Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
“A novel of capacious intelligence and plenty of page-turning emotional drama.” — Kirkus
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Future scholars looking to comprehend the current zeitgeist and its many contradictions — e.g. how we can lament climate change while actively contributing to it — might well comb the growing oeuvre of Irish novelist Sally Rooney, wherein she masterfully sets up “gray” areas of moral ambiguity or liminality. Consider her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, in which we readers find ourselves voyeuristically embedded into a tantalizing and forbidden scenario. Ex-lovers and university students Frances and Bobbi become besotted with a successful, artsy older married couple, and the foursome falls in love and in bed with each other, yielding surprising, poignant, and ultimately life-affirming results.
This is one of the hallmarks of Rooney’s work: she allows her characters to smolder and then catch flame psychologically, and often physically, forcing them to confront the painful chasm between their ideals and their all-too-human decisions and/or corporal constraints. Religion, morality, capitalism, and exploitation all come into play. Just before breaking these hapless souls, Rooney saves them with an almost beatific grace. (Oh, and the prose throughout is transcendent and, indeed, almost other-worldly; at once deceptively simple and arch, with pitch-perfect dialogue. I won’t even get started on the sex scenes in which even the most cerebral, cold individuals turn to gods of sensuality.)
SELF-SABOTAGE VS. REDEMPTIVE POWER OF CONNECTION
Rooney’s third and latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), applies many of these themes to late-twenty-something best friends Eileen and Alice. Eileen edits a tiny literary magazine in Dublin while talking herself out of publishing her own material. Prideful, she pines for her childhood crush, Simon, and yet frets over what she’d do should any romance turn south. As she writes in an email to Alice, “I feel so frightened of being hurt — not the suffering, which I know I can handle, but the indignity of suffering, the indignity of being open.” Nevertheless, in true Rooney-esque fashion, Eileen seduces him.
As for Alice, a celebrated novelist, we find her as she’s recovering in the countryside from a psychological breakdown. Alice has tentatively gotten to know a local warehouse worker, Felix, whom she impulsively invites on a work trip to Rome with iffy results. As she and Felix tip-toe into romance, Alice reconciles herself with her unsolicited fame and unexpected wealth. She emails Eileen, saying, “I find my own work morally and politically worthless, and yet it’s the only thing I want to do with my life.”
In keeping with Rooney’s previous books, the Beautiful World plot is largely a quiet one, defined by internal character growth, and a more somber mood pervades as Rooney invokes climate change and the global pandemic. However, the central question remains the same: will these characters, with all of their foibles and grandiose intentions, self-sabotage? Or will they access the potentially redemptive power of connection? The characters themselves acknowledge this paradox; as Eileen writes, “What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal — the engineering and production of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same as always — just live, and be with other people?”
A STORY OF FRIENDSHIP AT THE HEART OF IT ALL
The difficulty and necessity of being with other people takes center stage, in part through the characters’ sexual hijinks and the delicious question of will-they-or-won’t-they make it romantically. However, at its heart, this is a story about friendship, and the lopsided power dynamics between the two women must be resolved. In spite of the intimacy of their correspondence, when Eileen and Alice actually meet in person and introduce their beaus, they appear shy and skittish for reasons we readers fail to understand.
As with Bobbi who destabilized Frances, here in Beautiful World, Felix plays the role of Pan, disrupting the equilibrium with the natural openness that Eileen so fears. A blow-up ensues, and, in the aftermath of the book’s dramatic peak, Rooney assures us in placid, poetic language: “Outside, astronomical twilight. Crescent moon hanging low over the dark water. Tide returning low with a faint repeating rush over the sand.” Yes, the bonds that we nearly demolish through carelessness, vanity, and folly shall somehow persevere. And — Rooney seems to aver with a quivering lip — the beautiful world at large shall somehow survive us.
