Sally Rooney, _Normal People_

I WAS NOT expecting to like this as much as I liked the first one, that being how it so often goes (cf. Nell Zink, Zadie Smith, or even Thackeray, Woolf, and Forster as sophomore slumpers), but I actually liked it more.

Rooney, who came up with a strong complex first person narration in Conversations with Friends, this time goes with free indirect discourse, raising the stakes by alternating point of view between Connell and Marianne, an on-again, off-again couple who become lovers in their last year of secondary school and then are intermittently so throughout university (they both attend Trinity College in Dublin).

Marianne comes from a wealthier family than Connell does, so much so that Connell's mother cleans Marianne's family's house, and she is brilliant into the bargain, She would seem to have the edge in power within the relationship, setting us up for a peasant-wins-the-princess story. Hold on, though. Connell is a star footballer and handsome, so he runs with their school's A-listers, while Marianne is spooky and plain, and her family devotes serious effort to eroding her self-esteem. He is at the focal point of power in their school, Marianne a cold, eccentric satellite, so they keep their relationship secret to protect his reputation, and he asks another girl out for "Debs," which sounds roughly equivalent to senior prom. Marianne is still hurt, of course.

Off at university, though, the shoe is on the other foot. Wealthy, sophisticated, whip-smart, Marianne promptly becomes one of the cool kids, while Connell is just another striver from the provinces, a "culchie" (which sounds roughly equivalent to "redneck").  Nonetheless, the affair resurges. In a way.  Connell can't afford to stay in Dublin for the summer. Will wealthy Marianne offer to let him stay with her? Will he get up the gumption to ask?

No and no, so we're back on the rocks. The course of true love ne'er did run smooth, and Rooney is once again particularly good on how true love can fail to run smooth in the 21st century. "When I was in school," Connell's mother Lorraine sighs, "you were either going with someone or you weren't." Ah, those were the days. Even at novel's end, things between Connell and Marianne are a bit up in the air.  But hope hovers.

I would recommend Rooney to anyone looking for a contempoorary Jane Austen. Not so far as manners and mores go, to be sure. At a crucial moment, Connell has to decide how to respond to Marianne's sudden unveiling of a masochistoic tendency-- a problem no Austen hero ever faced (explicitly--we may wonder about Edmund Bertram). Unlikely , too, would be an Austen heroine who laments, as Marianne does, "I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know why I can't be  like normal people." But for sheer narrative art, command of voice, and an all-encompassing novelistic eye--all the things that really make Jane Austen who she is (not the Empire dresses and tea sets of the films), Rooney has it.