Sally Rooney is a novelist I found through the Hulu adaptation of her book Normal People. The dour, smart, university-age protagonists swept me into a world of romance, sexuality, and conversations with friends at parties held in what can only be described as the most beautiful Irish apartments and countryside houses - all of which had been pretty well hampered by the beginning of what would be a still ongoing global pandemic. I tried to listen to her debut novel, Conversations With Friends, through the library’s audiobook system, but I wasn’t ready. The characters were too close to those in Normal People. This was not a problem that actually existed between the two novels, which were released a year apart, but something that had to do with my own reading habits, which would take almost a year to return to normal.
When Beautiful World, Where Are You? was announced, I quickly pre-ordered it without checking what I would be in store for many months later. The cover design, which is a wonderful light blue with swipes of yellow images and black lettering, was enough. When it arrived, I was bouncing between books I didn’t really enjoy my time with. Most of my pandemic reading had been spent diving into the large omnibuses of Goodnight Punpun and Planetes - something that would slowly propel me back into novels and my love for reading prose. I was ready for the drama and awkward realities of modern people. I was ready for Sally Rooney.
Beautiful World, Rooney’s third novel, advances the age of it’s protagonists to around thirty, which is something I was not expecting and became a little frightening. People my age, I thought, smart and out in the world at parties, having sex, meeting each other. Written over many years, the novel takes on the lurid isolation of a small town cast. Even in Dublin, where half the characters spend the majority of the novel, the scenes are set inside of apartments or at the tail ends of small gatherings; or on the bus home, stopping suddenly to visit someone who comforts them (even if it might be a little awkward and weird); or visiting with a new friend’s roommates and meeting their dog. These are the kinds of scenes on which Rooney sets her cast.
Structured as a mixed epistolary novel - letters between the two main protagonists Alice and Eileen, which are then interspersed with sections of third-person prose - Beautiful World tells the story of two relationships. Alice, who is a famous author, has moved away to the countryside in Ireland after a psychiatric episode (caused in part by her new found fame). After deciding to meet someone new in town through Tinder, she begins an awkward and, at times, argumentative relationship with a handsome, often troubled warehouse worker named Felix. Eileen, who roomed with Alice in University and remains a close friend, tires of her mundane job at a literary magazine in Dublin and begins to spiral back into the arms of a childhood crush, Simon, who she has been on-again-off-again with for most of her life.
There is a sense, at times, which is close to how I often feel, that the characters are almost upset to have to know and repeat the things people approaching “adulthood” are want to talk about: the climate, generational progress, the standards of beauty and love and culture all around them. An element of fantasy comes through in the way Alice and Eileen exchange multi-page emails about Christianity and the history of the written word. And yet (even though I’ve never sent an email longer than a few paragraphs, let alone pages), their emails are exciting to read, and they’re revealing, and hurtful sometimes in the way they are interrupted by the trivial nature of love and life. The insecurity about the kind of love you don’t want to let yourself be swept away by because it feels so Hollywood, or novel, or childish, but you do anyway, all gets shoehorned in at the end of a long email.
This is the strength of Sally Rooney: she makes you believe there are these kinds of friendships in the world still, where people reach across a three hour divide to tell each other about how they are suddenly rethinking everything they’ve done in their lives because a childhood crush has resurfaced (seemingly endlessly, for the forth, or maybe fifth time). And he’s Christian, in 2020! Catholic, at that!
After finishing the novel, I thought the sexual situations were different when compared to Normal People. With some distance it seems like they serve a similar purpose, but were presented differently. Perhaps with the age difference between the narrators there became a certain understanding about the comfort or the need for sex to fill a certain emotional aspect of a relationship. In Normal People, it felt to me like sex was a means to an end - a way of getting close to someone by using your body as collatoral. The immediacy of sex was a device of confrontation and mutual avoidance when it came to having to talk about how the characters felt about one another. Whereas, in Beautiful World, I felt like the sex, while serving a similar need for comfort and closeness, was a way to bring an emotion to the surface. To share yourself with someone physically in order to show you have a desire to be near them. In the end, these are the same when it comes to closeness, but feel different. The maturity of a relationship that is burning to be more physically intimate versus using their bodies as a weapon (even if the purpose of that weapon is to get closer to each other). This could also be due to having only seen the mini-series version of Normal People, where the nudity is imagery to confront as opposed to words within a larger narrative context.
It’s strange to read a novel about characters your own age, especially during a time of such unnatural isolation and distance. At the end of the novel, the characters write to each other from inside of the pandemic isolation, which feels both too soon to read about and also strikingly too late. Voyeuristically, I want them to succeed in their new entrapments. I want them to thrive in all the ways we all thought we would thrive when the idea was that it would only be a few more months. Pragmatically, pessimistically, as the second anniversary of pandemic isolation looms nearer and nearer, I fear for my new fictional friends and lovers. I hope they make it together.
Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? is a wonderful portrait of what it is to be thirty-something. Through success and failure and milieu, Rooney finds a way to make an extremely successful author relatable to her new warehouse-working love interest. Through conflict and misunderstanding, through personal history and confession, and the unending obligations of being employed and living in the world, the characters become real for what I hope will be a wide range of readers.
Beautiful World, Where Are You? is out now in hardcover from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.