The Sheer Confidence of Sally Rooney
Narration, interiority, and authority in Normal People
I finally read Normal People. It’s been out eight years. Embarrassing, right? Everyone has not only read it but, also, says their new book is like it. Well, I’m a snob and a half. If everyone likes something, you can be sure I’m going to wriggle and claw at you, like a cat that doesn’t want to be picked up, before reading it.
It took the other half of the equation—writing a book that is something like it; a relationship that jumps forward in time—for me to pick the novel up. Even then, it had to be in the library for me to find it, as I hadn’t planned on ordering it. (Thank you, libraries.)
“For a few seconds they just stood there in stillness, his arms around her, his breath on her ear. Most people go through their whole lives, Marianne thought, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.”
From page one, it was obvious that Rooney is an uncommonly skilled writer. The opening scene is basically porn for the literary young woman, with a shy, brutish young man who barely speaks pitted against a bookish, oddly direct young woman.
Is rape culture the reason we prefer men who seem shy? Are they less scary? Have you read Wuthering Heights? I, typical of a 15 year old girl, fancied Hareton Earnshaw, gunsmoke-smelling brute, who mumbled when he spoke and wanted to learn to read from bookish, direct Catherine the younger.
Normal People’s prose is beautifully sparse; the focus refuses to widen. Rooney has the confidence to hold space only for the physical truth of this one relationship, and to trust that she can tell a story via exterior movements and slight asides related to character and motive alone.
In my opinion, it’s Rooney’s confidence that makes her exceptional. It’s not easy to write like this, but it’s more about being sure of yourself than it is about literary ability (of course, she has that, too). Authorship is this—holding authority.
One glaring mark of confidence is that Rooney tells a story about intimacy without the insight into interiority that first person brings.
A good contrasting comparison for Normal People is Megan Nolan’s debut, Acts of Desperation. They were both Irish writers in their mid-late 20s when they embarked on these works, and both novels are about intimate partner relationships in Dublin. For me, the similarities end there.
Apart from two divergent treatments of the lead male characters—namely that Nolan’s is a massive prat and Rooney’s is a massive prat who is then (quickly) forgiven as he (slowly) redeems himself—the works differ in that Nolan’s novel, in the first person, delves into the complexity of young female interiority under patriarchy, while Rooney’s, in the third person, takes a more distant view of the long dance of one coupling, revealing dynamics that might be affected by social-economic issues including patriarchy, domestic violence, class, wealth, domination, control and submission, but can also be seen as purely the story of a particular, very idiosyncratic couple.
Is it ironic, that between these two works, interiority, for me at least, engenders more universality?
Rooney’s third person perspective creates more authority — so toxicity in the narrative seems smoothed over by an omnipresent non-character narrator who believes the two should be together.
The relationship is sanctioned by the narration; the reader is dissuaded from drawing parallels, interrogating behaviours, relating to sociocultural themes.
Or, maybe not. Does third person instead render the work more Brechtian, more ‘stepped back’, in order so that we may see the universalities through the relative calm of our emotions? (Acts of Desperation being tonally more desperate, heated, confused, because our narrator is, and we are inside her head.)
The playwright Bertolt Brecht promoted this way of creating work in theatre, wearing masks, breaking the fourth wall, playing parts (‘the shy brute’, ‘the bookish, direct girl’) so that the audience might engage in critical thought over emotional immersion.
Third person can be cold, medical, investigative, but it’s appropriate for this story. It’s not written for or marketed to teenagers; it’s for adults looking back at their younger selves with more objective eyes.
I suggest third person can be a way of breaking the fourth wall, a Brechtian move. How many of us carry around a narrator over our heads, who also watches the life of our lover? If there’s an omniscient voice, it’s indicative of a work of fiction.
Nevertheless, the experience of Normal People was emotionally immersive for me—perhaps not as wrenching as Acts, but poignant, and with a lot to relate to.
An uncomfortably personal side note: I was the smart, too-honest girl in school, who was relentlessly bullied, never understood social dynamics; fancied a brooding, quiet, but probably nice lad who played on the football team, and experienced (verbal) abuse at home.
“In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality.”
I mean, is this everyone reading? It felt weirdly personal, but it’s so popular I assume it must be weirdly personal for everyone.
What I imagine is universally personal is the experience of the bizarre stage of life the characters begin in, where you are primed more than ever to want to initiate closeness, and yet terrified of closeness that in a few years will seem commonplace. The crippling, shaking, embarrassment of feelings is so true, and so rarely seen in literature—except in a wry, winking, self-conscious way.
But this isn’t the journey of the protagonist—and to be clear, the protagonist is Marianne, because her desires align with the narrator’s and propel the plot towards its conclusion.
We never get inside the head of our protagonist. Rooney occasionally sums up what Marianne is thinking but much, much, more often we watch her from Connell’s perspective and are left to wonder. We never really know Marianne. But we root for her, regardless.
I think part of the genius of Normal People, if you’ll forgive me for being this calculating, this much of a working novelist, is that it’s a clean book. It’s sparse language and that lack of a widened world view and the quiet, unburdened presence we are held so adeptly in, in scenes between lovers, creates a reading experience with no speedbumps, no cliffhangers, no question as to whether they’re meant for each other, no ethical query about Connell’s lack of curiosity for Marianne’s perspective, no frills, and no doubt.
Rooney’s confidence is like a solid thing, that seems to turn away edit notes and the inevitable suggestions of love triangles and fleshing anything at all out more than absolutely necessary. Nope—I’m doing it this way, and everybody will like it. Like the submission that Marianne finally receives, we the readers give up to what Rooney gives us, and what she won’t give us, because she knows what we want, even if we are not so sure.
I never use third person when writing, and Rooney’s prose is the first to make me interested in attempting it. I tried it, but I can’t do it. I’m all about interiority, especially female interiority these days, what with writing autofiction and wrestling with the fact that I couldn’t write in an adult woman’s voice (including my own) until I was about 30. But I’m glad I finally read the novel and can appreciate the distance, all the same.
“For the privacy between himself and Marianne to be invaded by Peggy, or by another person, would destroy something inside him, a part of his selfhood, which doesn’t seem to have a name and which he has never tried to identify before.”
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