Though much current media attention is given to the millennial disdain for their elders (e.g., “OK, Boomer”), what millennials seem like to baby boomers (who are sometimes their parents) is often discussed more quietly. The generations have always sized up one another in broad categorical descriptors. Perhaps, in part, this is because it posits a romance for romantic agnostics, and thus speaks to many generations at once, though especially her own. In a year that featured a surprising number of literary novels with a focus on high school-Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, Ann Beattie’s A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys-Rooney’s was the one that became an international sensation. The narrative then follows them later through their time at university in Dublin, moving effortlessly in and out of both their points of view. It follows the relationship of two teenagers: the rich, disputatious, masochistic Marianne and the poor, quiet, popular Connell, as they take up with each other in their final year of high school in Carricklea, Sligo. The rhetorical pivot and pounce, the rapidity, the vapidity, the slight violence of forensic discourse (if one barrels ahead with the speed of an auctioneer, one can kick up a helpfully obfuscating dust) might leave one wanting something more substantial moreover, debate’s hip-hop aspects, its cadences, poetic improv, theatrical slam and jam might tempt one toward a related but different verbal art.Īnd thus we have Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, which proceeds with the sparsely sketched backstory, rushed pace, and quick retorts of comedic theater, though at its heart it is a love story about brokenness: Normal People became the hit millennial novel of 2019.
But there are other novelists who have been debaters-Ann Patchett, Ben Lerner, Mary Gordon-and presumably debate wore them out a bit not one went on to law school. One assumes that if one were that skilled at public speaking, one would not, subsequently, take to one’s desk in quietude and fictional daydreaming, for years on end. This might seem unusual for a would-be novelist. In 2013, the Irish writer Sally Rooney, then only twenty-two, was the top debater at the European University Debating Championships. Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Normal People, 2020
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