Sally Rooney is sensitive to old school delicacies: she writes love stories. In Normal People (2018), her second novel, Connell and Marianne talk, grow fascinated with each other, misread their own silences and urges, betray one another and feel let down, in a loop. All the elements of a young melodrama. And yet, the text unfolds with the rogue appeal of a stolen snapshot; no pretense of embellished bliss. Rooney captures the bubbling of microscopic gestures — the instant when a character puts his hands in his pockets or peels the label off a bottle to sublimate shyness — and carves the textures of relationships with precision. Still it is her “taste for ritualized, abstract interpersonal aggression” and her splendid swing for the ways of speech what deviates the plot from commonplace and infuses her writing with a certain roughness, a sourness, a freshness, that makes it impossible to put down. The novel delves into the hypnotic relationship between two characters who inhabit the ruthless, foggy, time of absolute youth. And it works because it doesn’t resort to melancholy, nor to the prejudices of those who no longer live in that time. Rooney is an expert calibrator. She can create the most delicious intimacy by force of the blows that are given in passing.