The uncomfortable relationship between Marianne’s low self-esteem and her masochistic streak has been criticised by some in the BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Submission, and Masochism) community, but is one of the themes explored in the medley of short stories in Bad Behavior, the collection that made Mary Gaitskill’s name. Though he declines, elsewhere he reflects on how “he has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing his hold over her”. Marianne’s willingness to abase herself for love sees her repeatedly seek out violent or degrading sexual relationships – and later, in a climactic scene, to ask Connell if he would hit her. There’s more to it than that – Madeleine takes a detour into Derrida and Barthes her hapless admirer Mitchell wrestles with theology her mercurial boyfriend Leonard is diagnosed with bipolar disorder – but, in essence, this metafictional love triangle is a book about books that has much that will appeal those who like Normal People. (The eagle-eyed will notice Rooney uses a quote from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda as an epigraph.) The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides ( The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex) also took inspiration from the English literary canon in his third book, a campus novel set Brown University in Rhode Island, in which the English major Madeleine Hanna havers between two suitors, while writing her thesis on Victorian romances. Rooney, who has a masters degree in English literature, told The New Yorker in 2018 that her books are “basically 19th-century novels dressed up in contemporary clothing” – books that Connell spends much of his time reading as an English student at Trinity College, Dublin.

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

Normal people a novel