The Irresistible Intimacy of <em>Normal People</em>

Once, a woman who works in publishing told me that the metric for a hit book is whether, after reading it, you feel immediately compelled to pass it on. After I read Sally Rooney’s Normal People late last year, I was determined to press it into the hands of everyone I knew; uselessly so, it turned out, because most had already read it and had the same impulse. Rooney has her detractors, many of whom seem more by her preternatural success than by her actual work. The structure of is also fairly diaphanous, and the ending is maddeningly uncertain. (“I wanted to sue Sally,” one of my co-workers told me.) And on its face, the oscillating relationship between Connell and Marianne, whose intense connection begins in high school, when he’s a popular athlete and she’s an oddball outcast, feels familiar enough. But the story, the characters’ tantalizing proximity to life-changing love and their clumsily human insistence on messing things up—it all felt so addictive, so affirming, so loaded with potential. “JUST LOVE EACH OTHER!” I wanted to scream after virtually every page. Why is that so hard?