For television viewers who have yet to read Sally Rooney’s bestselling 2018 novel Normal People, a hard choice awaits. Plow ahead with Hulu’s masterful new adaptation and one risks occasional confusion. Buy the book first, and the show’s ending will be spoiled. Having stumbled into the first of these options myself, I tentatively recommend it. Yet even audience members who know where the plot is going will find it difficult to look away.
Normal People tells the story of Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron, a pair of teenagers on the verge of adulthood in County Sligo, Ireland. Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is clever but despised, a lonely cynic who dresses down teachers and trades insults with her more popular classmates. Connell (Paul Mescal) is a shy footballer whose unfashionable studiousness is overlooked on account of his rugged charm. When Connell’s mother takes a job cleaning the Sheridans’ mansion, the two young people are thrown together unexpectedly and commence a secret affair. Soon enough, what began as a purely physical liaison blossoms into a connection of striking intimacy and depth.
It is no exaggeration to say that Normal People’s first three episodes, in which Marianne and Connell navigate the contours of their new relationship, are among the most beautiful half-hours of programming ever to appear on U.S. television. Working from scripts co-written by the novelist, director Lenny Abrahamson captures the tenderness and uncertainty of youthful desire with rare and startling precision. Witness, for example, his framing of the moments before the protagonists’ first kiss, when Marianne assures Connell that “no one would have to know” if anything were to happen between them. The exchange is presented sparely, with unobtrusive musical accompaniment. (Throughout, the soundtrack and score are excellent.) Crucially, the camera stays on Marianne for a long beat both before and after her act of self-abnegation, a decision that allows Edgar-Jones’s wonderfully expressive face to dramatize Marianne’s sadness and longing.
It is exactly this imbalance — Marianne powerful attraction to Connell and his anxiety about being seen with her — that drives the earliest of Normal People’s emotional crises. But it is also here that one of the show’s few flaws is initially evident. Because Edgar-Jones and Mescal are actors of preternatural maturity and share extraordinary chemistry in their many scenes together, it is next to impossible to believe that Connell would hold Marianne at arm’s length for the sake of his high school reputation. (The fact that Marianne is lovely to behold makes the proposition all the more ridiculous.) Rewatching the opening episodes after reading Rooney’s novel, I had a clearer understanding of Connell’s apprehension. On my first go-round, however, I was legitimately puzzled.
If confusion of this sort persists at times as the pair depart for Trinity College, that fact says as much about the difficulty of adapting fiction as it does about the quality of this particular production, which remains outstanding even as the scope widens. Established in bustling Dublin, on their own for the first time, Marianne and Connell make new friends, pursue their studies, and begin the long process of shedding their adolescent identities. Through it all, Edgar-Jones and Mescal inhabit their characters with such naturalistic ease that viewers can’t help but invest in their relationship. In Mescal, Normal People’s creators have found an ideal Connell: a solid slab of a man whose physicality belies an interior frailty. But it is Edgar-Jones who emerges most vividly by the show’s end. Moving effortlessly between Marianne’s brashness and vulnerability, the 21-year-old gives the breakout performance of the year.
So compelling is the series’s acting, in fact, that one is inclined to forgive the two or three instances in which a character’s motivation is less than clear. Take, for example, the issue of Marianne’s and Connell’s disparate financial circumstances, which may or may not contribute to a pivotal scene near the show’s midpoint. Forced to give up his room for the summer, Connell knows that he will have to leave Dublin unless he moves in with Marianne. On Rooney’s pages, his hesitance to do so is explicitly economic: To live with Marianne “just felt too much like asking her for money.” Yet because the television program largely omits the book’s ideas about class, the viewer is left with no choice but to shout at the screen that Connell is being ridiculous. If this is a complaint, it is one that could be made about many literary adaptations, especially those that err on the side of subtlety. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about Normal People may be that it works at all despite the absence of the novel’s skillful omniscient narration.
Regardless of their small differences, what the book and show share is an insistence on the redemptive power of love, an idea that feels at once vital and politically courageous given contemporary gender orthodoxies. Adrift in a city that doesn’t know him, Connell needs Marianne to remind him of the man he hopes to be. Long a victim of emotional abuse on the part of her brother, Marianne can be saved only by Connell’s patience, love, and protection. “We have done so much good for one another,” Marianne says in a valedictory scene, and, of course, she’s exactly right. That men and women still can do as much, that normal people have been doing so since time immemorial, is a worthy message for any work of art.
As for Normal People’s sex scenes, much remarked upon in the early response to the series, they are indeed as frank and unblinking as has been reported. Whether or not they are strictly necessary, they are poignant, deeply human, and at one with the show’s unwavering sincerity. Perhaps a better avenue of critical inquiry is whether Normal People’s conclusion is faithful to the traditional values that it spends 12 episodes propagating. My own sense is that Rooney’s otherwise first-rate novel somewhat betrays its ideals, whereas the television program is, to its credit, rather more ambiguous. Yet whatever one decides about the final moments, this is an exceptional story.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
