"Normal People" by Sally Rooney

An audio book. Episodes are often separated by about 3 months, time intervals clearly stated.

Sligo, Ireland. Connel comes to collect his mother from Marianne's house where she works as a maid. Connel and Marianne are at school together and are both clever. He's popular, she isn't - she's a bit strange. She has crooked teeth and opinions vary as to whether she's pretty. Connel comes from a bad family (he doesn't know who his father is). Marian's dead father used to beat her and her mother.

Connel and Marianne start having sex together. She's a virgin and he hadn't enjoyed sex before. They keep their friendship secret. She's planning to do English at Trinity. He was going to do Law elsewhere. He changes to English at Trinity. He asks another girl out to the school ball. Marian doesn't go to school after that, and splits with Connel. Connel gets maximum marks in the final exams. Marian gets 590/600.

They meet again by chance at a Dublin party. Connel's shyness didn't matter back home - he was handsome and good at soccer. He has made few friends - he feels upper/lower and East-Ireland/West-Ireland bias. He returns home at the weekends to work in a garage. Marianne's boyfriend is on one of Connel's courses. He's quite well known. Marianne has a group of girlfriends too. She offers to introduce him to them.

He starts staying in her flat most nights. When he has to move out of his own accommodation he wants to ask to move in with her but she doesn't pick up the hint. In the end he returns home for the summer and she stays in Dublin, finding a new boyfriend within a fortnight (though later she says she would have welcomed Connel had she realised what he meant).

They still fall back on each other when in trouble. They discuss their sex lives. Why haven't they stuck together? He feels that being lower class, he wouldn't fit in with her high society friends. And his mother thinks he treated Marianne badly. Marianne doesn't want to seem dependent. But mostly they seem to lack a commitment to trying to make it work, to clarifying possible missunderstanding and apologising.

Marianne falls out with her siblings. Though she's steady with Jamie she's upset when Connel tells her he's in love with Helen, who he goes around Europe with, writting to Marianne as he goes. With Helen he feels normal. With Marianne he sometimes began seeing the world her way, as an outsider. Helen tries to be friendly with Marianne. When she mentions to Connel that Marianne seems to crave male attention he gently defends her.

Marianne says "I don't know why I can't be like a normal person - I can't make people love me." She breaks up with Jamie, which loses her some female friends. She goes to Sweden for a while, indulging in more self-denigration. Of men she thinks that "Their desire for domination looked like attraction"Her next boyfriend is Lucas - an artist. She thinks that his taste in art is good, but that he's not a good person. Not for the first time she falls into a relationship where (especially during sex) her partner tells her what a bad person she is.

Connell gets depressed after a friend from school kills himself. He fantasises about suicide. He goes to the student counselling service and gets put on meds. He and Marianne meet at the funeral. After 2 weeks, he and Helen break up. He and Marianne end up back in their home town for a while. She wants things to be like they used to be, but realises that though she hasn't changed, he has. They have sex. She asks him to hit her. He doesn't. He writes stories and is the editor of the college's literary magazine. He's offered an MFA place in NY. He wants her to go with him. She says he should go alone - "I'll always be here. You know that."

I'm underwhelmed. The descriptions of little student gatherings (posturing, teasing, assessing) are well done. The on/off nature of the relationship isn't always convincing.

If Rooney uses "nodding to himself", "she smiled to herself", etc, then I guess it must be ok.

Other reviews

• Kate Clanchy
• Elizabeth Baines' reading-group

"Beautiful World, Where Are You" by Sally Rooney

On Ireland's west coast, Alice (novelist) and Felix (warehouse worker) meet on a tinder date. Both are about 30. She comes from Dublin but had lived in New York. She invites him home. He goes there then leaves without the relationship progressing. When Alice was 24 she got £250k in a US book deal. Alice wasn't popular at school - critical, and not beautiful. She had a breakdown - that's why she's moved to the West coast. He had a bit of a breakdown when his mother died the year before, and lost his job. When he was a schoolboy he got a schoolgirl pregnant. Felix says he's bisexual. Alice is too - if she likes someone she wants to sleep with them whatever their gender. They're both relaxed about it. She fancies him. He's a considerate person/lover. They seem to enjoy chatting - which is rather a surprise given his education.

Eileen meets a man she knows at lunch time. They are both about 30. She met Alice as a student at Dublin university and lived together. She'd known Simon, who has an Oxford degree in philosphy, since before then. They were neighbours and Simon recalls Eileen as a newborn. Eileen had been with Aiden for 3 years when Alice returns to Dublin to go into a psychiatric hospital. She splits with Aiden. She writes to Alice about politics and missing Aiden. Eileen earns 20k working in a literary magazine. Simon's religious, a politics consultant. His girlfriends are some years younger than her. Eileen and Simon are both beautiful.

I liked chapter 7 - phone sex where Eileen role-plays being Simon's wife.

Alice goes to Rome for a book show. She invites him, having only met him once, not too successfully. He goes with her. She sees representations of herself in articles about her. Some drain her, some she doesn't recognise. She's written nothing for 2 years.

Eileen's interested in capitalism/Marxism, why civilisations collapse. Linear B (a language whose meaning is rediscovered) is presented as an analogy. They think about definitions of "working class". Eileen wonders how an atheist like her should respond to people like Simon who believes. She wouldn't normally respect someone who believes in something cranky and irrational.

The 2 couples spend time together in Alice's big house. Felix and Simon get on ok. Felix wonders about having a threesome with Simon. Felix takes them to a party where his brother and friends are. Felix has a good singing voice. He's 5' 8" and can't read that well. Simon is 6' 3" and sang at college. After he and Eileen have sex, Simon gives up his girlfriend. But then Eileen says she'd rather be his life-long friend than a lover who might later be rejected. Eileen gets angry with Alice - they'd started an e-mail dialogue when Alice was in New York. When she returned to Dublin she didn't tell Eileen for a while, but continued the emailing. Simon suggests that Eileen chooses people as friends who don't fight for love then challenges them to fight for her. 18 months later the 2 couples are still together. Eileen is pregnant, and wonders whether having a baby is politically sound.

The degree of interiority changes from section to section. There are monologues (email), there are scenes where the PoV is camera-like. There's texting and dialogue. Several passages mix direct and reported speech.

All the characters are cautious about showing their depth of interest. "I don't mind" can mean "Yes please" or "No way". It's unclear why the Felix character is said to be bi-sexual, why he owes money, and why he's rather uneducated. Perhaps the orientation and education are what fragile Eileen needs in a partner.

Some of the phrasing looks rather lax -

• "Nodding to himself", "Smiling to himself"
• "She nodded her head"
• "In a low voice Simon murmured"

Other reviews

• Anne Enright (This is prose you either get or don’t get; for some it is incisive, for others banal ... The last third of Beautiful World, Where Are You, when the four characters meet and connect, is a tour de force. ... When a fictional writer opines that writers’ opinions should not matter, the real writer is either having her cake and eating it, or enacting the paradoxes her character so derides.)
• goodreads
• Caleb Crain (the leftism of Rooney’s characters is shallow, and that their worldview is to a great extent undermined by the novels’ plots. ... Submissive impulses, homemade Christianity, and an ethos of mutual care return in her new novel ... Rooney claims Felix is bisexual, a claim that goes largely unsubstantiated, and makes his outlines even blurrier. ... Chasing her ideas about love, Rooney hasn’t sufficiently incarnated them. Unlike the wayward human beings of her earlier novels, the foursome in Beautiful World seems carefully planned and a little static, like figures in an allegory. Rooney’s efforts to introduce romantic suspense feel added on. I couldn’t manage to believe that Alice and Felix would ever make a couple except briefly and painfully, and I couldn’t see why Eileen and Simon weren’t settled lovers from Chapter 3 onward. ... There’s something a little 18th-century about Beautiful World, with its philosophical tone and its abstractly conceived characters who can’t stop talking about how to reconcile romantic liberty with love’s responsibilities.)
• Heller McAlpin (two main female characters, best friends from college now on the cusp of 30, grapple with repeatedly in their struggles to figure out how they should live and find meaning in a troubled world that has become increasingly unviable on multiple levels — ecologically, economically, ethically and emotionally.)
• Edward Heathman (The weakest section is arguably the very end, when the story spins itself into a pandemic narrative and one of the relationships is wrapped up in a near-sentimental Mills & Boon bow. The main disappointment is that the characters, who are meant to be thirtyish, have the emotional life of teenagers. Stylistically, however, Beautiful World, Where Are You? is flawless. Readers can hope that the semi-autobiographical elements in this novel have freed Rooney up imaginatively for her next fictional foray.)

"Conversations with friends" by Sally Rooney (Faber and Faber, 2017)

Bobbi (beautiful, rebellious lesbian) and the narrator Frances (bi though a hetero-virgin, clever, poor) are about 21 in Dublin, finishing degrees and performing poetry together that's written by Frances. They're befriended by Melissa (a photography and essayist) and Nick (an actor, ex Trinity) a married couple who are rather older. Frances has an affair with dishy Nick who she's excited by physically. She's insecure. She thinks of herself as "plain and emotionally cold" (p.83), looking like "something that had dropped off a spoon too quickly" (p.181).

Her personality hasn't yet set - "At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterwards think: oh, so that's the kind of person I am" (p.19). Later "I was aware of the fact that he could pretend to be anyone he wanted to be, and I wondered if he also lacked a 'real personality' the same way I did" (p.39). Later still "I couldn't hear my own voice when I spoke, but I think I said something about wanting to talk to him" (p.168). She consoles herself by reading ex's old e-mails - proof that she was once loved. She analyses them for nuances, like literary texts.

She's rather desperate to know if people really like her, perhaps because "It had been obvious to me from a young age that my parents didn't like one another" (p.48). She agonises in passages like "Derek and Evelyn seemed instead to feel awkward on Nick's behalf, like they thought he had been trying to conceal his feelings from me; and toward me they expressed a kind of unspoken concern, maybe that I would be offended or upset. Evelyn kept glancing at me with a sympathetic expression" (p.130). Later, alone in her room she thinks "it was clear to me for the first time how badly I'd underestimated my vulnerability. I'd lied to everyone, to Melissa, even to Bobbi, just so I could be with Nick. I had left myself no one to confide in, no one who would feel any sympathy for what I'd done" (p.135).

Some of Frances' actions seem unlikely to me (the risk-taking of going to Nick's bedroom with Melissa in the same house; the one-night stand; interest in the bible) though I suppose her mental state might justify them.

She rushes to hospital after a heavy period that might be an early miscarriage. But it's not. The affair goes on, both parties unsure about the motives of the other (is communist Frances merely trying to wreck a bourgeois marriage?), both doing just enough to keep the affair going. The affair continues unabated after Nick's told Melissa about it (Melissa's transgressed a few times herself), and Bobbi shares a flat with Frances.

Frances has the first story she's written accepted, worth 800 euro! She'd only sent it to a friend of Melissa's. It's heavily based on real life, mostly Bobbi.

Then Nick starts sleeping with Melissa again (he reveals he had low self-esteem - just out of a mental home - when he met Frances), Frances discovers she has endometrosis, and Bobbi moves out having read the story. Frances cuts herself - not for the first time. Nick and Frances break up. Frances sleeps with Bobbi again. After a month of no contact, a wrong number gets Nick and Frances talking again and they seem to decide to get back together. The End.

Except for a few street names, Dublin hardly appears. The action is interpersonal, the dialogue psychologically probing. If you don't like phrases like "You're interpreting your failure to hurt me as hostility on my part, I said. That's interesting" (p.279), don't read this book. The characters are bright, sometimes in a show-off way. If you don't like banter such as "Bobbi thought the fetishisation of 'untouched nature' was intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. I like houses better than fields, I observed. They're more poetic, because they have people in them" (p.242) you'll find the book tedious. You may find the characters' naivety and pretension comic, and/or their personal development interesting. Towards the end Frances realises that "I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed. By this logic Nick and Melissa were like my parents bringing me into the world, probably hating and loving me even more than my original parents did" (p.238).

One phrase seemed misplaced to me - "We were driving along by the harbour, where the ships implied themselves as concepts behind the fog" (p.138).

Other reviews

• Blair (Okay, I think this book might have worked better for me if I'd read it before Elif Batuman's The Idiot. Batuman and Rooney give their narrators similar voices: sharp, clear and deadpan but excessively self-aware. Both use email conversations to map out the development of a relationship. Both novels are told from the perspective of naive, supposedly intelligent young women who appear largely passive, falling into particular courses of action more because of the lack of a viable alternative than any great impetus on their part. ... This is a character-driven novel, and for me, the characters were the problem. On a personal level, I hated (most of) them; on a critical level I felt they lacked the necessary depth to make the plot work (in particular, I did not believe in Melissa and Nick as a thirtysomething married couple). ... I could find absolutely no sympathy for Frances and just felt irritated every time she got bogged down in her emotional distress over Nick. Unfortunately, this makes up an awful lot of the book. The narrative is always best when it moves away from Frances and Nick's relationship.)
• Claire Kilroy (Frances is an unusually contradictory creation, so clever and yet so blind. Her formidable intellect prompts her to adopt an ironic position towards everything – including herself. She repeatedly declares herself to be emotionally cold, despite evidence to the contrary. ... Rooney is not a visual writer. ... Rooney writes so well of the condition of being a young, gifted but self-destructive woman, both the mentality and physicality of it. She is alert to the invisible bars imprisoning the apparently free. )
• Adam Mars-Jones (Frances, the heroine of Conversations with Friends, has great difficulty discerning her own characteristics and moods. She often has to work backwards from physical gestures or reactions to establish what her feelings must be ... The characters share an esperanto of badinage, sharper than the style spread worldwide by Friends and its successors but not definitively distinct from it. When every exchange is a little stylised battle it’s hard to spot the moment when things become more fully charged, flirtatious banter not being a form of dialectic but a strange poker game in which the stakes can suddenly be raised without any apparent choice on anyone’s part ... Overall what is both memorable and remarkable about the book is how much emotional incoherence and damage can be accommodated in the portrait of its heroine without loss of sympathy, how much self-hatred is compatible with a residual sense of worth.)