Literary Novels Are Using Romance to Talk About Politics

Books like ‘Normal People’ and ‘Immigrant, Montana’ are mixing love and Marxism to interrogate global politics

Joanna Scutts
GEN
Published in
8 min readApr 24, 2019

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Credit: Roc Canals Photography/Getty Images

In the middle of Sally Rooney’s new novel Normal People, one of the protagonists, a young Irish college student named Connell, finds himself “in a state of strange emotional agitation”…

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Joanna Scutts
GEN
Writer for

Writer, critic, curator, cultural historian. Author, THE EXTRA WOMAN (2017). Words at Slate, New Republic, Washington Post & more. www.joannascutts.com