The blandness of Sally Rooney’s novels, last year’s Conversations with Friends and her new one, Normal People,
begins and ends with those oddly non-committal titles. Inside the books
her territory is classic – the love relationships of young people – but
mapped with an unusual scrupulous smoothness. The characters are
brainy, even startlingly so, but she doesn’t exalt their intelligence or
flaunt her own. At the beginning of Normal People, Connell and
Marianne are contemporaries at school in Carricklea, Sligo, but hardly
friends, partly because Marianne is used to abrasive dealings with the
world, and may actively prefer them that way. Rejected by her mother and
brother (her father is dead), she can hardly be said to have such a
thing as a self-image. She sees her reflection in the mirror in
virtually non-human terms: ‘It’s a face like a piece of technology, and
her two eyes are cursors blinking … It expresses everything all at once,
which is the same as expressing nothing.’
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