Psychologists and sociologists, philosophers and other clever people have come up with hundreds of theories about how people interact, how they fall in love and how they decide who to stick with. Somewhere outside the edges of those theories is what you might call chemistry. It's not always possible to explain away why we love who we love and why we reject someone who might be a perfect match. Some of the elements are obvious and some are not. Sometimes, an inexplicable force ties you to another person without really showing you why. Normal People taps into that force in an intriguing and perceptive way.
Normal People follows Connell and Marianne from high school to College in Ireland, as they hook up, quarrel, drift apart, drift back together and so on. Connell is athletic, handsome and popular, but harbours a secret love for literature. Marianne, born into wealth, is coquettish but prone to traveling the darker alleys of her mind. Their story is relatable and believable in a way that few novels are. Connell struggles to understand how he feels about Marianne - very much something that young adult men go through - and ends up hurting her. They learn about each other and grow up together and realise that their chemistry is something they only share with each other.
Rooney does a lot with very little. Normal People is positively brief, especially compared to other stories of teenagers growing up (don't drop Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 on your foot). Chapters skip forward in time, offering the reader glimpses of the characters' lives. Rooney knows her craft and offers just enough clues for the reader. For example, Connell's missing father gets barely a nod, even though he might be blamed for many of the son's mistakes. It works brilliantly but for a few passages. Marianne's brother, who bullies and torments Marianne, is given so little time on the page that his actions mostly left me confused. Here a longer format might have helped.
So what exactly is Normal People? In one corner of the Internet, critics dismiss it as just another piece of "chic-lit"; naive books for young women in the style of Jojo Moyes and other bookstore top 10 staples. Normal People does share many of the genre's tropes. Connell is drawn to literature (can't writers imagine any other profession than their own?), is a top student at Trinity College and is invited to continue his studies in New York. New York as a metaphor for success is as vanilla as it gets. Paris is the city of love, Spanish is the language of lust and New York is the aspiring artist's inevitable destination. Some have mentioned Normal People as a generation defining love story. It obviously isn't. My generation (I'm very much the same age as the protagonists) doesn't care about high literature or write long emails to friends during summer vacations. We browse Instagram, not The Communist Manifesto, miscommunicate over texts and live in a constant state of FOMO (fear of missing out).
Nine times out of ten, the story ends there. A bestselling will-they-or-won't-they isn't a likely place to find graceful storytelling. Yet, there is an inexplicable allure to Normal People. We watched the TV series with my wife, which led to several deep discussions about our relationship and how we'd met. On several occasions, I thought about Normal People before going to bed. There are stylistic and thematic similarities with Hemingway's A Sun Also Rises; the sparseness of the storytelling, the frail inner life of the characters and the uncertain ending. And as with Hemingway, and human chemistry itself, part of Normal People's allure is physical and best left unexplained.