Wow, this was just extraordinarily terrific, especially your linking Normal People with Portrait of a Lady. To me one of the most chilling lines in all of English literature is when Isabel says that Osmond and Madame Merle “made a convenience of me.” That is all evil is--using other people for our convenience.
The connection I make is with Succession, because both Succession and Normal People demonstrate with undeniable power that money and status are completely irrelevant when compared with whether one grows up in a happy and loving family, or whether one grows up being abused and made a convenience of. Connell, for all his class-based shame, has a loving mom, and he will be ok. No one would ever choose Marianne’s family, or the Roys, over Connell’s cleaning-lady single mom.
Thanks Mari!! I'm so glad you liked it. This is a particularly heightened example of my writing-from-a-cliffside-Gothic-mansion, rhapsody-in-a-rainstorm type post, even for me. But I wanted to make some points about Normal People that hadn't seen articulated elsewhere and that I think are important!
I think you have it just right about class and family. And I like putting Rooney and James next to each other because James's tricky ironic stance toward his characters and their calamitous paths to self-knowledge show me a different way to read Rooney. When I read her third book after writing this, her open references to James there made me think I was on the right track.
finally a critique of this book that makes sense to me!
Thank you and thanks for reading!
Wow, this was just extraordinarily terrific, especially your linking Normal People with Portrait of a Lady. To me one of the most chilling lines in all of English literature is when Isabel says that Osmond and Madame Merle “made a convenience of me.” That is all evil is--using other people for our convenience.
The connection I make is with Succession, because both Succession and Normal People demonstrate with undeniable power that money and status are completely irrelevant when compared with whether one grows up in a happy and loving family, or whether one grows up being abused and made a convenience of. Connell, for all his class-based shame, has a loving mom, and he will be ok. No one would ever choose Marianne’s family, or the Roys, over Connell’s cleaning-lady single mom.
Thanks Mari!! I'm so glad you liked it. This is a particularly heightened example of my writing-from-a-cliffside-Gothic-mansion, rhapsody-in-a-rainstorm type post, even for me. But I wanted to make some points about Normal People that hadn't seen articulated elsewhere and that I think are important!
I think you have it just right about class and family. And I like putting Rooney and James next to each other because James's tricky ironic stance toward his characters and their calamitous paths to self-knowledge show me a different way to read Rooney. When I read her third book after writing this, her open references to James there made me think I was on the right track.