Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You?
by Isabelle Philippe
Sally Rooney’s unflinching literary voice has formed a genre of its own. The author’s all too familiar themes of labyrinthine sexual relationships and adolescent disconnect found in her precursory books, Conversations With Friends, and Normal People are further explored in her latest work, Beautiful World, Where Are You?
The novel follows the relationships of two couples as they grapple with their sense of purpose and moral conviction in a world where such virtues have seemingly come to deteriorate. Alice, a newly famed writer, meets warehouse worker Felix, and the two embark on a romantic relationship fraught with socioeconomic tension. Alice maintains close correspondence with her college best friend Eileen, an editorial assistant who is similarly enmeshed with Simon, a local politician and a childhood friend turned periodic lover in adulthood.
As has come to be expected of a Rooney novel, both settings and actions (including the masterfully executed sex scenes) within the text are described in painstaking detail. From the noise of house keys to the glow of a lamplight, not a feature goes unnoticed. Instead, these details amount to lengthened scenes that feel ordinarily common and familiar on page; they represent the functions of everyday life performed by everyday people. Such is the feat of Rooney’s writing – the ability to transcend the monotonous and imbue it with sensuous meaning. She applies the same level of manicured attention to an unoccupied room at dusk that she would to the, arguably, more important actions of her characters.
Through her analysis of thoughts and interactions, Beautiful World, Where Are You? presents Rooney’s mastered ability to put into words life’s simple yet often unexpressed commonalities that poke our own streams of consciousness, drift among the discussions of our inner circles, but for the most part, remain largely unexamined in a larger, public discourse. The general feeling of existentialism that courses through the novel is largely maintained through the email correspondence that takes place between Alice and Eileen. In such letters to each other, the two muse about God, what it means to live a life without religion, beauty, and unhappiness.
Eileen holds a difficult relationship with both her mother and sister. The former is jealous of the attention Simon gives Eileen while the latter’s actions showcase Rooney’s perceptive ability to focus on an ordinary feeling, peel back it’s layers and apply theory to it. In one interaction between the two, Eileen’s mother accuses her daughter of being impervious to her sensitivities, only caring for her own problems. Eileen muses on this, counteracting this accusation and asking why her mother’s unhappiness is more important than her own. She later muses to Alice that “remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering,” and perhaps that is the reason why people her mother’s age tend to think their feelings are more acute than that of young people. It is such keen observations like these that permeate the book and are relinquished from the unspoken corners of the mind and onto the page that has contributed to the author’s success today. The two friends also discuss the female biological clock, possible infertility, and what it means to bring a child into a world filled with ugliness – plastic usage, poverty, and oppression are points of ruminations for the women as well. While Eileen struggles to find purpose in a life she is not keen on, Alice struggles with her celebrity status which has brought her wealth, guilt, and unabating boredom despite the book signings, readings and frequent travel that has come to constitute her life.
Rooney, known to juxtapose characters with a focus on class and ideology, gives an introspective character study of the two women – one has achieved her desired professional goals while the other is frustrated at the lack of directionality in her life. Both find themselves lonely amidst conversation with each other and their daily partakings in their worlds at large. With such a void, both easily take comfort in the love and tumultuous relationships Simon and Felix provide. A similar trope runs in her other novels--the affections of men counteracting a woman’s social, romantic, or sexual plight, though it is to be said that Rooney writes smart, autonomous women.
With this observance, her words are pertinent to a larger discussion that swells around questions related to earth’s duration as habitable and hospitable, along with the larger purpose we all subconsciously search for in an increasingly connected world that still lends itself susceptible to fears of isolation and abandonment. This perception has earned her the love of millennials/gen-z readers globally and a spot as a defining and sometimes provocative generational voice.
Having recently found critical acclaim after the commercial success of her second novel Normal People, Beautiful World Where Are You focuses on a disillusioned, millionaire protagonist residing in a reclusive countryside home--drawing similar parallels to Rooney’s real-life. In a New York Times interview, the author describes liking her “controlled life,” one that is lived in seclusion which has now been made largely impeded by fame. It begs the question of whether Alice’s own jaded lens through which she views her success is the same that falls upon Rooney?
The intensity of Rooney’s protagonists are the most climatic parts of the novel - the author has found success in her anticlimactic writing. Beautiful World, Where Are You? hones in on observation over tension and unfolding drama. The closest the plot comes to an escalation point is when it is revealed that Simon has been seeing another woman at the same time as a sexual relationship unfolds between him and Eileen. A description-laden text may be frustrating for some readers who rely on quickened pace and twisting storylines for story investment, but there is a satisfying beauty in working through Rooney’s layered prose and the characters’ worldly questions.
This overall style has influenced my own writing and approach to storytelling--whereas others may dismiss such questions and exaggerated descriptions as inconsequential, Rooney embraces the beauty in the small facets of life, the very findings her characters so heavily depend on for happiness – “the smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on” – all of life’s beauty. The ending of the novel, which sees both women grateful in their points of life, if not entirely content, reconciles the conflicts presented early on–ordinary life, simple and plain, is enough.
Isabelle Phillipe is a first-year fiction student in the NYU MFA Program. She has written for ABC News and Ithaca Times and is currently working on her first novel.