Sally Rooney - Beautiful world where are you (2021)

Sally Rooney – Beautiful world, where are you? (2021)

Beautiful world, where are you? is Rooney's third published novel. In it the author displays much of the same universe as in Rooney's debut novel, Conversations with friends: politically interested, college educated people who bond in intense friendships and complex on-and-off romantic relationships. We find social class differences, a Spaniel dog, people reading the Bible, a bisexual character, age gaps, a beach scene. All the ingredients which have proved to cook bestselling books.

Narrated in third person, we get to know four main characters, all in their late 20s or early 30s. There is Eileen who works at a literary magazine making ends meet on minimum wage. Her best friend Alice has become a successful writer, selling books internationally and making ten times the money Eileen makes – maybe we have some autobiographical or auto-fictional elements there. We meet Simon, Eileen's childhood friend from the countryside, who she is in love with, now working in politics for a refugee aid agency. And Felix, Alice's Tinder date, a down-to-earth, working class boy. So, as in her debut novel we have a quartet – or four person constellation of friendship and love.

Sally Rooney's project is ambitious, it investigates the troubles of young adults in contemporary Ireland, marked by the financial and spiritual precarity of our time. The difficult reality of establishing their own selves, professionally and privately, engaging in serious relationships and searching for themselves, highly thought-through, the characters are so smart and yet so lost in modern life.

Despite having very high expectations for this novel, or maybe because of that, I didn't quite appreciate this one the same way as I did her previous books. This was my personal experience, I still think the novel can work brilliantly for a different reader. In continuation, I will further explain the characters and themes and then I'll get into what didn't function for me.

Alice, the author who got to be a celebrity is struggling with the fact that she can no longer lead a private life. Her success even lead to severe psychological problems. She is often described by her friends as cold and snippy and although trying to change this, she also seems to need space for herself. Whilst she and her best friend Eileen exchange very deep emails, they don't see each other frequently in person, in recent years. She travels to Rome to promote her last book and spontaneously invites Felix, her new acquaintance, to come along. Felix is a fun character, he is kind of the “bad boy with a soft core” of the group, totally out of place at the literary conference, but politely interested in this social milieu, that is new to him. Sometimes he just can't hold back with some observations that stand out to him. Eileen has recently broke up with her boyfriend of three years. Her sister is getting married soon and giving her a hard time for being single with a shitty job and not getting forward in life which she takes to heart, she is a very insecure person and suffers from her friend Alice's detachment. Meanwhile she gets intimate with Simon with whom she had been close since childhood but got estranged in adult life when both worked in different cities and engaged in relationships with other people. Simon is the good boy, the type every parent would love to see their daughters with. A kind of blond angel, successful in his job, religious. Like Nick from Rooney's first novel, Simon is a bit passive. The boys have problems of their own, yet we get deeper into the girls' heads reading their emails.

The novel starts with Alice and Felix's first date, where there are sort of weird silences, they like each other their worlds are so different that they take it slowly. Eileen and Simon are working in Dublin, however Alice has moved to the other side of the country to live alone in a huge house by the sea. We follow Alice and Felix on their trip to Rome. We have the other couple seeing each other, we have parties, lots of sex scenes and in the end all four come together at Alice's place.

As in her other novels the communication between the friends and lovers occurs often via messenger and the author includes long emails Eileen and Alice write each other in which their world-view unfolds. Almost every second chapter is an email between Alice and Eileen, making it half an epistolary novel. These, for me, are the best passages about the novel and make it worthwhile. They discuss their love life and other, deeper questions. Among other things, they deliberate about the absurdities of conservatism, the degenerate mechanisms of the literary market, and “sex studies” as a field lacking theory and vocabulary apart from gender studies. They search for beauty in life reflecting about the nature of “real aesthetic experience”. And interrogate themselves about their generation and the present moment in history. They feel adrift, at loss of an “intellectual home”, like out of step with the cultural discourse as Eileen puts it.

To show some examples, here is what Alice writes on conservatism and capitalism:

I’ve been thinking lately about right-wing politics (haven’t we all), and how it is that conservatism (the social force) came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism. The connection is not obvious, at least to me, since markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions. What could be ‘conservative’ about such a process? [...] Just look at what conservatives make of the environment: their idea of conservation is to extract, pillage and destroy, ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’ – but because of that very fact, it’s no longer the same earth we do it to.

The girls are mostly on the same page with their opinions and complement each other. Eileen about our specific historical time:

The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition. This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic.

Personally I have lot of the same thoughts and concerns, and I find them brilliantly put into words. Alice on the relationship with her parents:

I have put between myself and my parents such a gulf of sophistication that it’s impossible for them to touch me now or to reach me at all. And I look back across that gulf, not with a sense of guilt or loss, but with relief and satisfaction. Am I better than they are? Certainly not, although maybe luckier. But I am different, and I don’t understand them very well, and I can’t live with them or draw them into my inner world – or for that matter write about them. All my filial duties are nothing but a series of rituals on my part designed to shield myself from criticism while giving nothing of myself away.

They talk about the collapse of civilisation that has occurred in the Late Bronze Age and they think a lot about Jesus, in a theoretical way, what he represents culturally, almost as a literary figure. As it also comes up in other novels, Jesus is an example of how me should try to be loving everyone. Even the dog had behaviour problems in the past but had recovered with the help of love. God as a possible measure of moral good and bad, as the standard of beauty, where otherwise would be a gaping nothing. Discussing why she respects and admires Simon's faith, Eileen writes:

But how is it possible for me to admire someone for believing something I don’t believe, and don’t want to believe, and which I think is manifestly incorrect and absurd? If Simon started to worship a turtle as the son of God, for example, would I admire his sincerity? From a strictly rationalist perspective, it makes as much sense to worship a turtle as it does to worship a first-century Judaean preacher. Considering that God doesn’t exist, the whole thing is random anyway, and it may as well be Jesus, or a plastic bucket, or William Shakespeare, it doesn’t matter. And yet I feel I couldn’t admire Simon’s sincerity if he went down the road of turtle worship. Am I just admiring the ritual, then? Admiring his ability to blandly and uncritically accept received wisdom? Or do I secretly believe there is something special about Jesus, and that to worship him as God, while not quite reasonable, is somehow permissible? I don’t know.

Whereas Simon is more “vanilla” as they would say nowadays, Felix really spiced up the novel quite a bit. He describes himself as “I wouldn’t be known as a great catch, [he said], I’ll put it that way. Not the most reliable character going. And speaking honestly, I owe a bit of money around town as well”. He is actually bisexual, and not knowing he is with Eileen, tries to flirt on Simon. Which makes the reader smirk. When he introduces the three others to his “working class” circle of friend he says: “Now just be normal, alright? Don’t go in there talking about like, world politics and shit like that. People will think you’re freaks.”.

While the email parts are great, I do thing the novel has some bigger problems. It begins very slowly, anonymous, we get little data, little insight, it seems sterile. Rooney's novels are character studies more than plot driven stories and, in general, I love that, although I in this one I missed an arc of narration whereby I could root for the characters to achieve their goals as I did with Frances, in Conversations, for example. The psychological portraits, of Alice and Eileen especially, as deeply sensitive people, are great, but it contrasts with their frequent misunderstandings when they actually meet or talk. The various dates and sex scenes are bad, well I know that's a question of personal taste, but indeed they are all pretty much the same. We don't get warm with the characters in the first chapters, they all seem cold and distant and as a reader. I just couldn't care what happened or didn't happen to them. Once we get to know them, their resentments and behaviour is understandable, but I would have preferred less talking. I got really bored, especially in the first half of the book. At this point I only kept reading because of the philosophical and political reflections in between which on the contrary, I enjoyed very much, which makes me think that I would love to read an essay collection by the Irish author.

Their only goal seemed to be to connect and fall, or stay in love, and plotwise that wasn't enough for me. I couldn't identify, personally, even though I definitely share character traits or behaviours with the girl characters. Identification is the most important element in a good novel. And, forgive me if I'm being bold, Eileen and her insecurities challenged my patience, I found her lack of self esteem irritating and the ending is cheesy.

In conclusion, I think, notwithstanding my critique, maybe for a different public Beautiful world, where are you? is a great novel, Sally Rooney is a smart writer, but it doesn't speak to me, personally. I will certainly recommend people to read it if they like, and then tell me what they think about it.

Beautiful world, where are you? was published by Faber and Faber and won the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year prize. Nevertheless, I will buy Rooney's newest novel, Intermezzo, published in 2024.