Okay, yes, I have been telling myself for the past too-many-to-count years of my life that I would expand the scope of the books I read and resist my natural gravitation towards your average, teenager-geared, realistic fiction novel. But I couldn’t stay away from Normal People. How could I? Since it was published in 2018, Normal People has basically become an Instagram status symbol in the US, endorsed by celebrities like Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham, among others. I didn’t just want to read Normal People; I felt like I needed to, in order to maintain my self-satisfaction that I was keeping up with reading trends, let alone with contemporary culture.
Given all this premature thought that I had given to Normal People before even opening the book, reading it was, at first, one of the strangest experiences of my life. Typically, reading provides me with alone time. I pick up a book and immediately get sucked into it. My surroundings melt away. I can be in a loud, bustling subway, but for those precious minutes during which I am reading, I am unaware of all the strangers around me. With Normal People, however, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I looked as I read the book. Reading Normal People made me feel “cool,” so naturally, I couldn’t stop thinking about how “cool” I felt. I would be reading my book at a park near my house (mask on and socially distanced, of course), but every few seconds my eyes would dart around; I wondered whether people who walked by took subtle glances at me, thinking Oh my gosh, she’s reading Normal People. She’s a literary chic.
And so, something as simple as Normal People’s widespread popularity stripped away from my enjoyment of the book. An article by Vox from last year puts it best: “If you read Sally Rooney [the author of Normal People], the thinking seems to go, you’re smart, but you’re also fun—and you’re also cool enough to be suspicious of both ‘smart’ and ‘fun’ as general concepts.”
Luckily, I slowly was able to detach myself from the “Normal People craze” and see the book for what it was. And only after I did this was I able to see exactly why Normal People was such a big deal.
Normal People is essentially a microcosm. It covers class divisions, gender divisions, and mental health, among other prevalent societal topics. It’s a cultural critique of the way that friends from different social classes are hesitant of what others might think if they are seen together. It’s a harsh slap in the face urging people to realize that abusive relationships, especially across gender lines, have not ceased to exist. It’s a subtle reminder that if you are struggling with your mental health, there are people who can help you. Normal People is all of this, packed into 273 of the most wonderful pages I have read in a while.
Of course, that doesn’t even get into the phenomenal characters. Normal People is written in third person, yet Rooney speaks almost from inside the characters’ minds. Somehow, even without narration from the characters themselves, I can hear the subtle narration behind every sentence. Rooney fully develops and pries open her characters, revealing everything—the good, the bad, the ugly; the neat, fortune-cookie-worthy commentary that makes up less than 1% of our thoughts, and the messy, awkward questions that clutter up the remaining 99%. Because of this, Rooney’s characters feel raw and real. They aren’t thinking about the things they think about just because they were placed into this book by Rooney herself and she commanded them to do so; they are thinking about these things because they are real people and these are the things that real people think about.
In an interview, Rooney, a socialist, said, “There is a part of me that will never be happy knowing that I am just writing entertainment, making decorative aesthetic objects at a time of historical crisis.” And, truthfully, I don’t feel knowledgeable enough to comfortably elaborate on this delicate relationship that exists between Rooney, her privileged, “chic” readers, and the class struggle unfolding in society just as it does in the book itself. But, I do acknowledge and appreciate the irony that exists there, and I hope that one day I will understand this intricate balance enough to fully decipher Normal People.
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