west of Ireland in this strange tone of voice, as if it's a foreign country, but one they consider themselves very knowledgeable about." (pp. 70-72)
In the closing pages surprising but wonderful.
Normal People reminded me of Eleanor and Park, because in both novels the couples are seemingly misfits who have little in common with each other; the woman suffers emotional or physical abuse at home; and the relationship offers the woman emotional escape.
I looked up Normal People in Novelist because I wondered which other books would turn up on the Novelist "Read-Alikes" list for Normal People. (Novelist is a readers' advisory database subscribed to by many libraries for use by their staff and library users; it offers information about authors, lists of their work, book reviews, and finally "read-alike" lists: suggestions for new reading that fans of the book in question are likely to also like.) Eleanor and Park was not on the list much to my surprise.
(The books listed were Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi; One Day, by David Nicholls; The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBridge; Daniel Deronda by George Eliot; Purity by Jonathan Franzen; Skippy Dies by Paul Murray; The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud; Eileen by Ottesa Moshfegh; and The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.)
I like this excerpt from the review of Normal People that appeared in the Kirkus Reviews online:
"Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become. Absolutely enthralling. Read it."
Having done everything I can to avoid talking about what I think of the novel it is this: Like the Kirkus reviewer, I love the the psychological insight that permits Rooney to "articulate everything that's going on under the surface,"; I love that Marianne believes that Connell's love for her has "redeemed" her, giving the healing power of love a little shrine; I love that Rooney has captured the strange psychology of teenagers; I love that, to me, both Marianne and Connell are refreshingly surprising. Both Marianne and Connell are more, and very different from, what they seem. Asserting the healing power of love is in no way new; but Marianne and Connell's particularity and vulnerability means to me that Rooney has successfully reworked an old theme and made it fresh.
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