Sally Rooney, Ireland’s newest literary sensation, is widely regarded as the first great millennial novelist for her stories of love in the era of late capitalism. Born in 1991, Rooney is often called the voice of her generation, the J.D. Salinger of the Snapchat crowd. Her novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018) are largely concerned with the power dynamics of social groups. However, it is Rooney’s characters and dialogue that give her fiction a contemporary sensibility and demand that her books be read compulsively, even in one sitting.
In Normal People, longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize and currently being adapted for BBC television, Rooney tells the tale of an on again, off again romance between two young adults, Marianne who is rich, bookish and unpopular and Connell, who is working class, athletic and sought-after. He also happens to be the very smart son of a single mother who cleans the mansion where Marianne lives with her widowed mother and brother. Marianne and Connell are immediately attracted to each other, but he keeps their hook-ups a secret because he is afraid of what his high school friends will think. When they both arrive at Trinity College, Dublin, Marianne’s geekiness becomes glamourous, and Connell’s class origins isolate him from the moneyed, entitled students at Trinity. Still, their intimacy holds firm, albeit with a fair amount of partner switching along the way.
The plot of Normal People may seem thin, but Rooney’s social observations are trenchant enough to counterbalance a conventional plot. An avowed Marxist, Rooney is tough on the culture of power and privilege which is pervasive at Trinity. As Connell notes, his “classmates have identical accents and carry the same size MacBook under their arms.” Despite the tendency of his peers to launch into passionate and impromptu debates, “he did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realized that most people were not actually doing the reading. They were coming into college every day to have heated debates about books they had not read.”
Later, when Connell wins a university scholarship which will ease the financial burden of his elite Trinity education, he remarks that he can now live like his rich classmates. Suddenly he can spend an afternoon in Vienna looking at Vermeer’s The Art of Painting and have a cold beer afterwards. He comments on his new status: “That’s money: the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.”
Although reviewers often call Rooney a millennial novelist, I’m not sure that a demographically defined category best suits her novel, Normal People. Is this novel “millennial” because the characters are digital natives who effortlessly integrate email and texts into their relationships? Is this novel “millennial” because it focuses, as critics have written, on young adults struggling to achieve intimacy in a post-recession world threatened by climate change, uncertainty, and questions about the morality and viability of capitalism? Maybe.
My guess is that Sally Rooney slips Vermeer’s The Art of Painting onto a page of Normal People for a reason. Like Vermeer, she sees herself as an artist reflecting on the role of the artist in society. In a Mother Jones interview, she says: “I would like to believe that the arts have like, the value of consolation, which is that if we’re all in the struggle together then we’ll need art as a form of consolation to make our lives feel meaningful while the struggle goes on.” Normal People succeeds as a hugely entertaining form of consolation. It is a novel true to the concerns of a generation. It is also a novel that transcends the precarious historical moment in which we live.
— Gail Benick, author of The Girl Who Was Born That Way (Inanna, 2015)