It’s written with the same cool detachment, and addresses many of the same concerns: class, power, sex, capitalism. Normal People has a simpler premise: boy meets girl, complications ensue. Tale as old as time, but Rooney’s was a fresh addition to that genre, witty and near documentary, told in prose largely without affect. Rooney’s debut was about a young woman embarking on an affair with an older married man. Normal People is Rooney’s second novel her first, Conversations with Friends, was a virtuoso performance. The question is, then: Why can’t she be normal? Or is she? On page 187 of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, one of the protagonists, Marianne, declares: “I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.” It feels like a thesis statement. That precise moment a character says, “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird,” and the reader feels something (clarity or epiphany, however false). There should be a term for the place in a text where the words of the title appear. Normal People, by Sally Rooney, Hogarth, 273 pages, $26
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