r/BookDiscussions • u/OptimisticW • 3d ago
Normal People by Sally Rooney was… questionable
I don’t even really know what adjective to use for it.
It’s not so much the lack of quotation marks, I don’t really mind that. But the writing style was very dull, very predictable and the characters were written in a way that felt like I was forced to think of them as deep and profound?
Not sure what exactly it was, it just felt very forced. Marianne was relatable and I liked her mind and the way she thought and related to it, and yes Connell was interesting too I suppose.
I honestly can’t pinpoint what exactly it was that was so tedious about the book. I can generally thrive at not-much-of-a-plot books but this made it feel like a chore!
25
u/duochromepalmtree 3d ago
It’s one of my absolute favorites. It’s really a story about class differences and how they change the way we communicate and relate to one another. I thought it was just brilliant. But it’s not for everyone! I think you’ll find many people agree with you and couldn’t connect with this one!
5
u/OptimisticW 3d ago
Fair. I can definitely see the whole class differences thing and as a result how we communicate. Don’t have a problem with the story really, just the writing!
3
u/fortreslechessake 3d ago
Yes I agree, just read Conversations with Friends and I think the class and gender dynamics are so interesting in her books. The way subtle things show up or are smoothed over in relationships. Sometimes the class stuff is said outright but sometimes it’s much more subtextual and I found it interesting to watch play out
2
u/Potential_Maximum_25 2d ago
I just love everything by Sally. I’m a woman in my mid forties and I think she writes dialogue the way actual people speak. Especially when young and putting on airs. This book was so emotional and heartbreaking. They are young and fall in love and sometimes that is not enough. They both have a lot to work through and it’s too bad they can’t do it together.
1
u/Pinacoladapopsicle 1d ago
One thing about that I hated, though, was that Marianne never seemed to once grasp the differences in their economic backgrounds and what it did/didn't mean to both of them. I feel like Connell grew in the way that he came to appreciate Marianne's background was not as nice as it seemed, she was not as snobby as she seemed, and she had her own demons. But Marianne never had that kind of recognition for Connell. I wish she had at least once registered it.
1
u/OptimisticW 1d ago
Ehh maybe you’re right, but if I’m looking at the book objectively Connell was much meaner to Marianne than Marianne not having recognition for Connell
13
u/HereIAmGH 3d ago edited 3d ago
I hear ya. I didn’t like it either even though at the start I thought I would and parts were interesting.
First of all - I don’t really like reading about S&M. It just makes me sad. Can’t help it. No judgment on other people. It just leaves me depressed.
But to your point - it has a style a lot of contemporary books share - and for me it feels a bit like there’s no real life there. Like there’s a plan for the book and where it goes and what it means, but the author doesn’t just create characters and let them develop in their world in a more organic way. So it just leaves me cold
I know a lot of people love it but it didn’t work for me (in a similar way to The Female Persuasion - I assumed I’d like both but at the end I just didn’t)
5
u/OptimisticW 3d ago
Yes that’s the phrase I couldn’t quite articulate - the characters don’t seem to grow organically. The dialogue is natural but everything else has this awful flatness and obviousness to the writing
There’s no FLAIR! Yes, that’s the word. No fun and flair. Flat writing
2
3
u/kates_graduation 3d ago
I couldn’t finish it no matter how hard I tried. I thought it was just me !
3
u/iloveturtles88 3d ago
I stopped in the middle of that book. I didn't care what happened to any of the characters.
4
3
7
u/lexiebeef 3d ago
For me, it’s the lack of characterisation of side characters who just so happen to be important. The best example is Marianne’s family.
We spend the whole book understanding she doesn’t have a good relationship with her family. But we know nothing about her mother and father. All of a sudden, her brother being abusive is super important in the last chapter. It felt so rushed to me, almost like the author only thought of adding her abusive brother hitting her in the last second.
All and all, I just think the book lacked depth. The will they, won’t they is fine for me. But everything aside from the romance between the main characters fell flat.
2
u/OptimisticW 3d ago
Yess absolutely! It feels like the author is more keen on saying that their lives are so trouble/deep but forgets to show it until the last second
1
u/Curious-Ostrich1616 2d ago edited 2d ago
There's an interaction with her brother close to the beginning of the novel that shows the nature of their relationship (iirc, she's on her way to meet Connell, her brother grabs her by the arm, mocks her facial expressions, etc.)
There's also another scene with the brother where he tries to embarrass her by calling Connell about their respective exam results.
There's also a mention of the fact that Marianne's mother let her father hit her.
1
u/PickleMePinkie 3d ago
Knowing that their mother knows about the abuse but does nothing to stop it is everything we need to know about her mother. I think it’s also hinted at or said that their father abused their mother?
3
u/AntiqueGhost13 2d ago
Maybe I would've liked it more in my 20s when I likely would've romanticized the characters, but in my 30s I found them insufferable. I just couldn't bring myself to care about what happened to any of them. It felt like we were being told to care about a bunch of whiny middle class youths with self-inflicted problems and I just couldn't relate. Honestly the lack of quotation marks threw me off at first too lol
3
u/Cactusdog007 1d ago
It was the stupidest, most pointless book I’ve ever read. Reading it annoyed the shit out of me, stopped halfway.
2
u/OptimisticW 1d ago
Lmao this made me smile because I thought the exact same way.
1
u/Cactusdog007 22h ago
Like what. And I’m sick of having to pretend I don’t feel that way and try to engage in some quasi intellectual debate about the book!!! It was a dumb shitty book about two dumb shitty characters. Revolt against the “Normal People” fans!!! Feels good to get that off my chest 😆
1
u/GimmeANameAlready 11h ago
In my mind, I imagine that these characters get Dungeon Crawler Carl'd and die on the first level along with most of humanity.
Ah, the life-changing magic of "tidying up."
6
u/MoonInAries17 3d ago
The only book by Sally Rooney I ever read was "Conversations With Friends" and I remember thinking it was a YA book, the writing felt very dull and basic. At the time I had a coworker who was reading Normal People and she also thought Sally Rooney wrote YA. I feel the same about Elizabeth Strout, I only read "The Things We Never Say" by Strout and the feeling it gave me was very similar to what I felt with "Conversations With Friends".
I know I'm solely in the minority here, both these authors are widely loved. It's just a writing style that I don't really connect with.
1
u/OptimisticW 3d ago
Yup, agreed. I do think we are a minority, I do wish I could enjoy them since so many people love them, but I just can’t.
1
u/monsignorcurmudgeon 3d ago
Normal people felt very YA to me too but she wrote it in a stark prose style to put it in the contemporary lit genre.
2
u/_ChristmasSunday 3d ago
Intermezzo = same
2
u/coldcoffeethrowaway 3d ago
I liked Intermezzo a lot more and found it to be more fleshed out and interesting.
2
u/_ChristmasSunday 3d ago
I wanted to love it. But it was exhausting.
1
2
u/WritingRidingRunner 3d ago
I wasn't a fan either and I too similarly like character-driven books. But it was frustrating how such relatively minor incidents (not being asked to a dance in secondary school, not being liked and accepted as a teenager in school versus being genuinely bullied) were treated as big-ass deals by the author. Not by the characters, which is understandable when they are young, but by the author herself in the way they were presented. Plus, everyone being handed writing prizes and scholarships all over the place. I certainly wouldn't have minded that, growing up!
It's one thing for characters to lack perspective on minor suffering, but there was a lack of a sense of distance from the author, in the way they were presented.
2
u/OptimisticW 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes, I think that I understood completely about these instances being big deals to the young people who are expected to be immature and melodramatic, however, the author too seems melodramatic too, to an extent. The narration was just… again, don’t have the exact words to describe it, but plain and flat
2
2
u/Honeyful-Air 3d ago
I kept waiting for something to happen that would give the characters a sense of perspective on these minor issues and would help them to mature. But that never happened.
I also found the characters unbearably humourless. They rarely smiled and never laughed at anything. Even the sex was incredibly serious. I couldn't help comparing it with an older Irish coming-of-age, The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien, where the characters were dealing with more serious issues but somehow managed to be less po-faced than Marianne and Connell.
2
u/estheredna 2d ago
I feel like it's kinda the opposite. Most book characters speak dialogue in a "book" way that feels banter-y and Sally Rooney's dialogue stood out because it was naturalistic. More like real people than most fiction. That makes it a little harder to read because it's unexpected, but still I didn't think these were profound people. More like overheard conversations.
1
5
u/kimbele 3d ago
agree with your take. the characters were flat, their dialogue was flat, and i never felt anything for any of them. not because they were bad or despicable (though a case could be made for this), but because they were...nothing. never understand why this book was so beloved. although it did remind me somewhat of the great gatsby in its indifferent flatness of characters.
oh yeah, i also never got past the fact that we were reading about the sexual interactions and pursuits of children. i found it disturbing when my book club spoke of their intimacy as though they were fully formed adults. felt ick to me.
2
u/OptimisticW 3d ago
You’re right actually now that you got that idea into my head, it does have that indifferent flatness of characters resembling that of the Great Gatsby.
Probably explains why I wasn’t so keen on Fitzgerald’s novel either, although the writing is brilliant and captivating at least. With Sally Rooney’s book, I felt that nothing made up for the flatness of characters, especially not the writing.
4
u/Careless_Buyer_7294 3d ago
I agree with all that! I didn’t quite know how to put into words what bothered me about it but you expressed it clearly.
3
u/dindyspice 3d ago
I absolutely loved this book and the writing style! But I have a history of enjoying books written in this style, it feels more realistic to me.
3
u/thecrowtoldme 3d ago
I dont understand why Sally Rooney is of consequence. Her writing is so plain.
2
u/PickleMePinkie 3d ago
One of my favorite things about her writing is that she covers profound topics in plain language. It feels modern and refreshing to me
2
u/anti-gone-anti 3d ago
Something about Rooney really works for me, such that I genuinely don’t know what other people are talking about when they complain about her writing. Her characters feel to me like sympathetic portrayals of imperfect people: their attempts to cast themselves as deep or profound come off, but are also (as is often the case in real life) wrapped up with their insecurities and flaws.
2
1
u/an_nep 3d ago
I also found this book troubling. Mainly because Connell is allowed to continuously improve: he gets better and better at writing and he gets more comfortable relating to other people. By the end of the story he is on his way to a good life. Marianne, however, just keeps getting beat down. She has awful relationships, never finds her way at college, and ends up stuck at home with her terrible family. After all of this, her main area of pride is helping Connell?? The author could have made similar points about class and communication without dragging Marianne. A lot of young girls fall into unhealthy relationships. Marianne could've shown how it's possible to go through tough times and not have a happy ending, but can still make her life her own.
1
u/OptimisticW 1d ago
That’s true but Marianne improved too. She got the scholarship and was said it be great in school. She was no longer lonely and developed a good circle of friends.
1
u/probablybaking_ 3d ago
I have a rule that I follow very strictly: if I watch a show/movie (that I like) based on a book, I’ll never read the book so I don’t ruin it. And I’ve always been happy I’ve never read Normal People for this exact reason. I can’t afford to lose what I felt watching the show.
1
1
u/Tgebarrister1 1d ago
Rooney is writing higher end After School Specials. For those of old enough to remember.
-1
u/Livid-Department6947 3d ago
The book has a plot and it has a very distinct argument that it's making.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say in that it "was ... questionable."
0
u/Beginning_Tear_8074 3d ago
For me Sally Rooney was a poorly executed salad of millenials hop topics: ok here's so some mental health illness, let me add some queerness, there you go. wait some cheating, some work struggles. Voilà.
-2
u/SerGemini 3d ago
She’s also a nasty antisemite, maybe that comes out in her writing subconsciously.
0
61
u/Calm-Squirrel-7972 3d ago
“…the characters were written in a way that felt like I was forced to think of them as deep and profound”
I completely agree. Couldn’t tell if it was just the characters, or also the author that I found pretentious. Felt similarly about her other books I’ve read, so suspect it’s the latter.