Chapter titles orient us with the time that has passed since we last saw the characters and the current month and year (e.g., “Three Months Later ”).

As it traces Connell and Marianne’s relationship from the point they meet as teenagers (he’s the son of her family’s cleaning woman) through college in Dublin to early adulthood, the novel leapfrogs forward at abrupt intervals. This kind of perspectival struggle is likewise at the center of Normal People, though here it becomes even more acute.

“If I’ve ever treated you like that I’m sorry.” “You’re not just an idea to me,” she writes to Bobbi. When Frances starts amending her wrongs, she does so by trying to separate who she’s thought these people to be from who they actually are. Frances initially assumes that Nick, as handsome as “an advertisement for cologne,” has too much social capital to share her own sense of vulnerability, an outlook that likewise shades how she relates to Melissa and Bobbi, who are both wealthy and outwardly confident. Told exclusively via Frances’s rapid, clinical narration, the novel sets her involvement with Nick and Melissa, an actor and his well-connected writer wife, against her bond with best friend Bobbi, an ex and an intellectual soulmate. In Conversations with Friends - part bildungsroman, part adultery novel, part wry takedown of moneyed intellectuals - Frances’s willingness to take on complicated but meaningful relationships coincides with her recognition of her own principles. Praised in The New Yorker as a “ psychological portraitist,” she makes Austenesque drama from how her smart yet uncertain young characters come into understanding of others and themselves. Rooney’s attentiveness to physical suffering is in some ways incongruous with her novels’ other concerns. When Connell, one half of the couple at the novel’s center, fills out the intake form at a campus mental health clinic, he reads a prompt - “I feel my future is hopeless and will only get worse” - and finds that “its syntax seems to have originated inside him.” Marianne, Connell’s on-again-off-again lover, often seeks sexual partners willing to damage her, not because she likes the feeling but because “it relieves her somehow.” In her new work, Normal People, due out in the United States in April, pain comes in the form of depression and masochism.

After traumatic experiences - a visit to a callous doctor’s office, bad sex with a bad date - she levies small, precise attacks on her own body: pinches “on the soft part” inside her elbow, scratches she lets bleed for a three-count before “carefully” bandaging them. Frances, the protagonist of Rooney’s 2016 debut novel, Conversations with Friends, suffers from endometriosis, her body frequently wracked to the point that she loses consciousness. PAIN IS AN EVERYDAY THING for Sally Rooney’s characters.

Book normal people