Summary
A few months after the previous chapter leaves off, we find Marianne lounging in her family's luxurious yard. She's been having a lazy summer following her graduation—sitting in her room on her computer and barely eating. Her brother Alan loudly announces that Connell was the only person in Marianne's class who performed better than she did on the end-of-school tests. Alan, who likes to think of himself as a social butterfly, calls Connell—not knowing that he and Marianne have any relationship at all—and insistently tries to make Marianne talk to him. She refuses, though Connell wants to talk to her. It turns out they've been estranged for a while, ever since Connell asked Rachel to Debs. Marianne had confronted him, but rather than acknowledge the hurtfulness of his choice, Connell had deflected. Marianne had been so humiliated that she opted to simply study at home rather than return to school. She and Lorraine had formed a casual alliance of mutual anger at Connell, agreeing that he shouldn't enter Marianne's house to pick up Lorraine anymore. Back in the Sheridans' yard, Marianne infuriates her brother by hinting that she and Connell have a history together. Alan's manner shows that he is preparing to hit his sister, but their mother Denise comes home. Marianne reflects that Denise has never defended her against make aggression—in fact, Marianne simply detaches from her feelings when others harm her, which her mother sees as proof that she is coldhearted.
The story cuts forward several months to show Connell at a college party in Dublin, feeling awkward. Connell feels lonely and alienated at college: he barely even knows Gareth, the classmate who invited him to this party. The social norms of the school, attended mostly by wealthy and more urbane students, are baffling to Connell. He feels incompetent in class, where others express confident opinions even though they evidently haven't done the reading, and he reads by himself during all his free time, feeling very affected by works of fiction. Moreover, people act strange and disdainful when they learn that he's from the western part of Ireland. Gareth introduces Connell to his girlfriend—who is none other than Marianne herself. It's immediately clear that Marianne has become popular and self-assured, and that she fits in well at Trinity. She and Connell talk alone for a bit. Marianne seems determined to show Connell that she's no longer angry at him. She discusses their relationship, and breakup, with a dry, detached wit. Connell silently reflects on how upset and guilt-ridden he was after she left school, and how he had unsuccessfully tried to make himself feel better with drinking and casual sex. He remembers how a friend of his had brought up, casually, the fact that his sexual relationship with Marianne was common knowledge. This had upset him even more, since he'd realized that he need not have kept it a secret and hurt Marianne. Back at Trinity, Connell learns that Marianne's new boyfriend Gareth is part of a student debate club that has invited a neo-Nazi to speak on campus. Marianne weakly defends this choice, giving Connell a mild thrill, since she's always seemed so unassailably principled. Connell doesn't apologize for his actions, and wonders whether this is out of consideration for Marianne, who doesn't seem to want him to do so, or simply out of cowardice.
When we see them a few months later, Connell has joined part of Marianne's social group at school, though he feels like a peripheral member. He is picking Marianne up in his car to drive her home from a friend's house, where they've spent the night after a party. She apologizes for what happened the night before: at a party, Marianne had been very drunk, and, after spending most of the night with her friends Peggy and Joana, had sought out Connell. Though Connell is casually seeing another girl, Marianne had openly flirted with him and asked him to have sex with her. When she apologizes the next day, Connell brushes off the apology. Marianne tells him that renewing their sexual relationship would ruin their friendship. Connell remembers a recent night when, after leaving a gathering of friends, he'd gone home with Marianne, to her off-campus apartment. They'd discussed the first phase of their relationship. Marianne had confessed to feeling embarrassed about letting Connell treat her badly, and Connell had apologized for his treatment of her. They had fallen asleep, chastely but holding hands, in Marianne's bed. The narrative returns to Marianne and Connell on the morning after the party. At Marianne's apartment they have sex and fall asleep peacefully.
Two months later, Connell comes over to Marianne's apartment. Her friend Peggy is there. Peggy is loud and brash, and she begins to interrogate Connell. She asks Marianne and Connell whether they are sleeping together, and Marianne says yes, straightforwardly. She then asks Connell a series of questions about his male privilege and sexual preferences, concluding by asking whether he'd be interested in a threesome with her and Marianne. Marianne saves him from answering by saying that she would be too self-conscious, since she feels "cold" and unlovable. Connell's life has improved in recent months. He feels extraordinarily close to Marianne, even though they both insist that their relationship is purely sexual and non-romantic. He has a new job, obtained through a wealthy friend's connections, and he marvels at the way his friendship with Marianne has propelled him into circles of privilege. Meanwhile, despite his initial feelings of incompetence on campus, he's become something of an academic superstar in the English department. However, a few nights before the conversation with Peggy, Connell had confronted some of the problems in his and Marianne's relationship. Marianne had gone home for a few days, and came back acting odd, crying seemingly unprompted. Connell asked if she was pregnant, and she says no. Connell told her that, if she did get pregnant, he would support her whether or not she had an abortion. He asked how her family would react, and she said that they wouldn't care about her enough to react. After this, Marianne said that she didn't want to have sex because she wasn't feeling well, so Connell touched her with his hands instead. He thought about how vulnerable she was around him, when she was so closed off around others. The narrative returns to the scene in Peggy's apartment. Peggy goes home and Connell panics, realizing that he could physically hurt Marianne and she wouldn't stop him. He has no desire to hurt her, but the realization that she would allow him to do so frightens him.
Analysis
These chapters take place over the course of Connell and Marianne's first year at college (and the preceding summer). However, as with the book's earlier chapters, they each follow a complex chronology. Each chapter begins with a scene, and then cuts back in time as Connell is reminded of an earlier event. After that earlier event is described, the narrative returns to that initial scene. Thus in each chapter, a certain scene becomes the frame surrounding and contextualizing earlier events. In general, the "framing" scenes that open and close the chapter take place in more public or formal situations—a social gathering with additional characters. The scenes bookended by these framing scenes tend to be more intimate ones between only Connell and Marianne. In this way, the book's structure mimics the structure of Connell and Marianne's relationship. This relationship contains separate private and public elements, and each person has difficulty reconciling outside pressures with the real sense of connection they feel to one another. Connell, in particular, is horrified by the idea of Peggy or anybody else invading the private realm of his and Marianne's lives, which includes but isn't limited to sex. The outside pressures on Marianne and Connell form an inescapable context for the couple's love story, and yet feel separate from it, unable to intrude on their most intimate conversations.
The chapters following Connell and Marianne's arrival at Trinity are all uniformly written from Connell's point of view. In this way, they differ from the previous, high-school chapters, which alternated between the two protagonists' perspectives. This earlier, alternating point of view allowed the reader to understand both characters' doubts, vulnerabilities, and decisions. It highlighted the constant and subtle shifts in power between the two characters. Now, though, the shift into Connell's mind—and away from Marianne's—signals a shift in the power dynamic between the two of them. Marianne has gone from living as a social outcast in high school to being at the center of a large social group in college. Connell, meanwhile, has gone from being the most popular boy in his grade at school to being rather looked down on in college. Connell has become more vulnerable socially, while also becoming doubly vulnerable to the reader, who now has access to all of his thoughts and feelings. Marianne, meanwhile, is suddenly mysterious and cool. The part of her personality that she characterizes as "unlovable"—that is, the detachment and over-intellectualization she has developed in response to abuse—is a social advantage in her new setting. To reflect this, the reader loses access to her inner life: she has a kind of new invulnerability, or at least appears to have one, that robs us of access to her inner life. Of course, she's also less vulnerable than she was before simply because she doesn't have to fear her family. She can come and go as she pleases without fearing her brother's abuse or her mother's anger. Connell, meanwhile, no longer lives with his supportive mother, which makes him much more vulnerable.
Before coming to college, a somewhat depressed Marianne frets that her new life won't have the power to change her. She knows that she'll be in a new place with new peers, but can't imagine this will matter if her personality is fundamentally the same. Of course, to an extent this is true. Her traumas and self-doubts haven't gone away, and her reaction after visiting home shows that her family still has the power to hurt her. At the same time, she underestimates how much a shift in context will change her life, simply because her unchanged personality is perceived differently. Marianne's spiky, private, opinionated demeanor is an advantage now, and is considered the norm around her classmates. Connell's humble, conflict-avoidant ways are now considered unusual. Rooney suggests that this all comes back to the class difference between them. While Marianne's wealth set her apart in her hometown of Carricklea, it is Connell's working-class roots that are unusual here. Rooney lightly pokes fun at Connell's classmates' discomfort around his class background. For instance, Marianne's friend Peggy makes fun of his clothes, becoming awkward and defensive when another friend, Joana, points out (equally awkwardly) that he might not be able to afford the kinds of clothes other people at Trinity wear. The ability to afford things like fancy clothes or an off-campus apartment certainly set Connell apart, but at this point in the novel his working-class background is just as much exemplified in his values and attitudes. He doesn't particularly want to dress like his classmates, not because their clothes cost too much, but because he thinks they look ridiculous. Even more importantly, Connell doesn't know how to project self-assuredness. He feels that he doesn't have a right to act confidently if he hasn't earned it through competence or merit, but for his wealthy classmates, confidence is a good in and of itself. It's a way to demonstrate that they belong at Trinity.
Just as Marianne was once baffled by the strict social hierarchy of high school, Connell is now equally baffled by the social hierarchy of college. This hierarchy is less cruel and more confusing, with subtler signals attached to it. At Connell and Marianne's high school, popularity was attached to conventional attractiveness and athleticism. The students strove to fit in, and those who didn't, like Marianne, were openly mocked and excluded. At Trinity, that kind of open scorn is taboo, in part because it seems that morality and openness are themselves a kind of social currency. Therefore, nobody is openly cruel to Connell, even though they find him strange. Rooney infuses her dissections of the university social hierarchy with dry humor, turning the novel into something of a comedy of manners even while its romantic plotline remains front and center.
