Normal People

Trinity College Dublin: Normal People is set mainly in shadowy, smoky, studenty Dublin. Photograph: Jason Clarke/The Guardian Trinity College Dublin: Normal People is set mainly in shadowy, smoky, studenty Dublin. Photograph: Jason Clarke/The Guardian Of all the praise lavished on Sally Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends – that it was glittering, witty, addictive, elegant, heartbreaking – only the insistence that it was especially contemporary, and “could sit with Lena Dunham’s Girls ”, as the Sunday Times put it, didn’t seem entirely applicable. True, the author was only 26; yes, the story took place in an Ireland where Catholicism no longer mattered, and everyone was a digital native; and the narrator, Frances, was a new graduate who started the book in a modishly fluid friendship/relationship with the avowedly lesbian and definitely woke Bobbi. But the instant messages were used to produce something like Platonic dialogues; email functioned, like Victorian letters, to consider the workings of the heart; time was marked by the publishing of novels and the passage of the seasons rather than the irruptions of news; and Frances was not only diagnosed with endometriosis without ever googling Lena Dunham but very soon abandoned her never specified relationship with Bobbi for an all-absorbing affair with an older married man, Nick. The resulting doomed romance appeared closer to Rosamond Lehmann ’s novel The Weather in the Streets (1936) or Barbara Trapido ’s Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982) than to chilly contemporary autofiction or modish surrealism. There was the scant plot of these earlier classics, the romanticised, aphorising characters, the shamelessly beautiful sentences and exquisite, precisely considered suffering. There was even the calamitous female physicality, with Frances’s bloody struggles with endometriosis reminiscent of Lehmann’s portrayal of abortion or Trapido’s of birth; and, underneath the relentless irony of the dialogue, Frances’s haunting innocence and yearning, her distinctly pre-feminist sense of a lack of entitlement to love, which is perhaps much more like Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz than Girls . Above, all there was an engaged, questing subjectivity and an underlying faith in fiction itself, which seemed modernist rather than contemporary. Frances’s pain and striving are leading us somewhere: Frances is discovering her singular self and becoming a writer – and this, Rooney’s passionate creation tells us, is worthwhile. Normal People , written in barely a year since that debut, is set mainly in the same shadowy, smoky, studenty Dublin, has the same witty dialogue and delicately observed play of often anxious feeling, and the same interludes of startlingly graphic, passionately intimate sex. It, too, is astonishingly fresh: in fact, when these books are shelved together in the future, it may seem that Normal People is the earlier work. It’s a slightly smaller book, for a start. Conversations with Friends at least aspired to be a quadrille, including Bobbi and Nick’s formidable wife Melissa in the dance, along with memorable turns from Frances’s troubled parents. Normal People , by contrast, is a waltz, or possibly a tango, with two protagonists only: Marianne, a skinny, anxious, clever girl, like Frances but with even less self-esteem and more masochistic tendencies, who begins the book as a social outcast reading Swann’s Way in the school lunch hall in Galway, and Connell, the apparently secure and popular working-class star of the football team. Sally Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends , was a doomed romance. Photograph: Patrick Bolger/The Guardian The spotlight is the brighter on these two because everyone else is just a little darker and more blurred than in Conversations with Friends . The couple’s friends are not only more distant than Bobbi, but more cliched, absorbed in teenage intrigues about dances, committees and a slightly disconnected subplot w