Book review - Normal People: how Sally Rooney’s novel became the literary phenomenon of the decade. By Sian Cain
NB: The comments beneath the article are worth reading too..DS
... why has it become the novel of the moment – and, arguably, the decade? Normal People is a quiet, literary novel – but it is a zeitgeist novel too (despite being set five years ago). It’s hard not to emerge from Rooney’s book about two young people navigating adulthood in post-crash Ireland and sense that, somehow, the author has spotted something intangible about our time and exposed it. Like other zeitgeist novels, from Gone With the Wind, when mass-fiction began booming in the 1930s, to Franzen’s post 9/11 tome Freedom, Normal People has trapped a moment – in this case, our new sense of collective precariousness – whether individual, economic or political.
... why has it become the novel of the moment – and, arguably, the decade? Normal People is a quiet, literary novel – but it is a zeitgeist novel too (despite being set five years ago). It’s hard not to emerge from Rooney’s book about two young people navigating adulthood in post-crash Ireland and sense that, somehow, the author has spotted something intangible about our time and exposed it. Like other zeitgeist novels, from Gone With the Wind, when mass-fiction began booming in the 1930s, to Franzen’s post 9/11 tome Freedom, Normal People has trapped a moment – in this case, our new sense of collective precariousness – whether individual, economic or political.
It is the first novel
I have read that has convincingly captured what it is to be young today: often
overeducated, neurotic, slightly too self-aware. So much can be read into the
aspiration of the male character Connell to one day “start going to dinner
parties and having conversations about the Greek bailout” – a dream for a young
man with preconceived ideas about what successful adults do. Or, indeed, to
fellow protagonist Marianne’s sense that “her real life was happening somewhere
very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever
find out where it was or become part of it”.
“Hysterical realism”
was the name the critic James Wood once gave to the mid-2000s boom of novels
ostensibly deliberately setting out to capture the moment. He was not a fan of
novels he saw as overstuffed with symbolism and real world events. But what
Rooney does differently from Ian McEwan’s Saturday (the Iraq war) or Zadie
Smith’s White Teeth (multiculturalism and globalisation) is to ensure it never
feels like a lesson... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/08/normal-people-sally-rooney-novel-literary-phenomenon-of-decade
