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If you listen carefully - hell, no, cross that out! - If you listen at all and even if you are trying hard not to listen, there's a loud, harmonious choir singing a collective ode to Sally Rooney's Normal People. "Elegant, insightful novel", is intoned gingerly. "The real deal", it continues. On and on the chorus goes, reaching incredibly high notes, verging on that mythical A above high C - "a future classic". And here I come, seemingly tone-deaf, singing shrilly that I do not like the concert and that I want my money back, goddamit! Even worse, I'm not just leaving the room shaking my fist. I'm starting to sing in a different key a tune of my own.

I'm starting on a positive note, with a mellow stanza about how the book captures what it means to be young and insecure, unaware of your own contours, still trying to define them, allowing others to sketch them for you. I continue with a line about its examination of class and the blurry lines between friendship and love, the impact one relationship can have. But then I'm done with the positive note and I launch into a stanza about the characters' implausibility. "Who are these people?" serves as my chorus. Who are they? They should be entirely familiar to me. Not identical to me, not similar, not admired or loved, but believable. They are not. Also, Marianne's family - why so monochrome, one-dimensional, and artificial? I'm not disputing the existence of toxic families. But I am vehemently questioning the verisimilitude of this particular one. Should I sing too about the other cardboard secondary characters? No, I'll drop it - I've already forgotten their names anyway - and get straight to the last stanza about the lack of trust in the reader. The strained observations verging on the ridiculous and the nonsensical. The lack of subtlety disguised as rawness and authenticity. I love rawness in literature. Boldness. Honesty. Unfiltered slices of human existence and psychology. Yet layering scenes of indecorous sex not an authentic masterpiece maketh. Where are the questions? The growth?

Done. I'm done. I've sang myself hoarse. Now I'm leaving the room, whistling some The National song. One about difficult loves, about insecurity.