Before Normal People made her a household name, Sally Rooney announced herself with this novel, and reading it you can feel a major talent arriving fully formed. Frances is twenty-one, a student in Dublin, aspiring writer, performer of spoken-word poetry with her best friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi. When the two of them fall into the orbit of an older married couple, Frances begins an affair with Nick, the husband, and the cool, controlled surface she presents to the world starts to crack in ways she is not equipped to handle.
What Rooney captures so precisely is the gap between how Frances narrates herself and who she actually is. Frances is brilliant and self-aware on the page, ironic and unflappable, and the novel quietly dismantles that performance, showing the loneliness and the longing underneath the cleverness. The first-person voice is a high-wire act, intimate and withholding at once, and Rooney uses it to explore how young people armor themselves with intellect precisely because they feel too much.
The affair is the engine, but the real subject is the tangle of relationships around it, especially the charged, unresolved bond between Frances and Bobbi, which the book takes as seriously as any romance. Rooney is interested in the politics of these connections, in power and money and who gets to be vulnerable, and she threads ideas through the story without ever letting them stiffen into lecture. The prose is the now-familiar stripped style, plain and unhurried, so transparent it makes you forget you are reading.
It is a debut, and a few of its seams show. Frances can be a frustrating narrator, deliberately so, and a reader impatient with passivity or with characters who hurt others by failing to communicate may find her hard to sit with. The novel's coolness of affect is a feature, but it does keep the reader at a certain remove, and those who want warmth or resolution may find its ending characteristically ambiguous. These are the costs of its particular, very intentional spell.
Why you should read
- Readers who love sharp, cerebral literary fiction
- Anyone drawn to messy twenty-something relationships
- Fans of Rooney's spare, interior style
- Those who like morally complicated, ambiguous endings
What to expect
- A college student's affair with an older married man
- Cool, ironic, first-person narration
- A charged best-friendship as central as the romance
- Plain prose and a characteristically open ending
Read it for the pleasure of watching a young writer take the messy emotional life of a twenty-one-year-old completely seriously, and render it with an intelligence that never condescends. It is funny in a dry, glancing way, painful in a quiet one, and far more emotionally generous than its cool surface lets on. By the final pages Frances has earned a hard-won self-knowledge, and you close the book certain you have been in the hands of a genuine writer from the very first line. It is a debut that already knows exactly what it is doing, and it makes you eager to follow wherever its author goes next. For a first novel it is astonishingly assured, and it rewards a second reading with details and ironies you will have missed the first time through.
