In a series of posts, I’ve written about two modern novels, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead and Normal People by Sally Rooney. The series starts here.

After finishing The Nickel Boys, I turned back to Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Normal People. I’d put it aside after something about it bothered me; I didn’t know what. This time, I finished it quickly, and when I reached the final paragraphs, I finally saw my problem. 

As many people know from the very popular filmed version, the book concerns the relationship between a rich girl, Marianne, and a working class boy named Connor. They meet in high school in small-town Ireland and go to Trinity College, Dublin. At the end—and I’d better give a spoiler alert—Connor is accepted into a creative writing Master’s Degree program in New York and Marianne tells him to go.

The final page is written carefully, like the rest of this precisely-imagined novel. Connor says he doesn’t know whether to go to New York. Closing her eyes, Marianne reflects that if Connor goes, he might not come back. If he does, he’ll be changed. Yet she opens her eyes and tells him to go without ever asking what he wants, and I realized that this was the dynamic that bothered me throughout the novel: the dominion of rich girls over a working class boy, which I don’t find sufficiently examined by the author. 

Switch it. What would we feel about rich boys playing with the life of a working class girl, or white kids playing with a Black person’s future?  

In his last year of high school, Connor follows Marianne’s lead by applying to the elite Trinity College instead of heading off to the lesser school in Galway that his mates will attend. Once there, he aims to get a valuable and prestigious fellowship, again with Marianne’s encouragement, and submits his first short story to a college literary journal. The editor, Sadie Darcy-O’Shea, insists on publishing it despite Connor’s second thoughts. Note the hyphenated name and its class implications, as I imagine Rooney intends. 

Throughout, Connor is journeying out of his class at the behest of wealthy young women, and we’re signalled that this is the good and right thing to do. Connor is allowed his hesitations, growing depressed when one of his old friends commits suicide. But his sadness is cast as an illness he has to surmount. The novel is imbued with the idea of class betterment, and the implication that obstacles can be cleared away if you work hard and know the right people, not necessarily in that order. Never mentioned is the fact that obstacles often remain obdurately in place, much less the possibility of taking a different path, making a different life, and finding it just fine.

It’s a trope I’ve noticed often lately in American novels and films. I particularly dislike the way it works in the film Lady Bird, even though everyone else I know loves the movie half to death. 

Greta Gerwig wrote and directed this autobiographical first feature in which a working-class girl who calls herself Lady Bird aspires to an Ivy League education, hoping to get away from her mother and join the American elite. It’s one of many U.S. coming-of-age stories where an Ivy League acceptance stands in for the Holy Grail. As in the case in most of these fables, Lady Bird makes it past the scripted barriers to reach her college in New York, leaving her past behind to become, well, Greta Gerwig. (I didn’t like her film of Little Women, either.)

In interviews, Sally Rooney calls herself a Marxist, but given her novel’s unthinking delight in elite education, I found it deeply conservative, and in many ways wrong.

My father was a machinist who was desperate for both me and my brother to go to university. We had to Show Them. (His favourite phrase.) A formerly-militant Marxist friend insisted that I was born lower-middle class, not working class, since my mother was a nurse and my father worked multiple jobs so we could live in a pleasant suburb, where we went to the excellent schools. 

I still felt out of place, since we couldn’t afford the roller skates and country clubs and trips to Hawaii and Europe taken by many of our neighbours. University left me feeling even more anxious, defensive and vulnerable, and I stayed that way for years. I met my future husband in my first year at university, and he says you could smell the unease coming off me. The sense of being out of place. A misfit. Not quite right. So many years later, he still thinks snobs can sense it, and while it can be accepted in a man (working class male clichés: tough, sexy, vigorous, bracingly instinctual) it doesn’t work for a woman. (Pushy.)

Rooney has Connor feeling a bit of this in Normal People, but I was disappointed that a book so involved with class differences didn’t ask harder questions, and fell back on repeating coming-of-age clichés. 

Closing Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys, I had the feeling the best art gives: Yes, that’s what it’s like. (Unfortunately.)

Rooney’s book left me with the opposite feeling, No, it isn’t like that. It’s worse. Sorry.