Bet This Shit Slaps if you're 20

A short while ago, after reading The Human Stain, I wrote about how, after having children and getting older, incredibly well-written books that incessantly abuse characters as some sort of intellectual signifier became suddenly and intensely uninteresting to me. I've recently made a very similar, albeit somewhat different, discovery reading Normal People by Salley Rooney.

Backing up, Rooney is not abusive to the characters in Normal People; in fact, it is clear she is using them less as empty stand-ins for concepts or vehicles for plot progression, but instead as carefully crafted People You Want to Care About. There are no real villains; even the most minor of characters are somehow given a backstory that goes beyond "sympathetic" and instead really embodies the concept of humanizing without copious amounts of lore. Which is all to say, Normal People has great characters, including the two leads, Connell and Marianne. Rooney can weave in so many dynamics and intricacies without large amounts of exposition, if any at all. She relies more on dialogue, both internal and external, to fill the reader in on who these people are, and Rooney has mastered the authorial art of giving a lot while using very little. 

Normal People challenged the notion that I care more about how a story is told and crafted rather than the content therein. This feels true when I'm reading, say, Moby Dick or The Sun Also Rises. However, when I'm reading a book like Normal People, the contents of the story and how little they interest me actually distract entirely from the form. The novel follows Connell and Marianne through early high school and late college; each chapter propels time forward by several months, oscillating between an omniscient perspective of each of their thoughts. This is an interesting way to navigate through the actual happenings of the novel, which features two young people who can only really be themselves - IE normal - when they are together. Rooney seems to be making the argument that this is what love really is. The two characters drift in and out of each other's lives, debating whether they are actually growing as people or simply putting on different masks for the world to see, and coming together for rare moments existing as a pure form of uninhibited, vulnerable self. Cute!

I enjoyed the catapults through time as storytelling. Connell and Marianne were perfectly portrayed, self-conscious young people and really likable. There were subtleties in characterization that could interestingly formulate into plot twist-like actions; for example, I didn't catch the very real possibility that Marianne's kind of abusive older brother might actually be mentally disabled. Rooney uses fidgeting and characters filling awkward gaps in conversation with small, little quirks as a literary device; it is eloquently realistic and relatable, and anyone who has ever felt uncomfortable as a young adult (everyone) will find a visceral reaction to it and an instant fondness for the characters.

The problem is I just don't care. Love post-having children means something else than love in college. There is an arrested coming-of-age aspect that I can see as once relatable, but I can't find - nor is the text able to exorcise - the part of me that once cared about this stuff. This is what my then 27 y/o stepdad felt when I showed him Pokémon cards; as a former baseball card collector, he could recognize the passion, but the thing in front of him, however well crafted for its intended audience, could not conjure back up these feelings in him. So it was just kind of annoying and weird.

Ultimately, Human Stain has powerful and beautiful writing in service of cruelty. Normal People has soft and subtle craft in service of a young person's view of love. Neither of these things interests me anymore, but I'm glad they exist. Young people and angry people deserve a literary exploration of what they are going through.