Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney
Idk people, I loved it. I blushed and I cried. Perhaps it was constructed for me to feel. Is that so wrong?
The plot of Beautiful World, Where Are You? feels familiar if you’ve read Sally Rooney’s other books. There are two friends from college in their early thirties: Alice, who has experienced sudden, massive fame as a young novelist, and Eileen, her equally brilliant best friend who works as an editor at a literary magazine. And their respective significant others: Felix, an uncomfortably honest but kind Amazon warehouse worker, and the exceedingly chivalrous but closed-off Simon, who works at a government-run organization which apparently makes enough money to own a condo in Dublin. Two pairs made up of opposing socioeconomic classes, who subsist on a steady Irish diet of repressed emotions, intellectual exchange, near-willful miscommunication, and sensi, existential sex.
Alice and Eileen grapple with the value of making art in a world that’s falling apart; feeling selfish in caring about love and relationships and beauty while the fate of humanity looms large. Their emails to each other are nuanced, clear-headed ruminations on neoliberalism, the limits of Internet political debate, the Irish housing market, the role of art, fame, and God. Real life interactions with their lovers are awkward, insecure, restrained, filled with longing. Alice and Eileen are far more comfortable intellectualizing their fears and desires than expressing what they want. Intermittently, they’ll look down at their phones, and think about how pointless it all is. In other words, they’re very much like people we know, or are.
Sally Rooney (it just feels like you’re supposed to say her full name) is a scholar. Her course of study as a Trinity College student was rigorous and competitive — almost every early-career article written about her mentions her past as a champion debater, which, to me, explains a lot about the mass appeal of her books, which seems to be a frequent question for old people to posit.
(In addition to the sex scenes. They’re comforting. They all have the vibe of afternoon sex on overcast day, right after a shower, with someone you’re almost in love with. And afterward your hair has never looked better.)
After experiencing massive success and the subsequent discomfort of her particular 21st century celebrity, Sally Rooney’s approach to her third novel was to formally understand the function of the art form itself. The time spent studying the purpose of her own labor has a very clear answer in its result: a study in humanity that serves as an artifact of the time in which it was written. With, more or less, a happy ending for often miserable people. Offering salvation in the form of aesthetic experience: the exact conclusion that she set out to prove.
That her novels appeal to a great deal of people should be no surprise. She’s a Marxist who loves to win. I doubt Sally Rooney set out to design The Millennial Novel — but I would venture to say her approach to work led her to that end. Socialists aim to reach as many people as possible, in a way that the greatest number of people will comprehend, in order to establish solidarity. Debaters prepare by taking in massive amounts of information in order to formulate a strategy to arrive at a point with which it is logically impossible to disagree. And artists reflect the entirety of humanity and the world we inhabit back to us in order to help us understand ourselves. With that kind of scale and discipline at her disposal, Sally Rooney can’t help but embody the contradictions that she continues to interrogate. Which might be maddening to some people (i.e. haters). But I happen to admire a woman who succeeds in bringing her vision to life. And I look forward to the answers she’ll continue to glean. — Delighter #28
