Articles Available Online

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early summer, a trickle of people began to post online about having finished it in a single day, often accompanied by tears of recognition and complicated nostalgia for their own early romantic experiences Rooney, the laureate of interpersonal miscommunication, clarifies its agonies in spare prose as the central characters miss each other’s meanings: the painful ambiguity of the ‘cool see you soon’ text; the prickliness of teenage vulnerability (‘Some people are even saying that he tried to add her on Facebook, which he didn’t and would never do’); and the small, specific tenderness of domestic intimacy: ‘He wipes crumbs out from under the toaster and she reads him jokes from Twitter’ The novel follows Connell and Marianne from their brief affair during their schooldays in Sligo – where he, a popular footballer, is too ashamed to be seen with her, the ‘weirdest’ girl in school – to their time at Trinity College Dublin, where Marianne – always wealthy, now beautiful and popular too – has the social upper hand Normal People is a love story in the truest sense, by which I mean a novel intimately concerned with the things two people can do to each other, and how much we each might want to hurt or be hurt   Observation is Rooney’s primary strength as a novelist, and Normal People, like her first novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), has been hailed for its portrayal of life as it is lived now The contemporary political landscape is internalised, digested and refracted out to the reader through the lives of the characters: international conflicts, abortion protests and war breaking out in Gaza and Syria all feature as footnotes to the relationship playing itself out in the text This primary plot is curiously trope-like, a fairytale reversal of fortune that draws on the characters’ socioeconomic circumstances and fits the pair into a narrative of false equivalences Connell is poor and popular, Marianne is rich and a social outcast; they go to