Finished Normal People this morning. An engaging read, though I just couldn't connect with the concerns & lives of the young people at its centre. I suppose that's why I had no idea why it ended as it did. What exactly Connell and Marianne are looking for, other than each other, whom they reasonably easily find, I can't figure out. And don't really care, since they are doing pretty well in their lives, as far as I can see. Aside from their odd periods of depression and the like, which strike me as being just a bit non-essential.
On the other hand, the very real concerns of the characters in Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain (the last novel I read prior to Rooney's) made perfect sense and gripped me powerfully. I can think of more than one bit that was almost too sad to read, but I'll settle for naming two. The first, the sequence in which Shuggie's mum Agnes eats a pub dinner with her well-meaning boyfriend, Eugene, and he encourages her to drink again after a year of AA-assisted abstinence. You can see the relapse coming and the strange sense that's no one is really to blame makes it worse. The second, the bit in the taxi when Shuggie is off on a mission to find Agnes and the driver assaults him. Or nearly does. In that case the reader is allowed some temporary relief.
Mind you, other than the fact that reading the novels back-to-back has precipitated these broad points differentiating the two I don't honestly see much of a reason to compare them. They're both well-crafted pieces of writing and it's good to see novelists of some depth achieving what appear to have been popular successes.
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