January 19, 2023
This book hurt me. Sally Rooney’s first novel is an insightful and raw look into the lives of – oh god – normal people. Alternating between florid, beautiful prose and unfiltered, undecorated descriptions of the harsh realities attendant to young adulthood, she masterfully blends the cynicism of early 20-somethings with a subtle and underlying optimism that one day, someday, things will get better.
Rooney seems to have a complicated relationship with the so-called “intellectual elite”. She constantly is writing about young writers, thinkers, and young adults who naively believe they can change the world by talking about it, which often feels like a self-insert for her own literary experience. Consistently though, in writing these insights and critiques (and by extension making me feel rather intellectual myself), she often treats these high-minded young adults as shameful fools, completely out of touch with the rest of the world. This has the unique effect of literally propping me up just to immediately push me down, and sometimes laugh at me. While uncomfortable, it makes for an introspective and insightful reading experience.
Another common theme through her work (that I’ve read thus far) is extraordinarily unreliable narrators. Each character is so stuck inside their own mind, and Rooney presents all their thoughts as fact, as the characters themselves believe them to be. This story in particular uses the technique to great effect, as the two narrating characters often present opposite viewpoints as truth in rapid succession, and as such the book is constantly contradicting itself. This is aided in part by deeply flawed, sometimes even delusional characters. Insecurity, selfishness, and narcissism run rampant, the perfect storm of not understanding how one actually fits into the world. It touches on an idea most recently referred to as “gifted kid syndrome”, which is the tendency for smart teenagers to irrationally believe that they are, in fact, special, more so than anyone else they know. This belief is immediately challenged upon entering the wider world, and often leads to a psychological reckoning with one’s self. Normal People taps right into the heart of this trend, providing painfully relatable examples of this difficult period of introspection.
Sally Rooney has crafted here a fantastically told story about love, but really about something much bigger than that. Normal People shows us that no matter who you are or what you believe about yourself, we are all, in fact, quite normal. This book left me in exactly the right place, which is to say I wish it were twice as long. Several days after finishing, I still desperately miss being inside this story.
9/10
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