Sally Rooney’s sentences are droll, nimble and matter-of-fact. There’s nothing particularly special about them, except for the way she throws them. She’s like one of those elite magicians who can make a playing card pierce the rind of a watermelon.
Rooney employs this artery-nicking style while writing about love and lust among damaged and isolated and yearning young people. They’re as lonely as Frank Sinatra on some of his album covers, as lonely as Hank Williams’ whip-poor-will. The effect can be entrancing.
You’ve likely heard of Rooney. She’s the young author, born in 1991 in the west of Ireland, who was excellently profiled by Lauren Collins last year in The New Yorker. She has written two fresh and accessible novels, “Conversations With Friends” (2017) and now “Normal People,” which have been met with euphoric reviews in the Anglo-Irish press. “Normal People” was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Rooney’s new one is a lot like her old one; her books glide along similar tracks and can bleed together in your mind. Both are about intense but furtive love affairs that are thwarted by misunderstanding after misunderstanding.
“Intense love always leads to mourning,” poet Louise Glück has written. Still, you stare at Rooney’s hapless characters almost in disbelief: How were you two able to screw things up this time?
Her novels share themes and obsessions. One is social class — how, as a character puts it in “Normal People,” some people “just move through the world in a different way.” Because her characters come to Dublin from the rural west of Ireland, they have accents they sometimes try to lose. They’re outsiders, scorned as “culchies,” among other derogatory terms.
Rooney writes about financial imbalances among friends and lovers. Her characters, innocents in search of experience, in the thrall of first love, are sometimes budding writers. Her writing about sex is ardent and lurching. She writes about smart young women who are attracted to sexual masochism.
Here is another thing that links her two novels: There’s no sawdust, no filler. Her intimate and pared-down style can be reminiscent of Rachel Cusk’s. Rooney’s novels are satisfying, too, because there aren’t dueling narrators or cat’s cradles of plotlines. You buy Rooney’s ticket, you take her ride — not three muffled half-tours through bosky, dimly related hinterlands.
There is so much to say about Rooney’s fiction — in my experience, when people who’ve read her meet they tend to peel off into corners to talk — that I’ve omitted the wit in her books.
One moved through her first novel stepping around throwaway lines like, “If there’s one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets,” and “No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.” In the new novel, there is less of this kind of thing but perhaps something better. There is, in the pointed dialogue, a reminder of why we call it a punchline.
“Normal People” is about Marianne and Connell, teenagers when we first meet them, not yet flowers but small tight buds. At school, he’s popular and an athlete. She is offbeat and withdrawn and friendless. She’s wealthy, however, and he isn’t. His mother cleans Marianne’s family’s white mansion.
Like the central character in “Conversations With Friends,” like perhaps nearly all teenage girls, Marianne is an ugly duckling and a swan at the same time. There is also a coldness in her, a sense of detachment.
Marianne is formidable. She says things to her teachers like, “Don’t delude yourself, I have nothing to learn from you.” She comes from an emotionally and sometimes physically abusive family. She feels unfit to be loved, and “trapped inside her own body.”
About her relationship with Connell, we read things like, “She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that.” And, “He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him.”
He betrays her at a crucial moment, a moment that marks the original sin of their long friendship. “His attraction to her felt terrifying, like an oncoming train,” Rooney writes, “and he threw her under it.”
This novel tracks Marianne and Connell across four years. They are both gifted students and wind up at Trinity College in Dublin. They are never quite boyfriend and girlfriend in the conventional sense. They merely break each other’s hearts over and over again.
At college, their situations reverse. Marianne finds her crowd, and Connell becomes the depressed and isolated one. She can now date, he thinks, the guys who “turn up to her parties with bottles of Moët and anecdotes about their summers in India.” There will be further reversals.
Rooney is almost comically talented at keeping the lovers in her novels frustrated and apart. When you are deep into “Normal People,” you may start to feel that she has gone to this particular well one too many times.
This novel proves her to be mortal in other ways. Some of the plotting feels heavy-handed and expedient. Her characters cry perhaps more often than you will cry over them. This story can tip over into melodrama. But, then, what is young love without that?
Loneliness, Cusk wrote in one of her Outline trilogy novels, “is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there.” Rooney’s characters are similarly estranged from their environments and from one another.
Rooney herself, on the other hand, seems completely plugged in. She’s an original writer who, you sense, is just getting started.
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Publication Notes:
'Normal People’
By Sally Rooney
273 pages. Hogarth. $26.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.