Genre: Young-adult Fiction
Page Count: 240
Taking place in the early 2010s, it’s a story of two teenagers Marianne and Connell and their interdependent relationship. Marianne lives in a big white house with her mother Denise and brother Alan. Connell is the son of the Loraine who works as a clearing lady at Marianne’s house. Both Marianne and Connell go to the same high school, where Marianne keeps mostly to herself, has almost no friends, and is considered a rich-outsider. However, Connell due to his smartness and broad and attractive looks is quite popular among his classmates. And to everyone at school, a relationship between these two seems not even remotely possible; therefore, although close friends who even share a bed together, their ‘modern-day’ friendship is a secret from everyone.
Rooney’s popular YA novel carries this relationship between these two close, supportive and understanding friends, and through it expands into a nuanced portrait of the complexities of today’s relationships between young adults.
At surface, from the start, this novel reads like a movie. I couldn’t comprehend early on as to why this novel got so popular when it is so ordinary, and reads like a typical YA fiction. Another thing I was surprised at, which might have answered my first question, was how erotically intimate this novel can get. The prose gets right into bed whenever there’s an intimate scene, and pushing further, it follows the rhythm of the bodies and enters into the minds. I found it so erotic, it was hard to keep my pants from getting a bulge.
But as Connell and Marianne finish high school and are about to start their college lives, things start to stumble between them. From then on, they both go on their own journeys where they discover who they are individually, yet always in the light of who they were to and with each other. Hereon, we descend deeper into the lives of these young adult as Rooney expands, with simple and subtle prose, into the complex, dynamic, and often times, scaring relationships. There’s no black and white, no ‘in and out’, in the modern-day relationships; we could even say there’s no relationship at all anymore.
When Loraine, Connell’s mother, finds out that her son and Marianne are sleeping together, she asks him if they are in a relationship, to which Connell responds with a confused no. With an equally surprised and confused expression, Loraine replies: in my age, we either were in a relationship or we weren’t. Sorry mom, such simplicity and lack of drama are bygones now.
Rooney also touches on the mental issues of teenagers as there’s a suicide in the novel, and provides honest commentary on what goes on with these mentally ill young adults and how they view the contemporary treatment available.
But what sets this novel apart from others is its bold and challenging sneak-peak into the dynamic physical and emotional bonds of these adults. Marianne, in her journey, discovers that she likes to be submissive towards her changing partners, which may have its roots in her earlier life, and her boyfriends are quite okay in turn to get dominant, sometimes even abusively so. Scenes based on this topic ranges from being erotic, to bizarre, to even depressing.
Along with another such insight, ‘sexting’ together they present a much challenging and complex narrative to what our modern-day relationships and practices of intimacy have become, which, because of its inevitability, in the scale of morality hardly ever falls on either side.
Sadly, on the emotional side, today’s relationships starve as compared to abundance of physical pleasures. Therefore, throughout their college years, Connell and Marianne remain deeply loving and connected to one another, despite their changing partners, because they resonate so well with each other on a deeper, emotional level.
Rooney’s ‘Normal People’ isn’t only an enjoyable YA novel, but also a great conversation starter on today’s dynamic and incomprehensible relationships and what to make out of it. Her prose, although simple both figuratively and literally with no quotation marks, is nuanced and representative of the YA world in its simple style and honest dialogues.
With a few issues regarding its structure and literary insufficiency, this isn’t a great novel, but definitely one worth reading, and most importantly, one worth discussing about.
Ratings: 4/5 **** December 2, 2020_