Photo: David Levenson/Getty Images Who talks like this, I found myself thinking as I read Sally Rooney’s second novel. Especially, and I say this at the risk of revealing my utter lack of teenaged sophistication, someone this young.
Nevertheless, here we are: The book opens with high-school classmates Connell and Marianne in the latter’s kitchen, making awkward, tentative conversation while Connell’s mother Lorraine finishes cleaning Marianne’s very large home. Connell is a popular, well-liked kid at the top of his class, though from what Marianne knows to be a “bad family” . Marianne is right up at the top with Connell academically, but a social outcast from a dysfunctional wealthy family.
Both of Rooney’s books, Normal People and Conversations With Friends before it, stuck with me, but more as moods than events or images. While the physical appearance of Marianne and Connell never fully cohered in my brain, I felt such a mind meld with their interpersonal dynamic that this felt appropriate, the way you aren’t aware of the appearance of your own face moving through the world, but you are aware of how it feels. Your ears turning red, your heart beating faster.
In fact, there is so little external physical description that when it comes along it functions as a mental speed bump, drawing attention to the artifice. The spell of the book is broken, temporarily, as if Rooney has remembered to insert some description of rain “silver as loose change in the glare of traffic,” or cherries hanging from trees and “gleaming like so many spectral planets.”
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