BookJack talks about the novel “Normal People” by 29-year-old Irish writer Sally Rooney (in Russian the book was published in electronic form on the Liters website, and in mid-May it should appear in paper format). Critics call Rooney Salinger for millennials, the novel has already entered the Booker Prize long list, and the rights to film it were bought by Hulu and the BBC. We explain why the story of two teenagers in love fascinated the whole world.
Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and the Winter Pages anthology.
The concept of "happy love" in the public mind for two hundred years has been reserved for that love that certainly ends with long relationships, the birth of children, unconditional mutual support and trust, as well as other attributes of stable maturity. That is why the piercing, by definition immature and almost always doomed to a quick (by the standards of subsequent life, of course) finale, first love in fiction from Turgenev to Shishkin and Ulitskaya is perceived as unhappy love, perhaps even tragic.
At first glance, the novel "Normal People" by 29-year-old Irishwoman Sally Rooney also fulfills this ideological cliché. Connell and Marianne live in a small town, study in the same class, and outside of school they meet at least twice a week: Connell's mother is a cleaner at Marianne's mother's house, and Connell stops by to pick her up after work. But in reality, they are divided by an abyss, and not only by class: Connell is handsome and the most popular guy in the class, and Marianne is an outcast girl in dumb boots, a semi-legal object of bullying and general ridicule. Connell's mother loves and understands her son perfectly, but he is very timid in his dreams of the future and is completely dependent on the opinion of his classmates. Marianne has a toxic family, she has been humiliated and beaten since childhood, but at the same time she knows the value of her own intellect and does not care what others say and think about her. He has some sexual experience, she is a virgin. They are drawn to each other, and in the last grade of school they have a strange, uncertain relationship, which continues at the university in Dublin, where (instead of a neighboring college) Connell enters at the insistence and support of Marianne.
A series of small mutual betrayals and misunderstandings (Connell does not dare to invite Marianne to the prom, Marianne refuses to invite the homeless Connell to stay with her), a wonderful unconditional closeness - bodily and mental, an intoxicating feeling “made for each other”, rapidly giving way to inexplicable awkwardness and alienation - that is, in fact, the whole plot of "Normal People". The heroes explore their desires and learn to distinguish what they want from what they need, move away from each other and again, as if they are attracted to each other by an invisible elastic band, come closer. They try on and try new types of relationships: "best friends", "friends-lovers", "nothing serious", "a real couple." They change social roles (the superstar of her school, at Connell University, with his cheap clothes and country accent, turns out to be in third roles, while Marianne, on the contrary, flourishes). They hurt and heal each other: Connell teaches Marianne trust, Marianne reveals to Connell the benefits of courage. And little by little, having managed to give each other everything that they can give, they grow out of each other, as you grow out of your favorite sweater or the fastest sneakers.
In other words, despite the formal similarity with all the great texts about the first experience of love, in reality Sally Rooney's novel is completely perpendicular to them. For almost the first time in the history of world literature, she dares to show first love as a knowingly finite, and therefore painful and at the same time normal and healthy process. And it is precisely this (and not only the tenacious observation and factual accuracy that are extolled by many critics) that makes Sally Rooney the main writer of the millennial generation today - the first generation, in essence, to accept the idea of relationships as something that has a natural life cycle, is born and dies. on time. A generation that perceives unhappy love as a drama, but not a tragedy.
However, if the dignity of "Normal People" were completely exhausted by momentary reliability and sniper hitting the reader's expectations, they would hardly have been accompanied by such colossal success and truly worldwide popularity. Behind the first - there is nowhere more relevant - a layer in Sally Rooney's prose reveals belonging to the venerable and timeless tradition of the novel about feelings. The writer is often called the "Salinger for Millennials," but this comparison is superficial and imprecise. Catcher in the Rye is essentially a story of growing up in a vacuum, a one-man show, the action of which unfolds mainly in the head of the hero. "Normal People", on the other hand, is a chamber play for two, in which everything important takes place not inside the characters, but in a narrow gap between them.
The absolute nakedness of relations, their deliberate detachment from everything external and superficial, focusing on subtle, subtle nuances: a look, a gesture, intonation, which in the electrified atmosphere of the novel are filled with colossal weight and meaning - all this makes us remember not about Salinger, but rather about Jane Austen with her ultimate fixation on the characters' feelings. "And he told her," "and she told him that", "and then he thought she was", "but she really" - Sally Rooney takes the liberty to bring to the surface all this bubbling inner monologue, all this shame emotional rubbish, clothe it in ultra-modern, recognizable and understandable words - and thereby show that despite the transformation of scenery and behavioral norms, at the core of a person is surprisingly universal and changes much less with the change of eras than we are used to proudly believe.
This article was sponosred by Candace Mammarella
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