Yes, I know this is unkind of me

Though Rooney’s characters have scalding contempt for capitalism and its trappings, it’s easy to see how Normal People could have snuck into the handbag slideshow. Politics in Rooney’s novel are often ambient rather than explicit, submerged under the surface of a love story about, as Rooney writes, “two people who, over the course of several years, apparently could not leave one another alone,” Marianne and Connell, who spend four years alternately pursuing and withdrawing from each other.

One critic recently noted that the politics of Rooney’s novels were largely “gestural,” with airy mentions of Gaza or austerity protests but not much radical substance. Another suggested that her politics were essentially decorative, “more setting than subject.” I disagree. I don’t think Rooney is garnishing her love story with politics. She’s embedding politics closely and rigorously in the love story, showing how relationships can function like miniature states, and how political principles can work on an intimate scale, in the interactions of two, three, or four people.

In interviews, Rooney often talks about growing up hearing Marx’s dictum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” from her parents, and absorbing it as if it were a universal rule, maybe something Jesus said, or, as one interviewer from The Cut put it, something somebody might embroider on a pillow. In Normal People, characters have different things at different times: money, social capital, looks. The novel suggests the possibility of a setup in which these advantages are shared and redistributed according to need. Call it a Marxism of the heart.

… Marianne’s status “elevated Connell to the status of rich-adjacent: someone for whom surprise birthday parties are thrown and cushy jobs are procured out of nowhere.” The father of one of her new friends “was one of the people who had caused the financial crisis—not figuratively, one of the actual people involved.”

They circle, always seeming to misunderstand each other at some crucial moment. At one point, Connell loses a job and can’t pay rent for the summer in Dublin. He tries to ask to stay with Marianne, but she thinks that he is saying he wants to leave town. They break up. This represents her failure of imagination and his failure of courage, but also suggests that independence is not an uncomplicated virtue. The solution is obvious, and she has something he needs. Why shouldn’t people give one another food, and money, and places to stay?

… Rooney allows Connell to come to Marianne’s rescue when she is threatened by angry or violent men, not once but three times: when she is groped in a nightclub, bullied by her boyfriend (the one whose dad caused the financial crisis), and, finally, abused by her brother. A novel espousing independence as a straightforward virtue might have made her come to her own rescue. Connell isn’t helping her as an archetypical knight, but he is still a man and aware of the power this confers him in particular circumstances. The book suggests that people can use their advantages for one another—that personal qualities, abilities, status, and other advantages can act like wealth or goods in a socialist society, for common benefit. This extends far outside of gender, of course: Though Marianne initially fails to see that Connell needs a place to stay, she offers him other things, including social protection and money when he’s been mugged. From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.

In some ways, Normal People feels like an extension of Rooney’s flashier first novel, Conversations With Friends, which follows two college students who form a fraught relationship with an older couple. Frances and her best friend/ex-girlfriend Bobbi have long, drily funny and unresolved text and IM conversations about love and capitalism. Here’s an oft-quoted passage:

Bobbi: if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon

Bobbi: and try to understand it as a social value system

Bobbi: it’s both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness

Bobbi: which dictates the whole logic of inequality

Bobbi: and yet also it’s subservient and facilitatory

[…]

me: capitalism harnesses “love” for profit

me: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labor is the effect

me: but I mean, I get that, I’m anti love as such

Bobbi: that’s vapid frances