Book Review: Normal People (2018)

by Abbigale Kernya, ​for The 44 North

Managing Editor

The book cover of Normal People by Sally Rooney

Genre: Literary Fiction

“Marianne had 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 or become part of it.”

― Sally Rooney, Normal People

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I’ve written before about how university, for me, was quite a lonely experience. The movies and TV shows I watched growing up—depicting college or university as this “straight out of a movie” experience—set me up for a sore disappointment when I found myself unable to adapt to the fast-paced, extroverted lifestyle I expected. I found it hard to make friends, and even harder to keep them. Romance was daunting, and building a dating profile was near impossible when I really didn’t have a sense of who I was staring back at the screen. 

It was lonely, and I didn’t quite know how to grapple with the slow disappointment (in myself) that I wasn’t making the life I had imagined for myself only months before. I’d never seen anything in the media painting university as grey, damp, and a slow mental descent into isolation until Sally Rooney’s Normal People came across my screen. The 2018 novel was adapted into a TV series two years after publication, and after seeing just one trailer for the show, I immediately bought the book.

Connell Waldron is me, and I, unfortunately, was him in university. The book follows Connell from high school to Trinity College in Dublin, alongside his long-time situationship, Marianne Sheridan, as they traverse every embarrassing aspect of adulthood—for better or for worse—together. Connell, who was the star-studded high school athlete, suddenly finds himself without meaning as he walks quietly through his college classes in sour distaste for everyone around him. Marianne, as his better half at the worst of times, opposingly and finally finds her stride in college, stepping out of the depressive and anxious mental health spiral she (through no fault of her own) spent the past few years suffering alone in. 

It’s a tale as old as time. A smart girl suddenly gets pretty, and a jock boy learns empathy. However, Sally Rooney has an unbelievable way of taking these character tropes and ripping them apart in a revolutionary and refreshing way. Connell is a villain in his own story, and Marianne can’t escape the chains she was swaddled in. The story follows these two as they try to bury themselves in each other, in the competitive, insatiable craving to reinvent themselves, and in the understanding that everyone else around them kind of sucks. But maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe everyone is just as miserable and maybe that makes it not so bad in the end. 

Set in university, this tale of romance and self-discovery is tinged with the aftertaste of soured desire so invigorating and addicting you can’t help but place yourself somewhere alongside the characters on the page. Whether it be a desire for connection or a sense of self, Rooney captures the existentialism of post-secondary perfectly. 

It captures the feeling of watching your life pass you by while you stand watching, not knowing if you should run to catch up with it or if it was ever yours in the first place. College and university are a nauseating experience for some of us. It’s never how you thought it would be: love, sex, money, friends, politics, peace within yourself—everything becomes unfamiliar. 

Everything except the pieces of yourself you will inevitably find in these characters. 

For better or for worse, I found solace in knowing someone else had felt what I was feeling, strong enough to create an entire series depicting it in high definition. From the page to the screen, university for me felt like a poorly written chapter in the Sally Rooney universe, and honestly, I think I’m better off because of it.

I find myself at the end of this review feeling that no matter what I write, the power of Rooney’s work—the life she breathes into characters on the page—will always be somewhat of an injustice. Normal People is the one book I wish, more than anything, I could go back to and read again for the first time. The complicated strings that bind every one of her characters together—whether involuntary or not—struck a new spark in me as someone who, much like the two stumbling protagonists, had no idea why I ended up anywhere and even less what to do with the life handed to me. From class inequality spelled out on the page to the urge to prove your womanhood in an extreme fashion, Normal People depicts, better than any other piece of fiction I’ve ever read, what college is really about and the people we bring with us in life.

For better or for worse, at times. 

“All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.”

― Sally Rooney, Normal People