Sally rooney normal people5/15/2023 ![]() Here is another thing that links her two novels: there’s no sawdust, no filler. ![]() She writes about smart young women who are attracted to sexual masochism. Her writing about sex is ardent and lurching. Her characters, innocents in search of experience, in the thrall of first love, are sometimes budding writers. Rooney writes about financial imbalances among friends and lovers. ![]() They’re outsiders, scorned as “culchies,” among other derogatory terms. One is social class - how, as a character puts it in “Normal People,” some people “just move through the world in a different way.” Because her characters come to Dublin from the rural west of Ireland, they have accents they sometimes try to lose. Still, you stare at Rooney’s hapless characters almost in disbelief: How were you two able to screw things up this time? “Intense love always leads to mourning,” the poet Louise Glück has written. Both are about intense but furtive love affairs that are thwarted by misunderstanding after misunderstanding. Rooney’s new one is a lot like her old one her books glide along similar tracks and can bleed together in your mind. “Normal People” was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She has written two fresh and accessible novels, “Conversations With Friends” (2017) and now “Normal People,” which have been met with euphoric reviews in the Anglo-Irish press. She’s the young author, born in 1991 in the west of Ireland, who was excellently profiled by Lauren Collins last year in The New Yorker. They’re as lonely as Frank Sinatra on some of his album covers, as lonely as Hank Williams’s whip-poor-will. Rooney employs this artery-nicking style while writing about love and lust among damaged and isolated and yearning young people. She’s like one of those elite magicians who can make a playing card pierce the rind of a watermelon. There’s nothing particularly special about them, except for the way she throws them. Sally Rooney’s sentences are droll, nimble and matter-of-fact.
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