Book Review: Normal People

Relationships can be beautifully complicated constructs. We spend our entire lives forming these vast and expansive connections with people. Whether we love or hate people, there’s no denying that there’s an intrinsic response to the relationships we ultimately form with them. Loving relationships are an even more interesting format to look at. What does it mean when we find someone we can’t help but form an intimate bond with? To find a person who you want to share in every moment with, whether good or bad? Talking from personal experience, it’s a wonderous feeling and one I would never take for granted. Don’t get me wrong though, just because we value these intimate relationships, doesn’t mean we have an easier time navigating them as apposed to standard relationships. On the contrary, romantic connections are often the hardest to traverse. When you love someone on a deep level, logic and consideration aren’t always at the forefront of our decisions. That messy and complicated landscape behind relationships is the epicenter of what Sally Rooney chooses to explore in her critically acclaimed novel; Normal People.

Normal People’s narrative follows young adults’ Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan as they develop and struggle to maintain a complicated romantic relationship from their time at Secondary School going into College and University. Connell is a well-liked student and is known to be quite adept both academically and physically. Marianne on the other-hand, while excelling academically is shunned socially and treated poorly by her peers and even her family. Despite existing in notably separate worlds, Connell and Marianne develop a romantic relationship quickly but both struggle to identify and accept it in an open way. As the years go by and both of these characters move forward with their academic lives, they end up popping into each other lives in unexpected ways; each time reigniting the instinctual love they share for one another despite their best efforts to move on. It’s through their re-occurring catch ups they are left to ponder what they want to do with their lives and if they both fit into each others long term plans.

The notable quality behind this novel’s story is its grounded perspective. Connell and Marianne both share a good proportion of the page count in regards to storytelling perspective and what I appreciated is Sally Rooney did a brilliant job making them feel very realistic. As people, they have a lot of good and bad aspects behind their characters and their interactions bring out a lot of these traits in some really insightful ways. Despite being well-liked, Connell clearly feels small and somewhat lost in the scale of the life that surrounds him and the only thing that center's him is his feelings for Marianne. Marianne on the other hand is so focused on escaping into her future she can’t figure who she actually is as a person, that is until she finds herself back with Connell. The narrative does a wonderfully clever job in exploring how both these characters are capable of bringing out the best and worst in each other while also defining them on an individual level too. What I appreciated the most about this narrative is effort in reflecting a very realistic romance. The love these characters share is messy and it faulters just as much as it flares. That is a very real concept when it comes to real life and I love how well the book translates a lot of that reality into its pages.

The only place this book loses a bit of praise from me is in its pacing. I think for better or worse, Sally Rooney slows the pace down substantially to really try to dive into the character’s as apposed to the moments they are in. That’s not technically a negative, but the slow pacing can often make you feel like the narrative isn’t going anywhere. The reality is Sally wants to take things slow to show the depth of the characters relationships. It’s a love and hate sort of perspective I have with it. It works most of the time, however sometimes I feel it drags things out more than it needs to. Tone is an area Sally gets down brilliantly too. Again, it comes back to that realistically human representation in her writing. These people talk and behave in a very real sense and it helps add a lot of layers to the story and keep you engaged.

Normal People is one of the better romance books I’ve read in a long while. Sally Rooney does a brilliant job in reflecting the scary minefield that modern life can be while also showcasing the release that the intimate connections can provide during it. The realistic way the story teeters around these two central characters in a way that defines them just as much as they are together as they apart are truly appreciated. It all reflects the beautiful and messy reality of love and it defines us and keeps us whole when the world does nothing but try to tear you apart.