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.
