NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney

Ronny has been around for a while now and proved to be super successful if you ask me why I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly but I’ve read and enjoyed (and discussed) all but one of her books. This one has been suggested by Olga.

New York Times writes about it
 “Intense love always leads to mourning,” the 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 …“

So let’s peel off and talk!