Review: Normal People

 I don't know how Normal People made it into my borrow list from the library, but when it showed up I read it and found it easily readable and short, so just read it in a few nights.

A combination of a romance and coming of age story, it traces Connell and Marianne, who start the novel as high schoolers and finish the novel having graduated from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. The story of their on-again/off-again relationship is super-cringe, with you wanting to reach into the page and shake the characters for poor decision making or self-awareness over and over again. For instance, Connell likes Marianne so much that when she suggests that he apply to Trinity College as an English major instead of Galway for Law, he does so. Yet when it comes to the equivalent of the prom he asks some other girl out and is puzzled that Marianne treats this as a rejection, even when his own mother (who cleans the house for Marianne's family) storms out of his car after learning what he did!

Anyway, both characters do incredibly silly things, though Marianne's mistakes are much less dumb than Connell's (though her choice in men other than Connell is very much suspect). The book does a good job of exposing readers to the Irish college system.  For instance, the merit-based scholarship in Trinity is given through a series of exams, and there's no means testing, so even though Marianne is rich she still gets it. This is a far cry from what you see in American universities.

I read the book to the end, but as with much mainstream fiction, scratch my head as to why people think this is particularly good reading. Young people will make mistakes, and care too much about what other people think, and lack self-awareness. At the end of the novel, the characters still lack self-awareness though at least they've realized that they love each other. The whole thing makes me think of mainstream fiction as a dumb genre. It doesn't even have the insights that Ender's Game or A Fire Upon the Deep engenders.