Normal People is a novel that moved me. It’s a book that could’ve so easily veered into the grandiose, but instead asserted a quiet kind of significance, a reclamation of the momentousness of the everyday. Its story hinges on two central characters—Connell and Marianne—their thoughts, their flaws, their conversations, their relationship(s). On the surface, the story’s plot isn’t much: two people living their lives, coming together and drifting apart. But what draws you into this story is not the structural but the personal. Rooney’s characters are so tenderly drawn, so well-realized. Their conversations feel authentic, filled with pockets of humour and hints of vulnerability and the undercurrent of things unsaid. More than anything, though, the novel’s moments ring true. They are not disembodied Deep Literary Moments, but individual, particular, personal moments—not about meaning as a distant concept, but about meaning as a lived experience.
Like I said, this book moved me. I finished it crying but not knowing why, only feeling that I’d read something that struck me as remarkably honest.
(Thank you to Penguin Random House/Knopf Canada for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!)
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