Normal People

Connell and Marianne go to the same school in a small town in County Sligo. He is popular and she is not. His mother cleans her family's house. They begin something in secret, he refuses to acknowledge her in public, and then they both go to Trinity College Dublin where the social order reverses and she is the one with friends.

The novel follows them over four years, in chapters that jump weeks or months, watching them find each other, misread each other and separate for reasons that are almost always a failure to say one sentence out loud at the right moment.

Rooney writes without quotation marks and in a flat, close third person that stays just outside both of them, and the effect is remarkable: you can see exactly what each is thinking and exactly why the other cannot. Much of the book's power comes from dramatic irony that never lets up.

It is short and extremely readable, and people tend to finish it in two days and then argue about it. The arguments are usually about whether the characters' inability to communicate is a devastating portrait of class and damage or a plot device that becomes frustrating on repetition. Both readings are available and the book is strong enough to survive either.

What is less often said is how much of it is about money: who has it, who cleans for whom, who can afford to spend a summer in Italy and who has to go home and work. Marianne's family violence and Connell's depression are handled seriously rather than decoratively, and the novel is a good deal sadder than its reputation as a romance suggests.