At a reading earlier this year, Neel Mukherjee expressed his frustration with novels on relationships, marriage, and adultery, which seem “to have completely consumed the Anglo-American world”. His novels, he claimed, situate the fictional site farthest from his milieu. In another interview, describing what his Man Booker list might look like in a few years, he predicted some ‘Big Names’ nestled amid the digital generation’s multi-tasking writers who read, write, Gram all at once.
In Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People — like Frances and Bobbi in her debut novel, Conversations with Friends — Marianne and Connell are as close to Rooney as Ritwik is to Mukherjee in his first novel Past Continuous. They’re also distinct from each other, owing to their socio-economic standing: Marianne is affluent with a large mansion, which Connell’s mother, Lorraine, visits each week to clean.
Looking down
The novel deftly covers four years of their lives, from Carricklea to Dublin to Italy, Sweden, and back. Much humour comes from Rooney’s evocation of Connell’s difficulty to fit into Trinity, all too familiar to anyone not bred to believe that
institutions like Oxbridge and Trinity are where one will find ‘their’ people. In a darkly comic passage, Connell wonders why classroom discussions are always “abstract and lacking in textual detail”. He realises that the debaters don’t always read the books. The confidence with which they express opinions, he decides, is “easy” for them; they don’t have to worry about appearing “ignorant or conceited”.
In many ways, Normal People is an examination of the politics of ‘looking down’. When characters engage in ‘looking down’, the personal, to use that trite maxim, is always political. Mukherjee advocates writing that’s farthest from oneself, but Rooney resists this coercion.
She excavates networks of miscommunication, misapprehensions, and conflicts within the sites of the Irish (often, intellectual) elite. By carefully complicating plots and situations often written off as banal, tired or novelistically inferior, she becomes as much an innovator of form as Lorde, Warsan Shire, Durga Chew-Bose or Greta Gerwig.
Something transcendent
This is partly due to her fantastic sensitivity to dialogue; she reveals as much of the inner workings of Marianne and Connell as she keeps concealed. Their dialogues are often inadequate, as dialogues in reality are, constantly needing decoding, inviting either frustration or complacency.
Rooney is also a skilful calibrator of e-life, balancing the psychological complexities of pillow-talk and the ambiguities of netiquette. The beauty of the illegibility of a Skype conversation with Joanna, a friend, lies in Marianne blending Joanna’s ambivalence with technical obstructions like poor lighting and pixellation. Rooney is able to realise exactly when a novelistic move gets too ‘gimmicky,’ the word with which Connell rejects an idea to write a story only though email conversations. At no juncture are Marianne and Connell’s lives allowed an operatic presentation; if Rooney veers too close to that, she shifts perspective immediately to return only after the grand jeté is over.
Money is central to how Marianne and Connell behave with each other; both are deeply aware of their class differences, as are the other characters. When the university scholarships are announced, for Marianne the achievement is a “matter of personal feeling” but for Connell, “that’s money, the substance that makes the world real.”
An Irish friend asked if I found Normal People particularly Irish, but Connell is really in many ways the Everyman Undergrad-to-Be, not far from my ilk, vacillating between Kolkata and New Delhi for our degrees.
Singer-songwriter Lorde, speaking of Melodrama , said she wanted to take “traditionally young female emotions”, amplify them, and transform them into “something transcendent”. Rooney’s amplification of the diverse emotional minutiae found in us all makes for just such a transformation. She is not shocking or provocative. She is an interrupter; the coupling between gatekeeper and rouser, tradition and modernity.
And if she achieves all of this by writing about relationships, marriage, adultery, so be it. It’s clear that despite all of Mukherjee’s detestations, she is on her way to becoming a Big Name but, most importantly, Sally Rooney is one of us.
The writer, a Felix Scholar, is studying World Literatures in English at Oxford.
Normal People; Sally Rooney, Faber & Faber, ₹899
