I wanna live like Normal People

The BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, a story of two literary-minded teenagers who embark on a tortured decade-long romance, is imperfect lockdown viewing. For anyone with memories of “young love” and the debris it leaves behind, bright-eyed photographs, little scribbled notes, and dedications on the inside of book covers “All my love X”, it is sweetly/painfully resonant.

We first meet its protagonists, Marianne and Connell at secondary school in rural Ireland. They are both clever and neurotic. Marianne is nerdy and reviled by her classmates for her ostentation and aloofness. By contrast, Connell is good at sport and surrounds himself with a group of regulation laddish mates. He is painfully shy in his own way and finds his obvious academic achievement a source of vague embarrassment.

Marianne is astonishingly rich and her (single) Mum hates her; Connell is poor and much-loved by his (single) Mum. Throughout the series, these tensions play out in interesting and perverse ways. At university (Trinity College Dublin), Connell ruins their burgeoning relationship because he can no longer pay the rent and cannot imagine depending on Marianne’s charity and goodwill to remain in Dublin.

Marianne, who suffers from a profound sense of inner worthlessness, finds herself stuck in a series of unsuitable and destructive relationships with almost comically horrible men. Over time, they break up and get back together and even have ecstatic periods when all seems well, but both characters seem unable to fully extricate themselves from their respective pasts.

In fact, the near total absorption of the two of them in each other’s pain and longing means the rest of the cast is relegated to pastiche – such is the way with extremes of emotion, I suppose. Marianne’s brother is an alcoholic yokel. Her mum is portrayed as what I can only describe truthfully as a complete cow. Connell’s Mum is nice and smiley. Marianne’s posh friends at university are some of the most facile characters seen in fiction since Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.

Its ace soundtrack, with well-timed contributions from Nick Drake, Yazoo and Imogen Heap, makes this a well-executed take on Rooney’s second novel, which assured her ascent to modern literary stardom begun by her Booker-nominated debut Conversations with Friends.

CWF tracks parallel affairs between a glamorous older couple (an academic and an actor) and two young women, who are friends. It had a lot of the fetid atmosphere of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse in it and was a triumph of anti-literary style – so much of the drama plays out in simple transcripts of text conversations and long, long emails.

NP has so far proved more successful and more popular, and yet as a novel it’s a failure in literary ambition – she is far more expansive with her own voice than in CWF and her reflections on depressive states and sadomasochism in particular add little.

In CWF, her at times alarming use of similes seemed to work. I read them as a bitter piss-take of “literary value,” of the moralistic view of literature as both sensory and “improving”. But in NP, a much more straightforward love story, it felt less of a stylistic quirk and more like a substitute for the craft of writing: “Her body was all soft and white like flour dough,” for example.

The Sally Rooney phenomenon has had critics divided. Some find her little more than chick lit; others revere her in a creepy and possessive way. Is she a great writer? I’m not really sure and in any case, it’s a judgement for better equipped writers than me. The television series does, however, represent precisely why Rooney is so popular with my generation.

Connell and Marianne are stuck with each other because they feel that they cannot, will not, relate to others. They believe themselves to be preternaturally contaminated. They are sadists but delight in wickedness is not their condition. It is rather a sense of overriding shame, in both the pleasure they have together and the pain they inflict on each other and others. A gift for writing and “cleverness” are their consolation prize. Some prize!

Aggressively over-educated and pushed out of university into a labour market that doesn’t really reward academic achievement, Millennials and Zoomers have every right to feel a little stuck. After the crash, because of a variety of extraordinary monetary innovations, there was no correction towards younger people with limited savings, no switch to runaway inflation or a significant drop in asset prices. We have felt stuck – stuck in perpetual springtime of adolescent romance and personal stagnation. Rooney’s popularity springs from how fantastically successful she has been at dramatizing how dreadfully painful stuckness is, and how destructive it makes our young people.