As I wrote recently, I’ve been skittering among books with my COVID-era case of the concentration blues. Last time, I wrote about The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel and Bush Runner by Mark Bourrie. Now, two more: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead and Normal People by Sally Rooney.

The Nickel Boys was one of the books I asked for last Christmas, having read Whitehead’s earlier work and admired it. He couples an elegant, spare prose style with a loose imagination, and insights ring from his work like the clean arrhythmic ping-ping-ping-ping of windchimes. 

Yet once I got the book, I hesitated. The novel is about incarcerated children, and as a mother I wince away from the subject at the best of times. Once the pandemic started, I couldn’t seem to open my winced eyes on the page.

Then I remembered Sally Rooney. I hadn’t read her cultishly-popular first novel, Conversations With Friends, although half the people I know had told me I ought to, and the cacophony grew louder when Normal People was published in 2018. Now, of course, there’s a hit mini-series of the book that’s getting wonderful reviews. Hungry for something to read, unable to deal with The Nickel Boys, I picked up the phone and ordered Rooney’s latest from my local indie bookstore. 

Normal People is centred on two adolescents on their way to university. Like Rooney, they’re Irish, and the book opens in the small town of Carricklea where they go to high school. Connell is a working class boy growing up in a stable home with a single mother. His mother cleans the house of rich-girl Marianne, whose chilly mother is a widow and whose brother is abusive. Connell is a jock, popular in school, but like Marianne he’s bookish. Both of them have discovered sex, and their on-again, off-again adolescent love affair is stringently—microscopically—observed.

I found Rooney’s exploration of adolescent fumbling, both emotional and physical, brought back a time that I’m happy to say is very far in my past. Nevertheless, I found myself enjoying the book’s evocation of the struggles of adolescence, feeling nostalgia for a place I have no wish to go back to. Rooney is a precise and intelligent writer, and she gets the switchbacks of young emotion exactly right: the wrong assumptions, the sharp hurts and the stubborn stupidity. Also the rare joys and the comfort of finding empathy amidst the angst. 

It didn’t bother me that characters beyond Connor and Marianne are stock figures. Connor’s mother is a little on the saintly side, while Marianne’s is one-dimensionally icy, and the friends who in the background are so generic that I could never tell them apart. When you’re that age, most people are out of focus as you’re full to bursting with the huge Me and I. Yet I was bothered by something else that I couldn’t put my finger on, and set Normal People aside to pick up Whitehead’s book. 

The review continues here.