wait so is love marxist
I have been making my way through the Hulu adaptation of Normal People (I wrote about it last spring if you wanna know my fave quotes + my issue with anything being typified as “THE millennial whatever”) at a crawling pace because I’m trying to reread the book in tandem — an attempt to fill the gaps between all that kinda boring eyeball acting in with Sally Rooney’s extremely good between-the-lines observations about why people act and fidget the way they do.
But a friend also recommended this Atlantic review from last year (I definitely missed it in the general April deluge following the novel’s U.S. debut so maybe this is just very old news?), but it’s totally changed the way I think about the book/show: The Small Rebellions of Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
In the review, writer Annalisa Quinn teases out the Marxist politics underlying the book, ties it to the definitive way landowning economics defined Jane Austen romance, and hugely clears up a bunch of things most of us missed the first time around — like why it’s actually not as conventional as it seems to have [character] ride in and save [the other character’s] from [minor character] at the end of the novel, for example. Plus it brings in Rooney’s first novel, Conversations With Friends, at the end, so if you’ve already burned through all 12 episodes of NP, that is the first direction I’ll point you in if you need more uncommunicative and juicily political horniness.
(h/t Celia for the article and also dealing w/all my reaction texts including the one in this subject line)