Normal People by Sally Rooney

Normal People by Sally Rooney

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this, my first Sally Rooney over Christmas and the New Year. I was quite determinedly ill at the time, hurtling from one virus to another and then another in that breathless, desperate way that people can do when there’s nothing on the diary other than Be Ill and Buy All Of The Tissues In The Entire World, and I read this in the middle of the night and in the soft lessening of the dawn, and I admired every second of it. It’s a story of character and it took me a while to figure out the way things were going to be here but once I did, I was in. Normal People is kind of fascinating in how it burrows deep into the heart of people that aren’t normal, not in the slightest, but exert considerable effort to be so but also fail entirely, and also knew that, all along.

Rooney’s style is very beautiful, very clean, and deeply readable. What I admire most is her clarity of purpose: there’s nothing on the page that shouldn’t be there. It all feels so definite and directed and when you read it, you kind of know that you’re with somebody who knows what she’s doing and then that gives you confidence, faith, in where the story’s going. Even when I didn’t like it or didn’t quite gel with the characters, I knew that I still wanted to be here, that I had to be here because I admired what Rooney was doing and how she was doing it. I don’t know if I found this enjoyable (a curious quote on the front of my edition) but I knew that I was with somebody who was very good at what they were doing and I appreciate that very much. You learn a lot from the good stuff and this is that; a book which captures the soft, strange, intimacy of being human, of loving and losing, of being in the world and knowing that others are there, alongside you.



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