Normal People
Rooney's precision about power, class, desire, and the way intelligent people torture each other is almost clinical and completely addictive. The novel that made literary fiction feel urgent to an entire generation. The Hulu/BBC adaptation extended its reach; the book endures because its psychology is surgically accurate.
Rooney runs all dialogue without quotation marks, and readers report real trouble telling speech from narration, some quitting inside thirty pages over it, one admitting flatly, “Hated it when Cormac McCarthy used it, hate it now.” The relationship is called static rather than developing, the same coming-together and pulling-apart cycling for years without building. Both leads are chronically unable to say what they mean, which reads as an authorial device propping up conflict, prompting one exasperated reader to demand, “Connell, you are such an incompetent communicator.” Readers arriving on the reputation report the experience undershooting it, one going further and calling the missing punctuation “intentional. Absolutely unforgivable.” And ordinary domestic description, making a cup of tea, gets called padding.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
