“It’s not like this with other people, she says. Yeah, he says. I know. She senses there are things he isn’t saying to her. She can’t tell whether he’s holding back a desire to pull away from her, or a desire to make himself more vulnerable somehow. He kisses her neck. Her eyes are getting heavy. I think we’ll be fine, he says. She doesn’t know or can’t remember what he’s talking about. She falls asleep.”
Normal people are complicated. So is Normal People. I don’t know if there’s ever been quite a book that I’ve enjoyed this much and yet remain so hesitant to discuss or even recommend. At its heart, it’s an ironic problem of communication. This is the struggle at the heart of Normal People, and at the heart of normal people, and it’s as much a struggle in the book as it is talking about the book at all.
Communication is… difficult… and so is this book. Normal People is unflinching in its observations of the difficult aspects of humanity, standing tall amongst the broken, knotted web of its occasionally disappointing main characters, a feeling which is somehow enhanced by its writing style. There’s an active, almost intense sense of the feelings binding Connell and Marianne to each other, as addictive and painful as any difficult relationship experienced firsthand. The reader rides the waves of the highs, lows, reversals of fortune, and stupid, irrational decisions, tethered by a prose that dares them to ignore the events as they unfold. That is the story nestled inside the intense, moving prose of Normal People. A relationship spanning years. A love story, real enough to see the pain. A beautiful train wreck, witnessed near enough to feel the fire. Normal people, and everything that entails.
A quick confession to make, but I am not a particularly fast reader. The ability to crush a 600 page novel in a few days has always been beyond me. My first read of Anna Karenina took me around three months, 100 Years of Solitude (a runner-up on my Top Ten List, as it happens, and one read at the fitting height of the COVID quarantine) around four weeks. This is in part because I usually have multiple books going at once (at the moment, four (House of Leaves, Klara and the Sun, Relae: A Book of Ideas, and Axiom’s End)). It’s also in part because of life, writing my own stuff, work (finally working again), and an occasionally bad habit of stopping and coming back to books days later… and that I’m just not that fast a reader anyway, not when I’m actually reading something.
Normal People remains one of the few books I’ve read entirely in one sitting, and the first since graduating college. It’s an engaging, if difficult, read. Difficult not only for some of the content, and it does bear mentioning the discussions of a not insignificant scope of harm, unhealthy habits, mental struggle, and destructive behaviors and situations, but also for that aforementioned unflinching willingness to examine the nature of being, well, normal people. Whatever that means.
I think it’s important to note that where some people, especially when discussing this book, use the word “disappointing” as a pejorative, I am not. Marianne and Connell are disappointing in only that unique way people can be, in the sense of wanting more from them as living, breathing flesh and blood and not in an abstract, literary critique sense. The book carries that sense of disappointment well, straddling the line of leaning into the emptiness growing up and discovering things, and people, can really be.
“Sometimes when Marianne mentions a film she recently watched, he waves his hand and says: It fails for me. This quality of discernment, she has realized, does not make Lukas a good person. He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly.”
I’ve yet to be to Europe, a combination of focusing on other plans and putting my time, effort, and money into other things. There’s plenty of travel I’ve done within the United States, and as many experiences of living in a few different areas in my home country. But, still, I feel that sense Connell gets in a particularly illuminating passage about the problems of privilege associated with traveling, and money, and the disappointment that comes from having to acknowledge it:
“It’s like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop his whole life had revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.”
It’s hard for me to like this book, but impossible not to love it. Whereas so many of the things I read and have praised here before deal with the same beautiful trend towards romanticizing life, Normal People almost refuses to. It acknowledges the pain inherent in love, the irrationality in how we live, the difficulty of people and our ability to communicate, and says that, if not okay, it’s at least not uncommon.
And sometimes, like a friend who just lets you cry without trying to cheer you up or the way pushing through another mile of a run just hits the right way when you think you’re through, it’s a catharsis. It’s understanding, even if it’s unspoken, or disappointing, or difficult. Because there’s so much of life in that, the difficulty, and it’s too often barely discussed. A chance to see the kinds of pain you may feel, or something similar to it, is a chance to feel a part of the rest of a humanity.
A chance to feel like a normal person.
To feel a little less alone.
