Rooney’s debut novel follows two young university students, Frances and Bobbi, who become involved with Nick and Melissa, a wealthy couple in Dublin.
Frances finally finds a way to escape her best friend’s shadow when she starts sleeping with Nick. While this relationship offers temporary contentment, it eventually reveals the cracks in Bobbi and Frances’ fraught relationship and Frances’ own dysfunctional personal life.
This book makes for impulsive reading; it’s almost addictive in its easy salaciousness and barefaced honesty. We’re all curious about the lives of others and what Rooney does so well in this novel is to take us behind the façade of the rich and successful, making us see them as the flawed and reckless individuals we always suspected they would be.
Frances is slightly more relatable and thus even more interesting. My main complaint about the much celebrated Normal People is how quickly it fizzles out after the last page is turned; I don’t think I remember a single thing about the protagonists. Frances will linger around for longer.
Her doomed visits to her father’s house and her health struggles were bleak and saddening with Rooney truly taking the time to carve out a believable interpretation of a young lost soul. The enigmatic Bobbi was only mysterious for her apparent lack of characteristics. We were only told how fascinating she was to be around; as a character on the page she was completely forgettable. And it is somewhere in the middle of these two extremes where Sally Rooney’s writing ability lies. There really is nothing astounding about it — if anything, it’s quite straightforward. And yet there’s a level of coolness that Rooney strikes so effortlessly. It may be the quasi-pretentious omission of punctuation or the casual way she writes about trauma: whatever it is, Rooney’s writing is the ripped pair of jeans in the contemporary literature shop. It’s a cheap trick, only young people can really get away with it but we all want to wear them.
