Normal People, Sally Rooney, 2018
My Psychological Evaluation of Marianne and Connell: (credibility being DUDE I can relate)
All I hear from the haters of this book is that it’s one big miscommunication trope. What do you mean “miscommunication trope”?! All they do is communicate! There should be a new literary trope called the “ultra communication trope” where two characters speak to each other so intimately and so deeply on such a soul level that they are ultimately fated to never find fault in the other, and therefore to never create the necessary boundaries that keep relationships healthy.
Possibly the most jarring line I’ve ever read in any literature ever is this: There’s something frightening about her, some huge emptiness in the pit of her being…she’s missing some primal instinct, self-defense or self-preservation, which makes other human beings comprehensible (254). This is the perspective of Connell. Marianne is characterized, using third person omniscient, as someone who is formidably free, though only in romantic relationships does she lose her sense of worth. She blends into the other person and becomes stripped of all her boundaries; a girl without self-preservation.
Rooney does a great thing where she makes us understand the roots of Marianne’s identity issues without Marianne quite catching it herself. Marianne is shown to come from a loveless family. She is scapegoated and abused by her brother, and emotionally neglected by her mother. In public she has always been perceived as unstable and attached with darkness. It is as though people are afraid of her, all except Connell, who enters her life by lucky circumstance. His mother is her mother’s housemaid, and their communications build naturally outside the anxious social dynamics of school. The two outsiders find community on the outside. They grow a first love bond. He keeps her as a secret at first, rendering her illicit and all his own. This is where we see her anxious attachment style first take hold. Their dynamic is the novel’s throughline, the story of Marianne desiring to be belonged to—from him, the prototype, and then all her ensuing romantic relationships, which she reproduces the dynamic with. The issue is that most other men don’t share her same soul connection as with Connell, and so the dynamic leans into abuse.
When people give a summary of Normal People, I’ll often hear it’s about a situationship, but I think what it really is is a story about how difficult (but trying) it is for two people with mental health issues to have a healthy love. Marianne is broadly someone who struggles with trauma and depression, and Connell is someone who struggles with anxiety and depression. If there is any “miscommunication,” as the book is reputed as, it’s that the characters struggle with the very real, very unspoken nebulosity of self. They don’t understand themselves, but they do understand each other. They love with a very passionate and dangerous dissonance.
Further, Marianne loves with an anxious attachment style and Connell is an avoidant. I have never read something so niche and real. Here is this: (p. 108-109)
You shouldn’t do things you don’t want to do, he says.
Oh, I didn’t mean that [she says]. She throws her hands up, like the issue is irrelevant. In a direct sense he understands that it is. He tries to soften his manner since anyway it’s not like he’s annoyed at her.
Well, it was a good intervention on your part, he says. Very attentive to my preferences.
I try to be.
Yeah, you are. Come here.
She comes to sit down with him and he touches her cheek. He has a terrible sense that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him. The idea frightens him so badly that he pulls his chair back and stands up. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know why he thought about it. Maybe he wants to do it. But it makes him feel sick.
He feels a kind of tingling in his fingers now and he can’t breathe right.
Oh, I don’t know, he says. I don’t know, sorry.
Connell’s closeness to Marianne is frightening because he doesn’t understand his intrusive thoughts and the anxiety which surrounds them, and Marianne submits so completely to him that if he were to become a monster, he would be met with no resistance. He could absolutely be that. So he pushes her away. This is their main miscommunication—she is vulnerable to him but he feels too negatively about himself to perceive her way of loving in a healthy manner.
Rooney’s choice not to include quotations in dialogue is the most genius thing in the world. In my novel (which has become a big point of pride for me now that I’ve read this and found how similar it is in both theme and style), I write dialogue without quotations in paragraphs in which the protagonist feels a loss of control (either positively or negatively). In passionate moments, there is no rigidity to conversation, no thought to it; it should flow naturally with the ambiance. The inner worlds of the characters are so strewn up with one another that to mark the dialogue with quotation marks is to push it into an external space. It removes the pivotal impression that their main language is through the soul. I’ve heard criticisms about Rooney’s dialogue style as being confusing, but that to me is why it is so touching. Dialogue with a lover is often confusing—uncontrolled, unmarked. It is my opinion that the lack of quotations and the dialogue within paragraphs lend to why readers are able to project themselves into the scenes so fluently.
Another writer’s perspective note is the skill in which Rooney can add nonchalant notes, like “the egg was more rubbery than he’d like” in the middle of conversation—it is somehow always relevant. It always adds to the scene. We know his inner world as wandering, nervous, critical. There are some real sexy pieces of narration too. I was stunned when Connell says I love you for the first time (p. 46) and the narration immediately becomes retrospect: “Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she’s aware of this now, as it’s happening.” What an interesting thing to do with time. It keeps us in the moment, but brings our awareness to the fact that this moment will live in memory; that time continues; that retrospect will become a factor.
Another narration moment that astounded me was page 86 when Marianne and Connell are having a conversation about something that happened, and then we are brought into a flashback which begins “This is the thing that happened.” I smiled SO BIG at this moment, overcome with the beauty of storytelling and how I KNOW Sally Rooney had a blast experimenting with ways to express her ideas in this way.
The ending was the best ending I have ever read. Can we recognize real quick that there is a plot twist here? It’s subtle, sure, but our whole perception of Marianne changes. Marianne becomes the caricature of what she’s always been afraid of. She becomes dark, too dark for Connell.
They are intimate for the first time in years, and she asks him to hit her. First, they straddle a line where she says she belongs to him and he’s turned on by it, but then she takes her risk, goes one step further, and asks him to hit her. He can’t do it. These characters, who live in a space without judgement, have found an area where they disconnect. This is it:
Now she knows in the intervening years Connell has been growing slowly more adjusted to the world, a process of adjustment that has been steady if sometimes painful, while she herself has been degenerating, moving further and further from wholesomeness, becoming something unrecognizably debased, and they have nothing left in common after all. (245).
The thing that’s uncomfortable and painful to confront is that this is true. These are Marianne’s thoughts, but they are true. Her fears have become external—he says he can’t debase her in this way, and so she wants to stop having sex. The novel ends quickly after she returns home and calls Connell after being hurt by her brother, and he tells her he will never let anyone hurt her again. Finally, the two of them together.
But Marianne is suddenly, on the very last page, jealous, insecure, and desperate, accusing Connell of being in love with someone in his writing cohort. She has never been this way up until this point. To us, she’s had a low sense of self-worth, but she’s always been deeply secure in who she is. It feels like a big revelation when we find that she is just like the rest of us—filled with romantic ideas that are not realistic or attainable long term.
And then, in the most defining moment of Marianne’s life, the very last sentence is her telling Connell to move to New York for his MFA even though it means he will leave her. She rationalizes this, heartbreakingly, by holding tight to their permanence. They have grown with one another, changed each other—their permanence is already there. She tells him: you should go. I’ll always be here. You know that.
And then the novel is over. That’s it. There is no fix here. She submits to him, and she will always submit to him. It may be relevant, too, that Rooney has a scene in which he gets therapy, but there is nothing to suggest Marianne does. This distinction indicates that Connell is on his way to growing healthy relationships, but Marianne, without any family support, is stuck in a loop of her attachment issues.
GOSH.
I have never felt so seen by any piece of writing ever. I realize that this is the experience of everyone who loves this book (there are very polarized opinions). My biggest takeaway is that my own novel, which also relates toxic family to first love and low self-worth, anxious attachment, and dissociation in a fabulistic storytelling style (I say this because it’s very simply written, and it feels like the lesson on unchecked mental health is clear) is maybe niche enough to feel deeply intimate, as this has felt to me.
5/5 but also my new favorite novel and writer. 🙂 got me out of a year long reading slump y’all!
