Coming of Age in the New Ireland

Normal People     Sally Rooney     (2018)

As we grow older, each of us carries memories from the years that we’ve lived through. Some of us also carry wisdom gained from reflection on our past actions. And a few of us can dissect the decisions and motivations of decades gone by.

Irish novelist Sally Rooney, who is in her late twenties, has an uncanny understanding of contemporary men and women in their late teens who are navigating relationships, developing their own worldviews in perilous times, wrestling with their demons, and exploring the directions that their talents might take them. She explores the emotions of emerging adulthood with exquisite sensitivity and nuance in Normal People, her second novel, following on the highly successful Conversations with Friends from 2017.

In 2011, Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in a small town in County Sligo, in the rural west of Ireland. Connell’s mother, a loving but impoverished single parent, works as a housecleaner for the wealthy Sheridans. Connell and Marianne, the two brightest students at the local secondary school, are drawn to each other. He’s a popular athlete, with several good friends. She’s a loner with a miserable home life. This being the New Ireland (not the Old Ireland of hidebound Catholicism), plenty of sex scenes ensue, handled with great care by the author, though still sometimes cringe-worthy. Connell and Marianne keep their liaison secret, each for different reasons.

When the pair head off to attend Trinity College, their roles are somewhat reversed. Connell struggles to adjust as a “culchie” (a country bumpkin) in the cosmopolitan Dublin, whereas Marianne, freed from her nasty mother and brother, slides right into a smart social set. Over a period of four years, they break up, get back together, break up again . . . and readers are pulled one way and another.

The plot is not especially original, but Rooney exploits it deftly to probe the thoughts of Connell and Marianne as they grow toward adulthood. Despite their different family situations, they hold much in common, including exceptional intelligence, proficiency in the academic enterprise, interest in global politics, and basic loneliness. 

Connell muses: “Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.” (175)

Marianne illuminates the title of the novel in a scene late in the book: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, says Marianne. I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people. Her voice sounds oddly cool and distant, like a recording of her voice played after she herself has gone away or departed from somewhere else. In what way? he says. I don’t know why I can’t make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born.” (187)  (The lack of punctuation is Rooney’s—a feature that I accepted despite its irritation factor.)

As if laying bare all aspects of adolescent angst isn’t enough, Rooney also manages some good digs at literary pretentiousness. Here’s Connell considering an author event  he’s just attended in Dublin: “He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured.  . . .It was culture as a class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.” (228)

Sally Rooney nails it with this insightful and intense book. 

Lonely French Siblings

How to Behave in a Crowd     Camille Bordas     (2017)

Isidore Mazal starts narrating this novel as a beleaguered eleven year old, and he tells us about the next couple of years of his life. He lives in France with five siblings; four of the siblings are in their twenties, working on advanced degrees, and they never come into sharp character focus. We do get a good picture of his sister Simone, who is only eighteen months older than Isidore but far ahead of him in school. Simone, like the rest of the family, calls her brother “Dory” despite his requests to be called “Izzy.”  She insists that he take notes for the biography of her that she assumes he will write once she’s famous. She comes right out and tells him, “I take it for granted that you’re gonna love me no matter what. I don’t do anything for it.” (101)

The five older children in the unusual Mazal family are academic prodigies, while Isidore is merely smart. He does fine in his grade level at school, but he’s also smart in ways that his family members don’t appreciate. He’s very observant of the situations around him. This is especially apparent during his many unsuccessful attempts to run away from home; his family scarcely notices that he’s left the house. When, early in the book, his father dies suddenly of a heart attack while on a business trip, Isidore catalogs the grief patterns of his mother and siblings. He tells us, “Because we never talked about the father—the fact that he was dead, the fact that he’d once been alive—saying the word dad itself felt out of place, or like I might’ve used it wrong.” (120) That’s a lot of alienation for a kid in adolescence.

You may notice in this quote about his parent that Isidore shies away from the term “dad,” using instead “the father.” This Francophone locution, found throughout the book, points up not just the estrangement that Isidore feels from his distant—and then deceased—father but also the mix of French and American language and cultural references  in the novel. I wasn’t bothered by it, but some other reviewers found it jarring. It may help to know that Bordas was born in France and has written two previous novels in French, but now lives in Chicago. She creates a generic France, perhaps from her memories.

Isidore’s observations, and his repeated attempts to offer his family an emotional compass for life, are poignant. Someone needs to help those friendless siblings, those pitiful sloggers in academia. In addition, Isidore does his best to cheer up Denise, a girl at his school who suffers from severe depression. His compassion is remarkable, given the cheerless atmosphere of his home. Simone explains to Isidore: “There’s a big drawback to being smarter than the rest, and I’ll tell you what it is, because I assume it will be in part responsible for the kind of person I’ll become: loneliness.” (50) Truly, most of the Mazal family does not know how to behave in a crowd.

I have a few reservations about this novel. Some of the witty repartee goes on too long, as do didactic components that don’t fit the flow of the narrative. For example, Isidore’s middle-school German class carries on a long discussion of Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the Verfremdungseffekt. (Don’t ask! Yawn, skip a page or two!) But novelist Bordas sparks up the story with side plots such as Simone’s unwanted pen pal and the town’s celebration of the oldest woman in the world. Overall, How to Behave in a Crowd is a pleasant little novel with an appealing hero.

An Australian Find

The Golden Age     Joan London     (2014)

I have woefully neglected Australian fiction. Before I happened on The Golden Age, the last Australian novel I’d read was Colleen McCullough’s 1977 melodramatic saga The Thorn Birds, which shouldn’t even count, because it was made into a television mini-series.

Joan London’s poignant novel The Golden Age gains its power from insightful characterizations and an unusual setting. In 1953, as polio ravages the lives of children and young adults around the world, two afflicted adolescents (Frank Gold and Elsa Briggs) meet in a polio rehabilitation center in Perth, Western Australia.

The repurposed building retains the name it had when it was a pub: The Golden Age. The author tells us in a special note that this was the name of an actual children’s polio convalescent home in the 1950s. For me, The Golden Age conjures up many appropriate images. The young patients are like ancient, wise souls—in their “golden years”—because of the life-threatening illness that they’ve survived. Frank and Elsa have a golden opportunity for friendship and love, having been placed in this rehabilitation center even though they’re both older than the other residents. The light in Perth—known for its sunny climate—has a gilded quality that London renders strikingly in descriptive passages.

London anchors her story in real-life events of the period, including the visit of the young Queen Elizabeth II to Perth in 1954. The narrative also includes powerful flashbacks to Budapest during World War II, where Frank and his parents barely survived the Holocaust before emigrating as refugees to Australia in 1947.

But the interior lives of Frank and Elsa, of their parents, and of the head nurse at The Golden Age are the heart of the novel. Here is Frank’s father, Meyer, describing his life as a refugee:

“It was like this. Budapest was the glamorous love of his life who had betrayed him. Perth was a flat-faced, wide-hipped country girl whom he’d been forced to take as a wife. Only time would tell if one day he would reach across and take her hand . . .” (92)

The characters in Frank and Elsa’s love story and in the interconnected sub-plots are genuine, flawed, struggling people. The thirteen-year-old Frank’s thoughts as he falls in love with Elsa build through the novel and ring true. He decides that he is a poet, and this vocation does not seem incongruous for him. He and Elsa scandalize their elders because of their youth, but, hey, Shakespeare’s Juliet was thirteen, and Romeo was probably not much older.

On a practical note, the Australian variants of English are not too intrusive for an American reader. I did look up “brumbies” (free-roaming feral horses), “ute” (utility vehicle), “chooks” (chickens), and “dunny” (outhouse), but context supplied enough meaning even in these cases. At first I was irritated by London’s frequent use of sentence fragments, which give a jerky, rough feel to some of her paragraphs. A few chapters in, however, I began to see this style as perhaps reflecting the erratic, lurching gait of the recovering polio patients, who are portrayed tenderly but with no mawkishness. Or perhaps the fragments express the tentativeness of many of the characters—those who don’t know what to say to polio patients, those who are refugees in a foreign land, those who have been hurt by love.

The Golden Age won several awards in Australia, including The Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction. It deserves more international attention.