Like millions of other people in recent years, I have fallen victim to the ongoing Sally Rooney craze. The Irish author, whose novels have received numerous successful TV adaptations in the past few years, has been labeled ‘the voice of a generation.’ In today’s media landscape, even those not in tune with ‘Booktube’ or ‘Goodreads’ will have stumbled across her name.
I liked her debut novel Conversations with Friends, but it was her 2018 bestseller Normal People that finally won me over. I read the book in a day during a particularly long 11-hour train ride between Italy and Germany. The things that attracted me to the story and its characters have been written about by countless other people over the years. It is true that Rooney’s work is outstanding. When it comes to crafting complex and relatable protagonists whilst also drawing the reader into their mundane daily lives, she is unparalleled.
However, Rooney’s literary projects are by no means groundbreaking. As the author herself states, she draws quite a lot on the 19th century novel in her writings. No other work exemplifies this as much as Gustav Flaubert’s 1869 L’Education Sentimentale. Although arguably much larger in scope and almost twice the length of Normal People, L’Education Sentimentale treads along the same stylistic lines whilst also having a lot in common with
Rooney’s work thematically. On the one hand, like Rooney, Flaubert aimed to remove any subjectivity from his writing, eradicating the narratorial presence from his novel. Through this, and his focus on mundane subjects, he hoped to bring the reader closer to the characters, and break some of the artificiality attached to any work of fiction.
On the other hand, both novels follow the evolution of two people’s relationships over time, and the way that they are hampered by miscommunication, self-doubt, and socio-
economic factors. Both novels thematicise the cultural differences between the city and countryside, and the way that the dynamics between people are shaped by class. Whereas Connell is uneasy at the fact that his mother works as a cleaner for the mother of his romantic interest Marianne, the penniless Deslauriers progressively develops an antipathy towards his childhood friend Frédéric because of his inherited wealth.
Although both literary works are certainly not identical, I believe the comparison is an interesting one, especially if one wished to make an educated guess about how novels like Normal People will be perceived a hundred years from now. In the case of French literature, it is clear that the most popular novels read and taught nowadays, are for the most part by realist authors such as Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. These authors’ character-focused stories which capture their contemporary society, have been of continued interest and have never fallen out of print over the last century and a half. Neither Romantics like de Chateaubriand, nor decadents like Huysmans receive as much attention today as one might expect from authors that were highly popular at their time. This is in part because they alienate modern readers, be it through the use of melodrama, pedanticism, or a concern for social issues that no longer resonate with today’s audience.
Because of this, I believe it is not unreasonable to speculate that contemporary authors such as Rooney will have a more lasting presence in the literary landscape, then some of their more experimental counterparts. Not unlike the aforementioned authors, Rooney’s work functions as a document of sociological and historical interest. It chronicles the attitudes, fears, and desires of our generation. Rooney’s novels are also, above all, relatable. It is this relatability that partially drives the success of classical authors such as Flaubert today, and it will be this relatability that will keep novels like Normal People in print for the coming decades.
