Normal People by Sally Rooney

[HappydaysArehere]

Not that far into above and can’t make my mind up as to whether it is going to be a crashing bore or a book I will enjoy.....in the end. Anyone reading it? Would appreciate any input.

Aargh no pic:

Awful book. Nothing happened.

I think what was infuriating was one reads it hoping to reach some kind of genuine development or resolution and it never comes. Things just pootle along much as they were. I think she probably thinks that’s very clever as that’s what life is like. But the point she’s missed is one doesn’t read books to experience something just like life. You don’t need to read books to experience life. Life is available to be experienced unmediated.
Generation iPhone I suppose

Seems like it's practically the law on mumsnet to dislike this book...

I haven't finished it though, but I can't put it down.

It is very readable.

I didn't think it was as good as Conversations with Friends but I did enjoy it.

It reminded me of that incredibly intense period of your life when you're young and trying to decide who you are (instead of simply allowing yourself to be who you are), and you feel everything very intensely, and even though you're aware you're making the wrong decisions sometimes you can't help yourself making them.

It's very readable and her prose is elegant but POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT "cool, edgy intelligent young woman gets off on submission and degradation because she's been abused" is such a lazy cliche, and so dispiriting. Both novels also rely much too heavily on people getting their wires crossed and not seeking clarification over minor mix ups where you'd just ask FFS and on manoeuvring their characters into situations that don't ring true - why would these bright young Trinity students schlep back off to Sligo every weekend during term time? Why would Marianne come back from Sweden to go to the funeral of someone she barely knew and who'd been unkind to her - and who would even have told her he'd died if she wasn't in contact with Connell? The characters in both novels mostly exist just to serve the plot.

Oh no, I've just got this out of the library today and I don't fancy it now!

Just whizzed through 7 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle so I don't want to kill my momentum!

Finished her first book now . I think I am the wrong age group. Again, I had no empathy for anyone.

I enjoyed it but didn't think it was worth the hype.

Maeve Binchy though - a couple of hers are brilliant, I think, in character study - eg the Glass Lake.

I really enjoyed reading it, much more so than Conversations with Friends whose main character I found incredibly annoying.

I wouldn't have really imagined it as a Booker contender and was a bit puzzled by that - would have been less surprised by it on the Women's Prize lists as that award seems to normally consider a different range of books.

I'm clearly not the only person in the world who did like it and hope I'm not the only one on Mumsnet, but think some like me will have been put off posting before, and am glad to see more range of responses since I first read the the thread.

Why was it a surprise to you that it was a Booker contender, @elkiedee?

I've just finished Conversations with Friends but that hasn't made me want to read another of her books tbh.I thought that was ratger underwhelming, and in the end I didn't care too much about any of the characters.

I thought it was fine, though also don't really understand the hype. I thought she wrote Conall better than Marianne, actually, and there was insightful stuff about contemporary masculinity in his character. I agree with previous comments about the cliches, especially wrt Marianne. Yes to the submissive stuff, and the constant, irritating references to her thinness as a metaphor for her emotional fragility. It was like an anvil at times.

Schnitzel, I actually thought the miscommunication thing was good - maybe it's just me, but I'm terrible for inferring, or projecting!, motivations or thoughts of other people, usually in a negative way. So I related to that. The going home every weekend thing also seemed right to me. I lived at home for college (not Trinity, but close), but lots of my friends were from the country and most of them went home every weekend.

the constant, irritating references to her thinness as a metaphor for her emotional fragility. It was like an anvil at times

It wasn't even the continual 'thinness as metaphor for emotional fragility' that irked me, it was the fact that it was clearly a fetishised, approved-of thinness as metaphor for emotional fragility etc etc.

If Marianne had been a comfort-eater as a method of dealing with unhappiness if the fact that she's eating Nutella out of the jar with a spoon after school in the first scene had gone in a completely different direction this would have been a very different novel, without all those lingering male-gaze descriptions of her slenderness and her narrow wrists, or the arty Swedish photographer wanting to take half-dressed photographs of her. And the whole fact of her being someone who wanted to be hit and strangled during sex would pull up a whole different visual if she were fat.

As things were, it was as obvious that she was going to flower from skinny, clever school misfit to the beautiful, edgy toast of Trinity as the kind of US high school flick where the nerd takes off her glasses and suddenly dazzles everyone at the prom.

Both novels also rely much too heavily on people getting their wires crossed and not seeking clarification over minor mix ups

Agreed entirely. The whole part where Marianne and Connell break up because he won't ask if he can stay in her flat during the summer made me want to shout 'USE YOUR WORDS!!!' loudly. And I got a bit irritated that I think we were supposed to notice that these were characters who could easily ask eachother frankly about sexual positions and strangling, even as teenagers, but not about ask something obvious like a living situation.

But I agree with a pp that people going home from university at the weekends was entirely normal in Ireland when I was an undergraduate usually a combination of having a weekend PT job at home, and seeing your 'home' friends and that coming back from a long distance or even another country for a former classmate's funeral wouldn't have been unusual, whether or not you had been friends.

Labassecour, excellent point re male gaze. I’d forgotten about the Swedish photographer. Crazy. I read somewhere that Rooney studied English Lit herself, and I expect that she probably read Mulvey. The book is a bit “learned” in that way, I think.

See, I didn’t find that failure to speak up unrealistic at all! But that is maybe a personal thing. My husband is always on at me to say what I want, rather than expect people to know and then seethe afterwards.

I loved it, I cared about them and wanted to know what happened to them - I like to think they stayed in touch & came back together at the stage they were both ready. He was better for her though than she was for him, and she would have needed to do a lot of work on herself to be good for him too. I really rooted for them

So glad to find this thread as I read this recently and was left thinking I'd missed something as I couldn't understand the rave reviews.

I'm sure some people really liked it, but surely not to the extent of 'Quite Astonishing' and 'A Future Classic'

Just read this. Had great expectations given the media reviews (only seen the selected headlines/quotes - will have read in-depth now to put in context).

I wonder if the “genius” is in the format rather than the content. Maybe the early anticipation, then nothing happening was deliberate to leave you with that apathy, shallow, unsatisfied feeling once you have finished it?

There were some techniques that reminded me of Donna Tart (Secret History) - where you don’t like the characters as they are so intellectually pretentious and tedious - but then you realise that was the exact response the writer intended. That shallow, young stuff rings a bit close to home reflecting back.

It did achieve its “sense of place” - the dull, west coast town vs the Trinity experience, the class issues, the contrasting emotional foundations of the two main characters.

I was technically elegantly written. The writer had lived a similar path to the main character - from a dull west coast town, to Trinity - even down to getting the scholarship. Their intellectual competition also reminded me a bit of My Beautiful Friend.

So - it didn’t deliver a rip, roaring read. But if it was to leave you feeling a bit unsettled and agitated (unfinished?) then it did that.

I can't bear her writing. I'm the right background but the wrong age maybe. I find her unpleasantly cold, unempathic and dull. Really puzzled by the hype.

I find her characters extremely irritating and frustrating

I find her characters extremely irritating and frustrating

Yes I did to - but wondered if that was the objective?

Might have been

Won’t bother with any more after these two though