Normal People

“Everyone is so convinced of his attraction to Miss Neary that sometimes he starts to doubt his own instincts about it. What if, at some level above or below his own perception, he does actually desire her?”

Connell is a herd animal at the beginning of the book, formed by the opinions of those around him. He can’t talk about difficult topics like Miss Neary’s inappropriate behavior toward him, which causes him to second-guess his own reactions. Marianne, the opposite of a herd animal, helps Connell to become more fluent emotionally and to trust more in his own deep feelings. 

“When he talks to Marianne, he has a sense of total privacy between them. He could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them, he knows that. Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him.”

The freedom that Connell experiences with Marianne both exhilarates and frightens a boy accustomed to boundaries and clear codes of behavior. It is one reason why he balks at committing to their relationship and making their involvement public. 

“He was thinking about what a secretive, independent-minded person Marianne was, that she could come over to his house and let him have sex with her, and she felt no need to tell anyone about it. She just let things happen, like nothing meant anything to her.”

Connell senses Marianne’s genuine independence and also her damage. She is not affected by the same concerns that other kids in his social group are, but she hides passivity behind her impervious pose. Both her stoicism and her vulnerability result from the abuse that she has experienced in her family. 

“Multiple times he has tried writing his thoughts about Marianne down on paper in an effort to make sense of them. He’s moved by a desire to describe in words exactly how she looks and speaks.”

Connell’s involvement with Marianne lends itself to writing; their relationship is a secret otherwise, and he cannot tell anyone else about how he feels. Marianne, therefore, encourages him to become a writer in more ways than one, one of many intangible gifts they give one another over the course of the novel. 

“He never thinks about the man who got Lorraine pregnant, why would he? His friends seem so obsessed with their own fathers, obsessed with emulating them or being different from them in specific ways.”

Connell’s unconventional family background puts him at a remove from his high school circle of friends. Although his conservative small town frowns upon his single mother, she gives Connell a freedom that his more traditional friends do not have. 

“He kept thinking of himself saying to Marianne in bed: I love you. It was terrifying, like watching himself committing a terrible crime on CCTV.”

Shortly after telling Marianne that he loves her, Connell effectively breaks up with her by inviting another girl to a school dance. His own feelings frighten him, and he has had a sensation of being in over his head. Yet he finds that cutting his feelings short is just as unbearable, if not more so. 

“Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves […] She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth,’ by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”

Victim-blaming—the idea that people who are abused deserve their abuse—is prevalent in Marianne’s family. Marianne’s stubborn pride and resilience infuriate Denise; she envies Marianne’s strength, so she tacitly approves Alan’s bullying. Denise’s late husband abused her, and in an irrational competitive way, she resents her daughter’s independence and options. 

“He understands now that his classmates are not like him. They don’t worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. They are not stupid people, but they’re not so much smarter than him either. They just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him either, or even try.”

Connell is shocked by the differences between social life at Trinity College and social life in his Carricklea high school. He has never before encountered wealthy people, apart from Marianne, or understood the entitlement that wealth can bring. At Trinity, Connell’s and Marianne’s statuses are reversed, with Marianne speaking the social language and fitting in, at least superficially, much better than he does. 

“This is the thing that happened.”

Rooney structures many chapters in this book by launching into a real-time situation at the beginning. She then writes a flashback that offers a gradual explanation for the present. This technique creates narrative suspense, and stays true to the many shifts and confusions in Marianne’s and Connell’s friendship. In this case, Marianne and Connell are returning from a party at which Marianne drunkenly propositioned Connell.   

“Really she has everything going for her. She has no idea what she’s going to do with her life.”

Wealthy, beautiful, connected, and bright, Marianne is a superficially privileged, lucky person. Yet her blessings also unmoor her, making her feel both that she has too many options and that she benefits from an unfair capitalist system. They also detach her from her own pain, causing her to minimize the real abuse that she has suffered. 

“It’s true that Connell is quiet at parties, stubbornly quiet even, and not interested in showing off how many books he has read or how many wars he knows about. But Marianne is aware, deep down, that that’s not why people think he’s stupid.”

Connell, uninterested in wealth, prestige and power, has different manners from Marianne’s wealthy Trinity friends and does not dress or talk in a way that earns their approval. Marianne’s friends interpret his combination of modesty and unconventionality as stupidity, never having encountered it before. Their attitude shows the small-mindedness that can exist even—or even especially—among supposedly worldly and cosmopolitan people.  

“Rich people look out for one another, and being Marianne’s best friend and suspected sexual partner has elevated Connell to the status of rich-adjacent: someone for whom surprise birthday parties are thrown and cushy jobs are procured out of nowhere.”

Connell’s new provisional status as friend to a rich person opens his eyes to a larger reality about capitalism: Wealthy, powerful people find ways to stay wealthy and powerful. He gets a job because he is friends with Marianne, which ironically places him in the category of people who do not need a job. Marianne’s wealthy peers see jobs and birthday parties as identical favors.

“For the privacy between himself and Marianne to be invaded by Peggy, or by another person, would destroy something inside him, a part of his selfhood, which doesn’t seem to have a name and which he has never tried to identify before.”

The intimacy between Connell and Marianne goes beyond the physical, although sexual intimacy is a part of it. They enjoy the intimacy of two people who deeply recognize one another. Connell experiences Peggy’s proposition to have a threesome as invasive, apart from the fact that he is an innately retiring, modest person. 

“Marianne pinches her lower lip and then says: ‘Well, I don’t feel lovable. I think I have an unlovable sort of…coldness about me, I’m difficult to like.’”

Marianne repeats an idea about herself that she has received from her own family, who insistently frame her self-possession as coldness. Marianne’s offhand comment shows how much she has internalized her family’s opinion, even while a more conscious and self-preserving part of her realizes that her family is abnormal.  

“She comes to sit down with him and he touches her cheek. He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him.”

Although Connell does not yet know the extent of Marianne’s damage, he senses her innate masochism, and it confuses and frightens him. He knows that he has control over her, which means that he must be the person who sets the boundaries in their intimacy. 

“Sometimes in the middle of the day she remembers something Jamie has said or done to her, and all her energy leaves her completely, so her body feels like a carcass, something immensely heavy and awful that she has to carry around.”

While Marianne rationalizes her sadomasochistic involvement with Jamie to Connell as harmless role-playing, it is deeper and more compulsive than that. She plays out her harmful family dynamic—her bullying at the hands of her brother Alan—over and over with her sexual partners. When she thinks about her private life with Jamie and with her later boyfriend Lukas, she finds it not titillating, but draining. 

“He and Marianne never talked about money. They had never talked, for example, about the fact that her mother paid his mother money to scrub their floors and hang their laundry, or about the fact that this money circulated indirectly to Connell, who spent it, as often as not, on Marianne.”

Connell, the less privileged member of their dyad, shows more awareness than Marianne of the role that money plays in their lives. He feels guilty rather than righteous, both because he knows that Marianne means well and loves him and because they are living in a milieu in which money is not discussed except as a means of bragging. He internalizes the values of their Trinity social set and feels ashamed of his lack of privilege.

“To be known as [Helen’s] boyfriend plants him firmly in the social world, establishes him as an acceptable person, someone with a particular status, someone whose conversational silences or thoughtful rather than socially awkward.”

Connell finds Helen attractive for a time because she represents good sense and normalcy to him. She comes from a more middle-class background than Marianne does, which is why her friends may be more accepting of Connell. Connell and Helen superficially have more in common than he and Marianne do, yet Helen also has conventional values that go along with her conventional background; this ultimately drives Connell and her apart. 

“It’s like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money: the substance that makes the world real.”

Connell’s perception that money “makes the world real” goes against the standard notion that wealthy people are out of touch with reality, and that poor people have more direct, immediate contact with the real world. The suddenness of his scholarship, and his new access to all of these experiences, makes the power of money slightly surreal to him. He sees a world that he has never had much contact with before: a world of travel, history, and culture.

“Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness for the promise of social acceptance.”

Rob’s suicide devastates Connell because he has lost a friend and because Rob’s life was both so craven and so conventional. Connell saw Rob’s desperation to be liked and to fit in; he also knows that a lot of people are like Rob, and that he narrowly escaped being like that himself. 

“‘I just feel like I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life,’ he says. ‘But I hate it here, and now I can never go back there again.’”

On the surface, Connell’s suicidal depression looks like a reaction to Rob’s death. Deeper down, it springs from a feeling of not belonging anywhere, neither in his traditional small town nor in the more rarefied world of Trinity. Connell must make peace with being an individual whose identity springs more from who he is than where he is.  

“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.”

Although Marianne is thinking about Rob here—a popular, bullying person who ended up harming himself—her thoughts reflect the other dynamics and power imbalances in this novel. They apply to Alan, whose bullying is ultimately an expression of weakness and powerlessness. They also apply to her lack of self-esteem, partly as a result of being a wealthy person in an unfair capitalist system. 

“Her body is just an item of property, and though it has been handed around and misused in various ways, it has somehow always belonged to him, and she feels like returning it to him now.”

Marianne sees Connell as different from her other lovers. At the same time, not even Connell can alter her fundamental attitude toward her body. Connell must learn that he can love her even if he cannot change her, and Marianne must learn to respect Connell’s boundaries even if she has no innate boundaries of her own.