It’s Alice’s disassociation from her life that propels much of the story (if we can even call this) forward. The romantic love stories provide the skeletal plot of the novel: Alice, our centre, discontent with her life and work as a twice-published, widely acclaimed novelist her best friend Eileen their respective partners, the disdainful Felix and budding-politician, Simon.
Though, deftly held together by memorable characters and a deep, complex understanding of friendship. It suffers somewhat under the overwhelming fraught banality of the story. It’s a pity the title Normal People was taken because my god, does this book embody that to a tee-normal people problems, normal people hang outs and dates and holidays, normal normal normal. Eileen laments the state of the world, her recent breakup, while skirting around the crippling notion that she may never really grow up. Alice spouts nonsense about her state of writing, while avoiding the realities of her relationships and confronting her nervous breakdown-in a trope so well worn I actually yawned, she’s escaped to a tiny Irish town and rents a large house so she can recuperate and rest. Though, more crucially, it’s also in these emails that they can hide. For BWWAY’s central characters Eileen and Alice, while they are physically isolated from one another for most of the story, it’s in their long-winded emails they can share intimacy, secrets, as well as their desires and hopes and fears for the world. Everyone can at least pretend that things are fine, even though they might be slowly crumbling around you. It’s an unspoken tenet of grand and romantic female friendships that things go unsaid for as long as possible.
It’s a summation of the tumultuous road of Marnie and Hannah’s friendship, which over the course of the first two seasons goes from peacefully spooning in bed, sharing cupcakes in bathtubs, to hurling insults and toothbrushes, ignoring phone calls, hiding from one another, as they drift into a constant state of flux which becomes the series status quo until its conclusion. In the HBO show’s sophomore season finale, Marnie reads the first sentence of Hannah’s eBook- ‘a friendship between college girls is grander and dramatic than any romance.’ She smiles wanly. Reading Sally Rooney’s latest, Beautiful World, Where Are You (BWWAY), struck a familiar chord and I found myself thinking about Lena Dunham’s show, Girls (2012-2017). Zachary Pryor reviews Beautiful World, Where Are You
A novel of letters but far from a novel idea
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