Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, Irish writer Sally Rooney embraces the moniker “millennial writer” by commanding the consequential riptides of the personal computer age for 20-somethings, yet not depending on it as a crutch or gimmick. She’s spot-on at mixing the clean and the messy, visually appealing characters with their urbane and often insouciant lifestyles, but never misses the humanity and poignancy that gives the story its heart. In her new novel, NORMAL PEOPLE, Rooney is like the anti-zeitgeist zeitgeist writer, or the anti-hip hip writer. I say that because the novel has a classical sensibility—third person pov, a love story of the wealthy, self-contained girl with the awkward, underprivileged boy, and the recall of manners novels of another era. But the author also textures it with a contemporary setting and modern angst. The years of post-crash Ireland, a wry tone, tacit gender equality that quivers with intimate power shifts. The lovers, Marianne and Connell, start their love story in high school, and are at cross-purposes, which is the main suspense and action that provides tension. Connell’s mother, a warm and loving woman, cleans houses for Marianne’s family (both are single mothers). Marianne’s brother is abusive and her mother dismisses her entirely. Although Marianne is from the elite family, this is a small town in Sligo Co. where her offbeat style is off-putting to her peers. Connell is a winning athlete and popular, and they begin their on-again, off-again romance in secretive fashion. Time passes with titles of Five Months Later, Three Months Later, or even a few days later, moving forward from 2011 to 2015, from high school on to college at Trinity Dublin. As the narration alternates between the pair, the background story fleshes out. The reader is in suspense as each time period begins, not knowing the status changes of their relationship until you are teased into it. The novel itself is largely interior, and the raw emotional and psychological energy is the story’s propulsive force. Yet, Rooney’s precise language and stripped down descriptions of place are yet amplified by the physicality of her prose. “At times he has the sensation that he and Marianne are like figure-skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronization that it surprises them both.” And the exposed, rough and yet tender description of the electricity between them is ongoing: “She was attuned to the presence of his body in a microscopic way, as if the ordinary motion of his breathing was powerful enough to make her ill.” Their relationship is often quiet, even when turbulent, a gale force between the two of them and a mystique to others. They confide in almost no one but themselves, even when they are off-again. A wall separates them, but when they penetrate it, there’s a shattering, like glass. But don’t expect a tidy ending—if you read CONVERSATION WITH FRIENDS, you know it isn’t Rooney’s way. She’s more of a yin yang writer, with an ending that is somewhere in the middle of time and things and life. “From a young age her life has been abnormal, she knows that. But so much is covered over in time now, the way leaves fall and cover a piece of earth, and eventually mingle with the soil. Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body.”