Although this one had been on my TBR list since release date, I only decided to purchase Normal People after watching the BBC adaptation of the novel (I don't know if it's socially acceptable for a self-proclaimed book blogger to admit this, but the TV show was so well-done and addictive that I'm not at all embarrassed by my frankness).
In any case, flash forward one year after I finished watching the TV show and I finally finished Sally Rooney's 2018 best-selling novel Normal People. The story follows Connell and Marianne through various years and stages in their young adult life. The way this is done is through flashbacks and time jumps, a choice which some readers might find more appealing then others. Rooney shines a light on the most important episodes of Connell and Marianne's life, namely those where they by some happenstance stumble upon each other after a long time of not having seen each other.
If the novel emphasises one thing about its main characters it is that Connell and Marianne are both smart. They are also clumsy in their human interactions and closed off, making it even as a reader hard to know how they feel. As I don't want to consider this a shortcoming in the way Rooney writes her characters, I'd rather opt that this inaccessibility is in line with the way Marianne and Connell often live alongside each other, skins brushing in different moments in time, but always searching for each other's true feelings. Indeed, Connell and Marianne are normal people with all their wonderful mysteries and beautiful problems. It's up to the reader to decide if they love this being left out in the open or if they find it infuriatingly frustrating.
Since no-one can know the course of life of normal people living their normal lives, the ending leaves plenty of room for speculation. The course of Connell and Marianne's relationship, too, is not at all as definitive as you might think. These two people are both their best and worst person around one another, even if they finally seem to have concluded they're only themselves when they're together, I'm not convinced it's definitive their ending will be a happy or a bleak one. With life you just don't know. After all, the book shows two normal people who are like natural satellites orbiting around one another: they can't be together but they can't be apart either.
Connell and Marianne are examplary millennials: happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time. The novel tries hard to make the unpopular-popular Marianne and popular-unpopular Connell likeable, but in reality they become a fantasy of the generation they're supposed to represent. They are almost too artificial, the dialogues at times fall flat and feel too constrained. Though, perhaps one could argue that the dialogue is constrained because the characters themselves are constrained: by their hopes and fears and anxieties, by both feeling discontent and having lust for life.