Normal People is bad, actually

When I read Normal People last year, I instantly hated it. More than that, I found it actually repulsive. Unusually, I could also immediately name almost every reason why it was so godawful. After a while, the hype died down, and I could stop loathing it with quite so much venom. But now that the BBC's produced an adaptation of it, the hype's back, and I'm writing this for catharsis, on the assumption that people won't, in the next few weeks, suddenly realise how horrible it is and finally stop talking about it.

Normal People is a book written for people who get all their knowledge from Wikipedia because they're worried that if they dug any further into the topics that interest them, they would find out just how much other people already know about those topics, and it would damage their self-esteem. Compare Sally Rooney with Doris Lessing, one of the many authors who are name-dropped in the novel without any obvious relevance or purpose. If Lessing wants her characters to discuss something intelligent, then she will devote pages to their conversation, she might stage a reading group with extracts from a pertinent text. She will describe her characters' thoughts, so that we can understand how they think and why they think it.

If Rooney wants her characters to discuss something intelligent, she states: 'Marianne and some others were discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict.' That's it. We don't get any sense of what they think about it, how they've arrived at their opinions, what indeed Rooney thinks about it. It's never relevant to what's going on, and because she never gives us any detail it contributes nothing to characterisation. All we know about the characters as a result of this reference is what Rooney has already told us, explicitly and interminably, since the beginning of the book: that her characters are clever. And because you also could hold a nondescript five-minute conversation about the Israel-Palestine conflict without embarrassing yourself too much, that must mean you're clever too.

One of the favourite bits of apologia for Normal People is that it offers 'an interesting take on social class'. Its take on class is trivial and self-serving. Connell's class is entirely irrelevant to his character, and Rooney dispenses with it as quickly as possible. In the first part of the book, we get one single indication of the effect that his poverty and his mother's low social status has had on his life, when he states that a derelict house is bigger than his actual one. He feels a bit of discomfort when he arrives at university, there are a couple of throwaway comments from richer students, and then he wins his Trinity scholarship and the whole class question goes away.

Connell's closest friend, and then girlfriend, could strip his family of its livelihood with a word to her mother. Somehow this has precisely zero impact on his character or their relationship.

It doesn't resurface until the very end of the book, when Marianne tells him about her abuse at the hands of her family. This is the big reversal, where we finally understand that whatever problems Connell might have faced as a result of his class (not that the book is interested in showing us what these are), they pale into comparison with his middle-class girlfriend's childhood trauma. That's the book's 'interesting conception of class': that it's an external irrelevance, eclipsed by the more profound, inner suffering borne by the well-off. It is absolutely worthwhile for literature to dwell upon middle-class mental health problems, but squaring them off against class is crass. Rooney has apparently described herself as a Marxist. If I were prime minister, Normal People would be banned as reactionary literature.

But maybe class just isn't that important to the book — maybe the reason for its popularity really is that it depicts characters whose psychological state is so intimately rendered that its readers can feel like they inhabit them. In my view, it's no coincidence that a book whose entire point is that middle-class psychopathology eclipses any pain that might result from economic deprivation is so popular among young middle-class people. The problem is that without the sociological statement ascribed to the novel, it really is just a book about faintly bored, precocious, wealthy kids who get everything they could ever want and still feel sad about it.

So, when people say that Normal People is the book for the millennial generation, I agree with them — it represents all the worst things about us. It refuses to take class seriously, because it is middle-class, and it would hate to have to admit that this constitutes an advantage. It's self-excusing, unsubtle, pretentious, insecure in its own intelligence and right to be so.

Normal People is a book for people who want to be told that they're special and clever. Fine, we all want to be told that sometimes. But let's stop pretending that it's a work of genius: it's therapy for moody, middle-class aspiring writers.

Post-script 19/08/2025 — while all of the above remains true, Rooney's political stand in favour of Palestine Action is an act of pure political courage and moral clarity that sets her head and shoulders above any of her peers.