Normal People
by Sally Rooney
Faber & Faber
As indicated by the cover image, Sally Rooney’s novel is about two people whose lives are entwined. Beginning in their last year of high school, Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron spend more and more time together away from the stratification that separates them at their high school.
Marianne lives in “the white mansion” with her mother Denise and her brother Alan – her father having died when she was 13. Connell doesn’t know his father and his mother Lorraine is the cleaner at Marianne’s house. It is in their kitchen that the conversations first start when Connell comes to collect his mother.
At the high school in the small town of Carricklea in rural Ireland, they don’t acknowledge each other. Star footballer Connell is bright and popular while Marianne the high-achieving loner, preferring to read novels at lunchtime. Connell has had a few girlfriends but he found sex stressful “leading him to suspect that there is something wrong with him … that he’s somehow developmentally impaired.”
Marianne has never been close to anyone at high school and nobody even knew if she liked boys or girls, but Connell feels that being alone with her “is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him.” He also finds the intensity of their relationship troublesome and damaging decisions will be made. At high school, Connell wanted to be ‘normal’ – “to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing.”
School is oppressive for Marianne and at home she has to put up with a bullying older brother, and a mother who believes it is acceptable for males to use aggression to express themselves. Marianne has “the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.”
Attending the same university, they go their separate ways and learn about sex and power. The terrifying intensity of their attraction draws them together again and again as they learn about the desire to be loved and to love and the desire to hurt and be hurt. Relationships are complex and you won’t be able to put the book down until Marianne and Connell finish their university years to come to terms with their special relationship.
Lezly Herbert
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