The meat of the story is psychological, and here Rooney is as good as that great Victorian, George Eliot, whose Daniel Deronda she quotes in her epigraph. Rooney is fully aware of the conventions she’s playing with. They keep coming back to each other, only truly at home in the weird privacy they share.īut plot summary can’t do this book justice. So far, so High School Confidential, yes? No. This sets the course for a reversal when Marianne takes flight at Trinity College Dublin, while Connell initially flounders. Towards the end of secondary school, popular Connell and oddball Marianne fall into a secret relationship, with Connell unwilling to risk his reputation.
Honesty is the main characters’ big problem. What is it about Rooney that gets under the skin, for good or ill? It’s her next-level honesty, which is in full force in her sharp, painful, and fine new novel, Normal People. Some also contend that this winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award is just writing about herself (if that’s a problem, a whole lot of novelists should be cancelled). Critics of her fiction aim little darts at her youth (her author bio opens with the fact that she “was born in the west of Ireland in 1991”). Like cilantro, Sally Rooney is either to your taste or she’s not.
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