Normal People

Sally Rooney
2018
Rating: 2

Made it 160 pages into Normal People and put it down due to dull lifeless prose and sub-par character and plot development.

At the 160 page mark it did seem like one of the novel’s strands, the female protagonist’s relationship with her shitty abusive family, might gather some steam, and that may have salvaged the project, to an extent, but after 160 pages of bad sentences I’d lost my patience.

I’ve decided to include in every review where I shout “bad setences!” some of the bad sentences, so that you, the reader, can gauge for yourself if my idea of a bad sentence matches your idea of a bad sentence. You might think that sentences that I think are bad are totally fine.

That said, here are some of the sentences that caused me difficulties:

Page 7: “For a few seconds he says nothing, and the intensity of the privacy between them is very severe, pressing in on him with an almost physical pressure on his face and body.”

Why would you modify “intensity” with “severe”?

A couple more examples.

Page 22: “In total he had only had sex a small number of times, and always with girls who went on to tell the whole school about it afterwards.”

WTF is a “small number of times”? Why lead into that inelegant formulation with “In total,” which suggests that you are going to cite an actual number?

Page 26: “I like you so much, Marianne said. Connell felt a pleasurable sorrow come over him, which brought him close to tears. Moments of emotional pain arrived like this, meaningless or at least indecipherable. Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him.”

This novel, I’ve also just now decided, has changed my approach to reading novels. Some novels I’ve stuck with out of a sense of guilt or obligation, over the 100-page mark, like this one. From now on, I’ve decided, I need to be much more brutal with the novels I read. If I make it 30 or 40 pages into a novel, and it’s replete with bad sentences, I just need to hit the kill switch. The final 120 pages of this novel that I read were a bad use of time. I could have been reading a better novel!

Thank you for your time and attention.