Sally Rooney’s Normal People: the millennial novel of formation in recessionary Ireland

Abstract

Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (2018), tells the story of two teenagers who become involved in a complicated sexual and affective relationship that lasts from their school days in a small town, into their dynamic and worldly lives at university in Dublin. Set in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, this coming-of-age novel experiments with form and content to explore the problematic articulation of identity formation in recessionary Ireland. The emancipatory process of the protagonists is framed by specific cultural notions of the neoliberal discourse such as material success, consumerism and body commodification, which unveil practices of social class inequality and gender polarisation. Normal People, embedded with power and loss, displays emotional suffering, guilt, and self-harm to render the damaging effects of individuation and materiality upon the millennial generation in contemporary Ireland.