Reading Sally Rooney
I read Conversations with Friends alone and loved it; reading Normal People with friends was an unrelieved frustration. I'd picked it for a book club soon after finishing Sally Rooney's debut. The first hype bubble had already burst, but Conversations still felt worthy of what it had occasioned. It also felt (as every wave of Rooney writing has observed) like a rare bridge between book audiences, recommended across both literary Twitter and celebrity Instagram. Perhaps too much has been made of this bridging, but for my purposes it was enough to know that the novels are worth reading, and that casual readers enjoy them.
My new book club was low stakes, but it had some relational work to do: B, N, and I were three high school friends who'd done a spotty job keeping in touch over the past decade, and we needed a form through which to reimpose a bit of order on our friendship. Rooney's whole thing, I gathered, is the texture of millennial friendship. Conversations had been about how hard it is to be a good friend while you're busy growing up. I thought we'd have plenty to say about that.
And we did. Mostly the choice was a good one. We all made it to the end, and after we finished it we picked another book. We talk regularly now. The book club is doing its work. But during our two long meetings about Normal People, a single question kept returning to disrupt every other train of thought, and we never managed to answer it. What is up with Marianne? one of us would ask, wondering at her stubbornness, her inattention to social cues, her propensity to self-harm. But mainly — and here the great cloud of our impatience mushroomed to encompass Connell, blotting out any pleasure we took in their love — her inability to express herself when an occasion most called for it.
Normal People is propelled by suppressed non-conversations between its two protagonists, tracking their ambivalent breakups and reconciliations from the end of high school to the end of college. Rooney tells us about long, roving, fluent talks that Marianne and Connell have in bed together, though we never get to hear them: "They talk about the novels he's reading, the research she studies, the precise historical moment they are currently living in, the difficulty of observing such a moment in process." But whenever narrative push comes to shove and consequential dialogue is called for, neither character can put their fluency to use. Why, we wondered, did every confrontation devolve into mute frustration and crossed wires almost as soon as it began? The novel's many arguments are all so brief, strained, preemptively aborted, its protagonists looking on helplessly as their own dialogue sputters and crashes before clearing the runway — what's that about? They're supposed to be brilliant talkers. And in freakish, paranormal love! So why can't they talk to each other when it counts?
As our group's professional reader, I tried to marshal some variables. Normal People is a book about gender, and class, and power's erotic charge, and how the three are connected but not stably aligned: they're overwhelming obstacles to relation as well as the stuff relation is made of. Well, sure. In grad school that's the stuff reading is made of: gender, class, race, sex, how they shape a text or how a text reshapes them. First in undergrad and then in a Ph.D. program — as my friendships with B and N lay fallow — I learned how to articulate these concepts, with a novel or a poem as their joint. But in our book club, to my great horror, that felt like a decade wasted. I, too, wondered what Marianne's deal was; I, too, struggled to say. Interpretation is supposed to be my whole thing — instead of a career, I have books. ("So when do you finish college?" N joked recently.) But the best I could manage was inept cross-referencing, flipping uselessly through my copy of the novel in search of some buoying detail. Remember, her family is rich (but abusive!), and his is poor (but tender!), I'd say, over and over. Like all nice guys, he's dense about misogyny. They both have some power, but different kinds, and that's... hard. Right? That's why they can never say what they mean.
A number of essays in this cluster model the kind of reading I tried and failed to improvise: clarifying, sensitive, substantiated, with Raymond Williams on hand — good literary criticism. But the point of a book club is not to produce a reading. I'd misunderstood the assignment. We were supposed to be mending a relationship, with the book as thread. We did that, fortunately; my pursuit of an interpretation did not derail our relational work, but it also didn't enable it. If I've since figured out how to read Normal People, my academic training deserves only indirect credit. Nine years of higher education have not made me a good book club participant: that's what this book is about. That's why I could never say what I meant.
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What do I mean? Like so many Rooney readings, this one's self-referential. And like so many Rooney readers, I've come to love Normal People because I've found a way to identify with it, or at least with one of Rooney's varieties of post-adolescent frustration. Not the would-be anti-capitalist, social climber, free lover, or creative professional — though all of these, too, are relatable — but the would-be good reader.
Books are the first thing Marianne and Connell have in common, after good grades: when he comes to her house to pick up his mother, who works for Marianne's family, they flirt over The Communist Manifesto. But the Rooneyan type of the good reader entails more than a literal sensitivity to texts and their meanings. In my book club, I found myself allied with Marianne and Connell not only in my bookishness but also in my inability to do anything with it, my self-conscious failure to put intelligence to use. The good reader clings to insight as her consolation prize for social failure. For this reason she appears alternately dejected and presumptuous, reticent and proud. Academic aptitude feeds the good reader's sense of her own perceptiveness, and she expects her insight to extend from books to people, to power relations, to the world and her place in it — even though her footing in the world is never secure. Her interpretive skills may make her feel omniscient over the social landscape that she fails (or declines) to navigate, but her intelligence also removes her from the plane of normalcy on which that landscape unfolds, incapacitating her. In her more arrogant moments, her peers may strike the good reader as unthinking cogs in a machine over which she hovers knowingly. When normal people call her down to earth, her excessive analysis breeds inhibition, like a dancer who must mentally rehearse each step before executing it. The good reader knows what grace looks like and is pretty sure that she can name its ingredients, but all this deliberation just makes her heavy-footed.
Normal People is narrated in a close third person that alternates between Marianne and Connell's perspectives, and both characters appear to ably trace the contours of their own abnormality. In high school, Marianne seems unpopular because she sees through and rejects the social rituals that consume her peers; Connell will later sacralize this unpopularity as a symptom of her precocious self-knowledge and -respect. In college Connell, too, becomes a compulsive re-reader of his own experience, holding every feeling and gesture up to the light of his intelligence for painfully close inspection. The good reader is abnormal and knows it, but her knowledge isn't easily instrumentalized; she has trouble applying it, deriving its practical lessons. She can't make you like her, but she can read you like a book.
Except that, outside of books, Marianne and Connell are chronic misreaders. We realize long before Connell does that Marianne doesn't particularly know or respect herself, and Connell scores no better in either category. Their arguments stall because they can't figure out how to put intelligence to use, but also because they know less about themselves and each other than they think. The good reader assumes her insight is transferrable across objects and contexts, but her relationships prove otherwise. People are more unruly than books: a book may chafe against a bad interpretation, but a person talks back, shuts down, pursues her own interests, changes tack in the course of a single encounter.
In our book club I felt a chasm open between my self-understanding — as a good reader, talker, teacher — and the occasion at hand: I couldn't translate my analyses into our more intimate register or direct interpretation toward friendship's ends. I noted my own failure to bridge that gap, but my self-awareness did nothing to narrow it. Every climactic exchange in Normal People tears relation along this same seam, with the same disfiguring consequences for its protagonists' self-perception. The good reader looks on helplessly, watching the gulf widen between what she understands to be happening and what she can do about it. In the novel's most cartoonish example, Connell intends to ask Marianne if he can move in with her for a summer but accidentally initiates their breakup. The confusion unfurls in a quarter of a page, and Connell marvels as though at something fated:
His eyes were hurting and he closed them. He couldn't understand how this happened, how he had let the discussion slip away like this. It was too late to say he wanted to stay with her, that was clear, but when had it become too late? It seemed to have happened immediately. He contemplated putting his face down on the table and just crying like a child. Instead he opened his eyes again.
Connell thinks he's just learned that they were never actually dating; Marianne thinks she's just been dumped. No matter — in a few months they'll reconcile, sort of. The good reader closes her eyes and opens them again. Rooney's protagonists are chastened by misreading into self-doubt, but they're never shaken loose of the novel's governing dynamic. Old interpretations are adapted or replaced, even as the gap remains between the good reader's knowledge and her capacity to act on it. She doesn't know as much as she thinks she does, and what she does know isn't good for much. The consolations of interpretation, Marianne and Connell learn over and over, are thin. Much better to be happy, effective, able to speak and feel oneself heard. Also much harder.
Literary scholars sometimes romanticize the uselessness of our knowledge, especially when we're put on the defensive by metrics-minded admins, conservative legislators, or uncomprehending friends. I share in this refusal to instrumentalize our work. (The alternatives — insisting that novels teach empathy, that English majors make good businesspeople, and so on — can't help sounding desperate, or conceding too much.) But I also know that the readings we hone are often baroque, myopic, hopelessly bound to narrow professional contexts, inadequate to the social and political tasks we imagine for them. They may not be worth much outside of our writing worlds; they may not make us good comrades, talkers, book clubbers, or friends. In Normal People, the good reader's ineptitude usually feels tragic, but it needn't. Marianne and Connell think of themselves as held together by some terrifying and incomprehensible power, but the real glue might be something as simple as curiosity, fed by the felt limits of their own insight. What is up with Marianne? is Connell's absorbing question, too.
Sam Huber is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.
