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Book Review — Normal People by Sally Rooney
The object of Normal People is innocuous enough. It is simply the tale of an on-again, off-again relationship between confused adolescents in a confusing world. In less adept hands, this object would have been mangled. It could have either been superficial, flighty nonsense that gawks at the apparent dysfunction of the central characters. Or it could have devolved into sentimental indulgence. This book does neither. The emotional and intellectual twists and turns within the characters are explored with the same blunt descriptiveness of 1920s Paris in a Hemingway novel. It treats a casual shared cup of coffee or a deep conversation on a road trip as earth shattering, life shaping events, as we ourselves often experience them.
It is not a single story, but rather a procession of set pieces broken up by spaces in time ranging from months, to weeks, to days that do not deviate in location or in tone within each piece. It was clearly written with television adaptation in mind. Each of these vignettes display an occurrence that is important to the central relationship, and attempts to show an evolution in the central characters that unfolds gradually yet overly swiftly over the course of the scene. The interesting bits are in the conversation and inner lives of the characters, expertly obscuring and then revealing in droplets pertinent information on the character’s…
