Review: Normal People by Sally Rooney

Normal People follows the friendship and romance between two youths from small-town Ireland, Connell and Marianne. The characters are both somewhat extraordinary — smart, attractive, and, in their own ways and social contexts, popular. At the same time they each, in their own ways, struggle to relate with people and fit into their broader social environments. The title is rather ironic; at varying points, Marianne and Connell long to be “like normal people” while deriving confidence and a sense of self from what makes them each stand out. Like “normal people,” they also struggle with the confusion and intensity of juvenile love and self-discovery.

Marianne grows up in a wealthy family, but an abusive one. Her father dies when she is young, but her mother remains scarred and unattached, permitting Marianne’s brother to abuse Marianne. Perhaps in self protection, she retreats into herself in high school, making no friends and caring not at all what others think of her. It is not until she leaves for university and is able to leave behind her family and reinvent herself (and surround herself with others of her class) that she forms friendships. While not preoccupied with how her peers regard her, she desperately wants to be loved, and in her darkest moments, considers herself to be unlovable. Because of this tension, she lets her romantic partners and friends mistreat her, and, sometimes, even invites them to mistreat her in hopes they will love her more for it. Like many young women who struggle with control over their lives, she develops an eating disorder. She surrounds herself with unpleasant people because they accept her into their circle and sometimes treat her lovingly. She is also lively, cultured, socially graceful, and politically conscious — she attends protests for Palestinian liberation and criticizes capitalism.

Connell grows up in poverty. His mother, who was from a “bad family”, had him as a teenager; his father is unnamed. In contrast to Marianne’s, his home life is loving and accepting; his mother, who works as a cleaner for Marianne’s mother, also serves as a parental figure for Marianne. Perhaps because of the circumstances of his birth, Connell is very conscious of the social dynamics and hierarchies of the high school social scene, and worries how others see him. Although he is bookish and sensitive, he navigates the toxic masculinity, low brow humour, and gossipy inclinations of this milieu and is popular (“Everyone likes you,” Marianne tells him, and the words flutter in his heart for days afterwards). Transitioning to university, he finds himself socially isolated; his lower class rural accent marks him as an outsider, and his quiet nature is read as stupid instead of thoughtful. Because of his family’s wealth, academic success is not just a matter of pride and ambition for him, but of his ability to eat.

The epigraph for Normal People is taken from the famous novelist George Eliot: “It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.” I thought it was a great choice: our narrative begins as a romance buds between Marianne and Connell, and revolves around their on-again-off-again relationship and the way they shape each other. Other characters play essentially bit parts, which some reviewers have criticized; I enjoyed this authorial decision since it brings to the foreground the intensity and importance of the relationship between them, and reflects their own self-centeredness that challenges their relationships with others.

Despite how important they are to each other, their romance proceeds in fits and starts. They are limited by their own abilities to be vulnerable and to depend on each other. Negative reviews have complained about their frustrating inability to communicate, but in each heart-breaking instance, I found each of them to be very understandable (“People are a lot more knowable than they think they are,” Connell reflects). In fact, I think that’s something that makes this book special: it finds a way to take the uncertainty and turmoil and rapid change of late adolescence and early adulthood and detangles it, making it feel much clearer than it was to live it.

For example, Connell and Marianne break up after their first year in university because Connell can’t afford to stay in the city, but finds it too difficult to ask Marianne if he can live with her. Marianne, with her economic privilege, never thinks about affordability as something that might shape one’s decision-making, despite her familiarity with socialist literature. Instead, she takes Connell’s announcement that he is ending his lease as a break-up. In her desire to protect herself and in her assumption that she is probably unlovable, she coolly and maturely accepts his apparent request to end things, puzzling endlessly over it on her own afterwards. Reading this story arc, one might insist (as some negative reviewers imply), “how ridiculous, I would never end a rewarding relationship out of something so silly as not speaking openly about my feelings for fear of being at my most vulnerable” but I think that is how normal people operate, at least when they are young.

The book ends with them apart again, but this time it is a mutually accepted separation, with them expecting to unite again after Connell’s graduate school program (and with long emails in the meantime). They’ve defeated some of their demons, but not all; they are after all, only in their early twenties. They have many challenges yet to face as they reach adulthood.

I appreciate the author’s weaving of politics throughout the novel. Marianne and Connell come from different classes, and this shapes the trajectory of their relationship and their lives. They are politically engaged, and embedded in our real world; they discuss Edward Snowden, media bias, and other topical events of the 2010s. Perhaps because the author is a Marxist, she recognizes the interplay between the personal and the political, despite this being a novel closely focused on just one interpersonal relationship.

Rooney shines in creating emotionally rich scenes focused on mundane slices of life, like writing a long email to a friend, or meeting up with someone for coffee (Gabrielle Zevin's story never of a winding romance-friendship wishes it could do this, but falls back on melodramatic plot points for heightened intensity). Her dialogue reads so naturally, her prose is sparse and yet so emotionally affecting. I devoured the book in just a few days, and highlighted several passages that really spoke to me. I’m looking forward to reading some of her other books.

Review: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

“One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
— Omar El Akkad, October 25th

El Akkad’s tweet, posted in response to a video of the devastation Israel wrought on Palestine, has received over ten million views. It’s a resonant message: we have all been watching a live-streamed genocide unfold, and it is so frustrating to see the major institutions of society refuse to acknowledge this, to sigh and say “oh it’s so complicated,” and receive little real repercussion for it, excepting a few angry protestors at public events, while people who do speak out against it are fired and detained in immigration centers.

The author develops this sentiment further in this expressive collection of ten essays, weaving in his personal experiences. Born in Egypt, he immigrated with his family to Canada when he was just a child. He knows what it’s like to view the West from outside (“In the unfree world, the free world isn’t a place or a policy or a way of living; it’s a negation… For a life stunted by a particular kind of repression, the driving force will never be toward something better but away from something worse.”). He learned about the ideals of the liberal West, and then learned how inconsistently and hypocritically they are applied. The experience of immigration — treated as an outsider, valued very explicitly according to your economic contributions and to your adaptation to the local norms — provided one window into the facade of liberalism; being an Arab who came of age and worked as a journalist during the War on Terror provided another.

El Akkad’s reflections on the journalism and publishing industry were some of the most compelling of the book. His fury at the way liberalism constrains journalistic speech and upholds an unachievable ideal of neutrality in the face of starvation of children radiates through these pages.

There’s always been a contradiction at the heart of this enterprise. In the modern, well-dressed definition, adhered to in one form or another at almost every major newspaper, the journalist cannot be an activist, must remain allegiant to a self-erasing neutrality. Yet journalism at its core is one of the most activist endeavors there is. A reporter is supposed to agitate against power, against privilege. Against the slimy wall of press releases and PR nothingspeak that has come to protect every major business and government boardroom ever since Watergate. A reporter is supposed to agitate against silence. To maintain both these realities at the same time—of the neutral agitator—requires a cognitive dissonance that can be seen in every corner of the industry.

The toll it takes on you to exist in the West and to not speak out against the violence and exploitation it perpetuates around the world is a consistent theme of the book:

Know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sign of dismembered children?

El Akkad takes aim at the “the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle”, who views the “conflict” as “all so very sad, but you know, it’s all so very complicated.” He acknowledges the upfront self-centered hatred of the Republican party, but focuses his criticism on the Democratic party for the corrosive effect of its hypocritical, self-interested ambivalence towards genocide. His writing echoes Martin Luther King Junior’s writing of over sixty years ago:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

That we are still fighting the same battles for liberation against the same foes as we were sixty years ago is infuriating and depressing. Yet, El Akkad’s book is cathartic to read. His writing is vivid, poignant, often poetic. He affirms the contradictory feelings of living in the heart of empire, surrounded by all the privilege it brings while witnessing the devastation it wrecks around the world. But bearing witness and internally grappling with negative feelings isn’t enough. El Akkad acknowledges the need for action too, encouraging the support of boycott movements and using prize acceptance speeches to speak out for the liberation of Palestine:

It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power—the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more. That having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world.

But for the reader who has already found a non-Israeli vendor for “chocolate flavoured hummus” and coffee and who isn’t winning literary awards, there is little guidance for further negative resistance, and even less for positive resistance, whatever that might be. It is difficult to glean what a positive vision for a more just society might be, since the author dismisses as unfree and imperial the various anti-capitalist states that provide an alternative to Western liberalism.

Will this book change minds? Give people the courage to speak out more strongly? I hope so, and discussion online and reviews I’ve read suggest it might. Certainly, anyone who might once have said "oh, it's so complicated" will feel deeply ashamed to repeat this bromide after having read this work. Still, the book’s argument is just a first step towards changing the ideology that turned a blind eye to this genocide. For a deeper understanding of liberalism and its history, I recommend Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo. El Akkad’s book is a snapshot of our present day anguishes, examining the 2024 US election cycles and Canadian news headlines of the last few years in particular. It is an emotional read, but not one that provides a theoretical explanation of the forces that shape society or proposes a way out. Because of this, I think this book will fade in relevance as the years go on. However, grappling with the psychological demands of our present is also necessary, and this work fulfills that need.

Review: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte cuts through the headlines and drama to understand how the French Second Republic fell to Bonaparte III in 1852 after just four years of existence. This is Marx applying class analysis to his present day, de-tangling the conflicts between peasantry and landed bourgeoisie, proletariat and industrial bourgeoisie, and between the various factions of the bourgeoisie. The value of the work is in understanding how Marx saw class conflict, and in Marx’s vivid writing; this work contains many of Marx’s best known lines, but many unsung passages are similarly poetic. Marx’s understanding of history is one of individual actors acting according to their interests (his Hegelian roots are evident), without seeing all of history as just the whims and wills of great individuals. He shows how relationships to the means of production shape individual decision-making without deterministically dooming history to unfold a certain way. 

Marx writes for an audience that would have been intimately familiar with the events of the day. His work seeks to make sense of the causes, so that readers might apply these hard-earned lessons to future conflicts. It makes for a challenging read for the 21st century reader. Marx refers to the “June Days” with the familiarity a millennial author might refer to the “George Floyd Protests” in a dissection of the COVID pandemic era. (I, a millennial author, shall leave this comment with little further explanation. Like Marx, I assume my reader already knows the details and infers my meaning.) My annotated version (Leopard Books) provided some useful context but I still found myself needing to look up historical details.

For understanding the phenomenon of Bonapartism and how it relates to the problems of governance of today, I preferred Losurdo’s Democracy or Bonapartism. Losurdo writes with the advantage of over a century of Bonapartist leaders since the one that gave the term its name. Tracing the pattern across countries and historical contexts makes it easier to identify the commonalities and causes. Losurdo’s book is also a great introduction to Marx's: the problem of universal suffrage, the charismatic leader pushing aside inter-party strife to unite the nation, the attacks on the means of theoretical production, the child-like multitude, the externalization of threat — all these characteristics Losurdo draws out are there in Marx, if sometimes under-emphasized.

I’m glad to have read this work cover-to-cover, to have familiarized myself with the shape of its contents. It is a major work, often cited. There are so many interesting threads to pull at. For example, towards the end, Marx discusses the centralization of state power as something that “modern society requires” — how should we interpret this line with respect to Marx’s vision for the role of the state in socialism? In other passages, Marx appears to have a strong appreciation for soft power and democratic norms; he often chides the liberal Party of Order for trampling on liberties, absconding from responsibility, or disrespecting institutions, showing how these actions impeded their ability to maneuver politically and resulted in their own demise. In his analysis of the peasantry, Marx refers to the isolated nature of their work and the lack of scientific thinking in their work as reasons for their combining together like potatoes in a potato sack, rather than in the transformative way the proletariat unites. In our modern age of swathes of isolated workers, do we have classes that resemble the peasantry more than the tools of their trade might suggest? It is a rich text, and I am sure I will return to it often.

Review: The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin

The Dialectical Biologist (1985) is a tour de force, compellingly arguing simultaneously for the need to overthrow the capitalist system as well as the need to overthrow dated scientific approaches. That book has rightly earned its place as one of the key texts on the relationship between science and Marxism. However, despite its name, biology plays more of a supporting role, with the collected essays centering on philosophy, society, and the history of biology. The examples of dialectics in nature are discussed at a high level, primarily drawing from evolutionary biology. The book, being a collection of articles and book chapters published elsewhere, lacks some cohesion, and the arguments repeat.

The Triple Helix (2002) addresses both these weaknesses. The book presents the dialectics of living things as a three stranded system: genes, organism, environment. The argument is well structured, examining first the gene-organism relationship, then the organism-environment relationship, then drawing all three together with a critique of reductionist approaches in science that try to view things in isolation. The work finally concludes with a section putting forward a positive plan for how biologists should conduct their research to avoid such pitfalls. After all, 

It is easy to be a critic. All one needs to do is to think very hard about any complex aspect of the world and it quickly becomes apparent why this or that approach to its study is defective in some way. It is rather more difficult to suggest how we can, in practice, do better.

Lewontin fills in these arguments with a variety of well-chosen examples (the 17 years between this work and the earlier effort were important ones for biology, and although already decades old, the discussion of molecular biology feels considerably more current). His narrative unfolds satisfyingly, flowing from one problem to the next, teaching the controversies and their resolutions. It is a wonderful work of science communication.

Despite the skilled writing on display here, I found it to be a less impactful read than his earlier book. Though the argument was delivered more sharply, the main ideas of The Triple Helix will be familiar to any reader of The Dialectical Biologist. Furthermore, while the author gestures towards the societal implications of the dialectical world view, the lines are never as explicitly drawn, and I missed some of the political fire of The Dialectical Biologist (a favourite example: “But whether the cause of tuberculosis is said to be a bacillus or the capitalist exploitation of workers, whether the death rate from cancer is best reduced by studying oncogenes or by seizing control of factories—these questions can be decided objectively only within the framework of certain sociopolitical assumptions”). 

I’d recommend The Triple Helix for any young scientist, or for any reader interested in the big ideas of biology. I’d recommend The Dialectical Biologist for scientists with an interest in political philosophy.

Review: Authority by Andrea Long Chu

I picked this book up nearly by accident. I had been looking for Authority, Jeff VanderMeer's sci-fi novel, but the name Andrea Long Chu caught my eye. She was one of those writers to which I attach vaguely positive associations, although without a clear picture of their ideas or style. I decided to fill in these blanks (anthologies are great for getting a sense of a writer’s forest rather than just their trees) and I’m really glad I did. As a reader and writer with a background in the applied sciences rather than the humanities, I had been thinking about the respective roles of the novel and the critic in society. ALC addresses these two topics in the two new essays written for this collection (“Criticism in a Crisis” and “Authority”) by historicizing the relationships between critic, art, and the public, giving me a better understanding of the tradition of literary criticism. These topics are also implicit in the 22 republished essays, which serve as examples of the theory she presents in these two newer essays.

Reading this book helped me test some of my own ideas about criticism, art and society. That is, I found a productive mix of inspiration and interesting ideas, as well as places where the author and I diverge, helping me to solidify my understanding. At times, she can be a little floaty, bending away just before landing a broader political point to strike more narrowly on a specific artist. She can also be turned inwards and towards pessimism; I enjoyed re-reading a critique of her On Liking Women that I’d read long ago, with my newfound familiarity in my pocket.

Below, I’ve included some highlights that I found thought-provoking.

• This is the supreme task of the critic: to restore the work of art to its original worldliness. The artist creates by removing something from the world; the critic’s job is to put it back.
• That’s it: as close as Sittenfeld ever comes to laying bare her heroine’s deepest desires. In an airport memoir, this would be mere pablum; in a novel, it amounts to dereliction of duty.
• What I’m saying is not that the desire for a universal is politically defensible but, more simply, that the desire for a universal is synonymous with having a politics at all.
• It strikes me today as a vicious piece, but not a very cruel one. Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days; cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty.
• When Arnold had made a virtue of disinterestedness, he had pictured the critic turning away from himself and toward the social whole, whereas Wilde’s critic was so disinterested that he answered to no authority but his own personality.
• But we will have to reckon with our longing for authority: our nostalgia, which is the opposite of historical sense; and our idealism, which is the opposite of the future. Nothing may be more dangerous, in criticism or in politics, than the revanchist desire to restore a form of authority that, if we are being honest, never existed in the first place. The great enemy is not the king of France, whose bloody head has been rolling through the streets for as long as anyone can remember. The enemy, my friends, is Napoleon.
• But the kind of freedom that John Dutton III truly admires, the kind that Beth Dutton embodies, is not the freedom to make decisions—that is, ethical freedom—but rather the freedom to act as if one’s decisions have all been made in advance. 
• Indeed, it is precisely because we feel that characters in novels are real that we can politically object to the way a writer treats them.
• The midcentury literary critic F. R. Leavis once wrote, in his very serious book The Great Tradition, that Austen’s genius was to take “certain problems that life compelled on her as personal ones” and impersonalize them, tracing carefully out of herself and back into the world. What Leavis admired was not that Austen had stayed in her lane; it was that she’d had the good sense to ask where it led. This is a splendid notion. It suggests that, for any novelist, there exists a small number of historical problems that, for reasons of luck and temperament, she naturally grasps as the stuff of life. The genius lies in knowing which ones they are.
• The humanist’s mistake is to suppose that politics is just lots and lots of ethics. Ethics asks us to recognize that the other has a soul; politics asks us to reject the soul as a precondition for moral interest. In this sense, fiction has always been an exercise in political consciousness. It asks me to care about people I do not know and will never meet, people who might as well not exist as far as my own life is concerned but whose destinies are nonetheless obscurely intertwined with mine.
• This was the game’s masterstroke. Form erupts into content, the player’s ludic relationship to Joel at last given narrative flesh in the person of Ellie, whose bitter determination to keep Joel alive leads to a horrific loss of innocence from which—as players of The Last of Us Part II already know—she may never recover. Here, we may rightly speak of interactivity: One may care about a character on television, but one must care for a character in a video game. In fact, The Last of Us suggested that care, by definition, means choosing to have no choice, holding on to another person so tightly their survival becomes an inescapable necessity. Of course, a TV show may treat these themes too, and the adaptation acquits itself admirably; the point is not that a video game, like other art forms, can show us something about love, but that love, at its most monstrous, can have the unyielding structure of a video game. This only a video game can teach.

Review: Riot. Strike. Riot. by Joshua Clover

The introduction of this book was promising — and is worth reading on its own — but the rest of the book failed to deliver. Clover sets out to investigate why social resistance movements to oppressor classes shifted from riots (pre-17th century), to strikes (until the 1960s or so), and then to riots once again.

His most important contribution is to clearly show that mainstream definitions of strikes and riots are woefully inadequate. Rather than strikes representing organized and peaceful protest while riots use violence to channel inchoate anger, Clover demonstrates that strikes also often turned to violence to make their demands met. Rather, Clover delineates them based on who participates and where. In Clover’s telling, riots are made up of citizens acting at the site of consumption (originally typically the market or port, now usually the public square) while strikes are made up of workers acting in their capacity as producers at the site of production.

Unfortunately, his framing of history as "Riot-Strike-Riot-prime" (an allusion to Marx’s M-C-M’) is overly cute, and restricts analysis rather than aiding it. Facts are thrown together when convenient, rather than building a convincing, scientific argument. Evidence for his thesis is sometimes drawn from history, sometimes from literature, and there is very little in the way of social survey of economic trends and social unrest, which I would want to see as proof of his thesis. Clover neatly sidesteps questions of generalizability to real social relationships between economic mode of development and social mode of conflict by stating he restricts his focus to the west. If riots are the mode of social conflict of pre-industrial production, strikes are the mode of conflict of industrial production, and strike-prime is the mode of conflict of off-shored post-industrial production, we should see these modes shift both across geography and across time. Clover resists testing his thesis, preferring to enjoy the vibes. (The vibes are indeed enjoyable. His writing is a pleasure to read; there are many fun turns of phrases, reminding me of Christian Thorne.)

The final section of my copy had an Afterword, in which the author reflected on how well his work stood up to criticism and time. It is easy to get nothing wrong if you don’t say all that much in the end.

Review: Canada in the World by Tyler Shipley

Canada crafts a narrative about itself as peace-keeping nation, beloved around the world as a friendly force for good. Sure, Canada will reluctantly acknowledge a few stains on its reputation — activism around the residential school system and genocide of the First Nations has grown too loud to ignore. But these historical beats are seen as blemishes, unconnected to Canada’s broader national identity.

In Canada In The World, Tyler Shipley corrects this narrative, starting first with early settler relationships with First Nations to show the through-line between Canada’s settler colonial origins and its continued colonial exploitation domestically and abroad. Shipley emphasizes large structural forces like capitalism, industrialization, and material geopolitical interests, over individual personalities and cultural clashes. With this method, he builds a cohesive narrative that covers several centuries of history in just 500-odd pages. Shipley often takes explicit aim at Canada’s nation-building mainstays like Canada Heritage Minutes and grade 10 history texts, and weaves in familiar media and contemporary history and the occasional personal anecdote. He draws from a vast set of secondary and tertiary texts, summarizing their theses and contextualizing them into his overarching narrative. The result is a compelling, approachable text that should be, for now, the definitive introductory leftist text on Canadian international political history, with a bibliography that lends itself well to further study.

The book is strongest in its first half, which covers Canada’s settler colonial origins up through its tepid opposition to fascism in the mid-twentieth century. The latter half drags somewhat: Canada has been very active in the world during the so-called Cold War and the periods that followed it, supporting oppressive dictators (e.g. Chile) and overthrowing democratic socialist governments (e.g. Ecuador) with the goal of furthering its mining interests and aiding US imperialism. Shipley does an admirable job at trying to summarize the requisite history of dozens of nations to understand Canada’s role in these conflicts and connect them to the unifying theme of his book, but the goal of a comprehensive survey of such activities inevitably results in episodic vignettes packed with names and dates. Still the book compares favorably with Yves Engler’s Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy (one wonders why Engler bothered at all; he draws from Shipley’s book as a source to create a fully inferior and redundant work), and would pair well with books like Vijay Prashad’s Washington Bullets and Vincent Bevins’ Jakarta Method, which provide more structure into the mechanisms of western foreign intervention.

It is too early to say how well the book will hold up since it was published in 2020. However, the relationship between Israel and Palestine has sharpened in the intervening years and Shipley staked out a position that would have been quite bold just five years ago, but has increasingly been adopted since. His analysis of China will likely age more poorly: he has nothing positive to say about modern day China, despite its lifting of a billion people from poverty and its emphasis on mass education, while praising similar poverty alleviation efforts when they occur in Latin America. Still, it is a fantastic corrective to the mythology of Canada.