NORMAL People, the BBC3 series based on Irish writer Sally Rooney’s novel, has been viewed by millions both in Britain and in the US, where it has also been a critical success.

The story follows young lovers Marianne and Connell as they negotiate the power dynamics of their social groups, moving from school-going teenagehood to the borderlands of 20-something adulthood.

While Variety praised the series for its immersive quality, “making you both crave and dread knowing — or perhaps more accurately, experiencing — what happens next,” the release of the series on TV in Ireland prompted furious debate among older listeners over its sexual content on the nation’s primary phone-in radio show.

Rooney's novel was longlisted for a Booker Prize, won the Costa Novel Award and was Irish Novel of the Year in 2018. Dubbed by The Times as “the first great millennial author” and by the book’s marketers as “Salinger for the Snapchat Generation” while still in her twenties, what perhaps has not ben given significant prominence is the fact that the writer is an avowed Marxist.

So how do Rooney’s politics interact with her writing? Or might a strategic reading of her claim to Marxism be more on the money — that it’s a brand ploy, the “normal” USP requirement of the corporate publishing industry, where books are commodities marketed as units of cultural capital?

Rooney herself says that she came to politics through feminism. She moved from an initial conception of herself as an independent woman — a political unit seeking emancipation — to the recognition that “my life is sustained by other people all the time.”

It is this idea of interdependence that she works through in her novels, not only intellectually but, crucially, emotionally. The felt experience is what her novels seek to deliver, building incrementally from ordinary events: “Everyone probably believes we can change each other, but to play it out so that it doesn’t just seem real, it actually feels real... and so your belief in it has changed by the end of the book,” she has said.  

Rooney’s success has received some strong criticism, particularly from some in the older generation. A disgruntled Will Self found that Normal People simply serves millennials with what they want to have reflected back at them, “with no literary ambition that I can see.”

Comparisons have been made with works such as Anna Burns’s Milkman, winner of the Booker Prize in 2018, a novel that challenges literary form as it snakes through the covert tactics of language-use among the traumatised working classes during the Northern Irish Troubles.

Charged to explain the influence of her politics on her storytelling, Rooney is careful to rule out any didactic intention. Her novels are not written to convince or share socialist ideas. But she is interested in structures and systems and “being attentive to the way class structures social life, otherwise I’m not writing about the world that we inhabit.”

Her interest is in observing the effects of such broad systems “on the minute, low-stakes, small-scale interactions between characters,” she points out.

This may be where Rooney’s political approach really comes into play. Her writing engages seriously with the most mundane, common elements of lives, treating them with sensitivity and also tenderness and grace.

In Normal People, her plot line follows trajectories of the everyday — Connell won’t ask Marianne to the school “debs” dance, Marianne and Connell go to university, they break up and then get back together, they graduate and move away. Along the way, the novel probes registers of sexual pleasure and emotional and physical pain.

The subtlety of Rooney’s art lies in her ability to bring small-scale mundanities zinging to life through a prose that is hard-worked into becoming smooth and unobtrusive.

She does not allow the writing to point to itself and her work cannot be said to engage in any kind of Brechtian “alienation” device. In this way the intention of her overall focus which, she says, is to consider our total interdependency, may have been lost on critics looking for linguistic or formal innovation.

Whether or not it is lost on the many thousands turning to the forthcoming second edition of Normal People, following the success of the TV series, is an interesting question.

Rooney is sceptical of the idea of individual “agency” — the individualism underlying that narcissistic label often slapped onto millennials. “You’re always a culmination of the influences of others,” she said recently.

She sees her task as trying to show the reality of a social condition as it is connected to broader systems: “You would hope that by trying to show these things in process you can say: ‘It doesn’t have to be this way’.”