Beautiful World Where are You?
When I closed the book covers of Beautiful World Where are You, the salty breeze was blowing, I was surrounded on three sides by surfable waves, and I had located the USA’s westernmost book store, just in case I ran out of things to read. Then I procrastinated royally, so it is a month later that I announce: I finally finished the new Sally Rooney!
If you have been blissfully unaware of Sally Rooney and the vice grip she has on both the publishing industry and readers alike, welcome! After publishing Normal People in 2018, and subsequently turning everyone on with the gorgeous and steamy TV adaption in 2020, The hype for Beautiful World Where Are You, Rooney’s third book was pretty intense. There was a bucket hat.
I walked to a local book store to pick up the blue and yellow hardcover a few days after it came out, but ensuing life plans and extra work hours meant it took me quite a bit of time to get from one cover to the other. Already, I had heard a lot of things, ranging from “this is her worst one yet” to “she seemed to be warming up for this masterpiece”, and I was eager to form my own opinions, separate from Rooney hate or hype. If you haven’t gotten to page 337 yet, and want to save all the details, there are spoilers below.
The novel follows two best friends in their early 30’s, Alice and Eileen, as each of them get entangled in separate romances, Alice with Felix, and Eileen with her childhood neighbor, Simon. Alice, a wildly successful author (and a clear self-insert, cough cough), has moved out of Dublin to the seaside after suffering a psychotic break and is getting back to her “regular” life of jet setting for press and book interviews. Felix, a local in the seaside town, is working a numbing job at a nearby factory, and still processing the pain of his mother’s death. Alice meets Felix on a Tinder date, and they begin a halting relationship, struggling to communicate their exact vulnerabilities to each other. Eileen, meanwhile, is working for a literary magazine at a barely livable wage (yikes), and after breaking up with her longtime boyfriend, she’s reconnected with Simon, a tall and handsome catholic, who she’s had feelings for since she was young.
The book is split: half email correspondence between Alice and Eileen, and half their separate lives. It’s got everything you might expect: distant narrators, the description “slim and pale”, hot hot hot sex scenes, and a lot of thoughts about the decline of society. I’ve got to say, it isn’t my favorite of her novels, and it took a while for me to sink my teeth in. Up until about page 60, I had no handle on the dynamics and didn’t think that the letter-writing was particularly engaging. Until I got to page 167, I wasn’t convinced that I was enjoying the story. Then, Simon said, “If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn’t have made me who I am.” ...and what can I say? I’m a sucker for a tall man with a god complex!
Ok but actually, I was drawn (no surprise) to the dynamics between the four characters. Once they crossed the barrier of “casual”, I thought Rooney was back to doing what she does best; expressing the unsaid. I was a little more swept up in the un-drama during the back half of the book, watching Alice and Eileen manage their friendship and relationships with the silent panic of young 20-somethings. There were moments that I relished, rereading and returning to them (no, I’m not just talking about the sex scenes). I particularly loved the moment when Eileen and Simon caught eachother’s eyes at the wedding: I thought that bit offered a different rhythm than the rest of the book in a really beautiful and poignant way.
In general, Beautiful World Where Are You was a departure from Rooney’s usual style, and although I’m glad that she’s trying out new things...I didn’t particularly feel that the epistolary aspect was something worth keeping. The problem, I think, is that Rooney’s characters are already so distant and passive from the reader, that when the characters are writing letters, their actions are even more shielded, so I felt further away from who Alice and Eileen really were. Sometimes their voices blended together and I had a hard time identifying who was who. I also thought that the self-insert….was a little on the nose. Usually, I have no issue with writers being a part of their stories (they almost always are, after all), but the direct connection between Alice and Rooney wasn’t my favorite.
All my interest in the back half of the book also became more stilted at the end, when we jumped to COVID times, and a seemingly happy ending. The epiloge felt like an afterthought, and I’ll say it: I don’t want to read about COVID in fiction!! All my interest in a fiction story drains out of me the minute I read the words “Covid-19”. I don’t mind books about pandemics (one of my favorite reads this year was about one) but the actual grounding in our current one just gives me the ick.
My favorite part about Rooney will always be how she pushes readers to recognize how highly passive they can be, and how passive action is usually (at least in her novels) a fight for self-preservation or a lack of it. The idea of how self-preservation and love are intertwined has been something I’ve been exploring in long form content for a while now. I think love has a unique quality that either heightens or completely removes our interest in caring for ourselves, and Rooney’s characters often disarm themselves in the name of remaining close to the people they love.
So yes, I still stan Sally Rooney. I still believe that she captures the underground feeling of a romantic generation and that her distanced prose can make readers examine themselves and their connections. Above all, I think Rooney caters to a subset of people (read: white women) who have been in a first relationship: one that they feel powerless to stop and at the same time, devoted to continuing. I would also argue that the nostalgia for that feeling is ultimately worth catering to...but I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.
What did you all think about this one? More than ever I’d love to have your thoughts about the hype and the book, separate or together.
