Part of the excitement of reading Rooney is seeing this old-school sensibility applied to what feel like acutely modern problems. Her prose, much like Salinger’s - her predecessor in philosophical post-adolescent neurosis - is sharp, dialogue-heavy and unadorned, written to be absorbed into the bloodstream quickly. (There’s as wide a streak of affinity with the 19th-century novel in these books as there is with Sheila Heti.) Her characters are drawn irresistibly to one another (consistently consummating their attractions with phenomenal, heart-stopping sex), and come apart over petty misunderstandings, after which they tend to have “anxious, upsetting sex” with other people before reconnecting. Though both her 2017 debut, “Conversations With Friends,” and her new novel, “Normal People,” are set in an exactingly depicted Dublin and West Ireland in the 2010s, her books describe the kinds of all-consuming romantic attachments that have bolstered narratives since Dido and Aeneas, or, O.K., Emma and Mr. There is something about Sally Rooney’s novels that makes people embrace (and occasionally reject) them like a long-sought romantic partner.
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