Banned Book: Normal People

BY STEVE NUZUM

Connell wished he knew how other people lived their private lives, so he could copy by example.

-Normal People, Sally Rooney

…the Subject Material is not Age and Developmentally Appropriate as defined by S.C. Code Reg. 43-170 and must be removed entirely from all public schools in South Carolina.

-South Carolina Instructional Materials Review Committee

Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.

-Normal People, Sally Rooney

It’s not clear why Sally Rooney’s Normal People was one of the ten books initially chosen by South Carolina’s Instructional Materials Review Committee as a test case for the state’s new book ban regulation. One thing every book on the initial list had in common was that, unlike the majority of book challenges which have been made in South Carolina in recent years, they focused mainly on white, heterosexual characters, which some advocates may indicate the committee was trying to preempt criticism that it was intentionally trying to attack diversity of representation and ideas in literature.

Committee Chair Christian Hanley has explicitly said the committee chose books that had come up a lot during public hearings on the regulation, which seems to confirm that he, at least, was acknowledging a desire to preempt such criticism. (This has been somewhat undermined by the fact that every novel included in the next two rounds of challenges, each set brought by individual parents who had previously failed to get the books removed at the district level, has focused on characters who are nonwhite and/ or members of the LGBTQ+ community.)

Normal People isn’t especially racy by the standards set by the committee in its other choices— most of which do contain mentions or even descriptions of sex, but which few serious people would classify as “pornographic,” none of which would likely violate the state law cited in the regulation, and which were only available, if at all, to older readers in high school libraries. And while the committee claims in its official report that the book’s content  is “clearly violative,” they also declined to ban 1984, which contains sexual content that is arguably as graphic as that portrayed (briefly) in Normal People.

For whatever reason, Normal People is one of eleven books the committee ultimately has voted to ban from every school library and classroom in South Carolina, so far.

The committee has not consistently defended a clear standard for which books to ban and which to keep. And so 1984, a book they knew very well could not be banned without widespread pushback, but which contains implicit sexual violence and explicit sexual activity, was retained, while books like Normal People, which contains mainly veiled and allusive depictions of consensual sex has been banned, and Flamer, which contains no depictions of sex, was voted for removal by the committee, as well. 

What is this supposed to tell our students? Reasonable young people might receive the message that depictions of sex that are deliberately upsetting and off-putting are somehow more appropriate than depictions of sex as just a small part of a complex narrative about intimate relationships.

As I’ve written before, it seems pretty clear to me that no one read 1984 before the challenge was considered in committee, because the report for that book did not contain any quotes. Meanwhile, in the report for Normal People, a short list of racy-but-not graphic sentences about sexual activity was provided. The committee, which didn’t seem especially familiar with either book, voted on that basis to retain 1984 without reading any of it and remove Normal People after presumably reading only that list. (A staff attorney at the time repeatedly said that reading the books before making decisions was not a requirement of the regulation.)

I do wonder if the real target of whoever actually put Normal People on the list was the Hulu streaming adaptation of the book. That adaptation does include a fair amount of nudity and frank discussions of sex (and the record, the most popular adaptation of 1984 contains both of those, as well). And while the average high school student has probably seen far worse, I wouldn’t have shown any of those sex scenes to my students, for obvious reasons.

The novel  is less explicit, often glossing over whatever the characters are doing in bed altogether. Even the passages chosen for the committee to review are often second-hand memories or references to sex acts, rather than descriptions of them.  Hanley previously told the State Gazette that in order for books to be removed for sexual content, they should have “multiple, express, extensive, graphic or detailed descriptions of sexual conduct.” If 1984 doesn’t have these, neither does Normal People. 

In fact, Normal People the novel doesn’t really have any explicit sexual scenes to speak of, covering almost every sexual act in a sentence or less-- much like 1984-- and arguably never getting detailed enough that the reader can visualize what’s happening.

If there is actually anything in the book that made it a target for the censors, I wonder if it’s actually the discussions of politics contained— an element which, ironically, is heavily downplayed in the more sexually explicit streaming show. (Ironically, if they didn’t read the book, they missed a pretty good joke: Connell, who is studious and likes to read, realizes, on page 71, that many of his classmates are showing up every day to “have heated debates about books they had not read… It’s easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don’t worry about appearing ignorant or conceited.”)

While there are many examples of political discussions in the novel, the most significant— assuming, of course, that anyone who challenged the book actually read it, is when Marianne at tells Connell, “The whole idea of ‘meritocracy’ or whatever, it’s evil, you know I think that” (180). (South Carolina has included a budget proviso in the past several annual budgets which forbids teaching the the concept that “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race”. Nonetheless, Normal People the novel doesn’t explicitly violate this language, either.)

The show touches on class issues, but the novel is deeply concerned with them. The pithy summary from the Instructional Materials Review Committee’s “Exhibit A” (as if the novel were evidence of a crime) is reasonably accurate in this respect, at least: “The book is about two coming-of-age teenagers from different social classes. The two shared a secret and intimate relationship while in high school. Later in college, the popular one in high school struggles in college and the one who struggled in high school blossoms in college.”

But like so much of the committee’s and State Board’s approach to books, this summary leaves out all nuance. The novel’s power is in how it portrays the silent signals, the small miscommunications that lead to intense emotional upheaval, between two sensitive and complex people who are close but who have trouble expressing themselves. The reason these characters have sex is not to appeal to anyone’s “prurient interest” but because they are representatives of human beings with bodies and interiority and emotions.

Connell, a budding writer, explores this same quality in the other literature, like Jane Austen’s Emma, which he reads for one of his college courses (while many of the other students are presumably cheating their way through, instead). Rooney writes, “And, in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr. Knightley kisses Emma’s hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them” (72).

It’s a shame that people who haven’t read them want to ban books like Normal People. The book is a beautifully detailed, immersive, and well-observed depiction of young people floundering through those “intimate relationships” the committee’s summary references, making regrettable mistakes, hurting each other, learning, growing, and developing into adults because of it.

It’s particularly a shame because no one outside of the committee actually challenged Normal People at the state level, and there doesn’t seem to be any available evidence of challenges at the district level, either. The most obvious thing that Normal People shares with the other banned books is that it appears on the Moms-for-Liberty-affiliated BookLooks website. In fact, every single quote pulled by the staff member who compiled the committee report comes from the BookLooks site, while other references to sex that don’t appear on the site also don’t appear in the committee report.

As with the other books the committee has bothered to obtain quotes from, the quotes considered from Normal People could very well have come straight from BookLooks.

Connell, who often feels deeply alienated from others, who struggles to know what “normal people” do in relationships, discovers how to confront and understand feelings and intimacy in part because he is a voracious reader. That he learns from a book like Emma, from a time and culture very different from his own working-class Irish upbringing, makes sense.

On the other hand, later in the novel Marianne recognizes that art alone can’t teach you to develop empathy, realizing that a boyfriend has “managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong” (196).

It’s the same reason we should be providing students with diverse texts in school, and why school should be an opportunity to discuss and learn about the complexities of literature, and it’s an indicator of what students lose when we don’t.

The book’s power is in its nuance and complexity, and that makes it all the more striking that the regulation, and the committee created by the regulation, have reduced it to a few sentences that seem smutty only out of context. And, ironically, since the book has been banned from every public school in the state, while the Board of Education website has not, students can now only access the supposedly “violative” excerpts chosen by the committee.