![]() For Connell, however, whose mother is the cleaner at Marianne’s home, attending Trinity is not only moving away from home and his support network - it’s a fork in the road, after which his old life seems increasingly distant.Ĭonnell’s story arc is a familiar one, but not only because increasing numbers of young people from working-class backgrounds have attended university in recent decades. For Marianne, from a wealthy background, it is expected she will attend Ireland’s most prestigious university. Normal People follows the protagonists Marianne and Connell in the last year of school in a town in Sligo and then to Trinity College in Dublin for university. These dynamics of contemporary capitalism press upon the characters and narrative Normal People, as well as the work her contemporaries, as those who came of age after the 2008 financial crash begin to make a substantial impact on our cultural landscape. This exacerbates a town and city divide, as the young are forced to leave the small towns of their childhood in search of jobs and opportunity in urban centers. ![]() Today’s world is increasingly divided between the asset rich and asset poor, not just young versus old but renters versus landlords, and workers versus bosses. It would have been really difficult for me to write about young people leaving home in the west of Ireland, moving to college, and not confront the economic disparities that were emerging at that time, like the stripping back of protections for people from working-class backgrounds who were going to college. Much to the chagrin of Guardian columnists, she speaks quite openly about how the novel deals with class and capitalism: ![]() She is the Irish author of two wildly, in literary terms, successful novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2019), the latter of which has just been adapted into a television series by the BBC.īut for Rooney herself the story is less simply generational. Sally Rooney has been proclaimed the voice of a generation.
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