Beautiful World, Where Are You review – Sally Rooney shows no sign of slowing down
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber), £16.99.
In the three years since Normal People was published the world might have stopped, but Sally Rooney didn’t. The author’s third book in four years, Beautiful World, Where Are You, came out on Tuesday, warranting tweets of “Happy Rooney Day!” with bookshops opening early across the country to serve complimentary coffees and bucks fizz to customers purchasing the book.
Beautiful World follows the classic Rooney formula: a group of (predominantly) well-educated but generally unhappy Irish young people fall in and out of love and try to navigate the world with an unshakeable air of malaise. The protagonists are Eileen, an editorial assistant at a literary magazine who spends her days “moving commas around” and feels flattened by her lack of achievements in her twenties and her best friend Alice, a writer who shot to fame at twenty-four with a huge book deal and subsequently suffered a breakdown. Eileen lives in Dublin whilst Alice has moved into a huge lonely “rectory” in rural West of Ireland, and the two communicate mainly through long emails that punctuate the chapters. Then, of course, their love interests; Eileen and Simon have been in love with one another since she was a teenager (he is five years older). Simon is religious, hard-working and so good looking “it’s actually warped his sense of self”. Alice has recently become involved with Felix, a local in her new town, who works in a factory and has notably little interest in her work or fame.
Whilst the couple’s relationships make for enjoyable reading (and some of Rooney’s best sex scenes), Eileen and Alice’s friendship is at the novel’s core. There is a tension to their relationship as “best friends”; despite repeated iterations that they miss one another, neither is particularly forthcoming in making the three hour trip between them. And yet their love interests are depicted as emotional reflections of one another – Alice and Simon are emotionally unavailable and convinced that they could never be loved as much as they love, whilst Felix and Eileen are self-destructive in their pursuit of emotionally unavailable people. “Maybe that is why you got to like me in the first place,” says Felix upon this realisation: “The problem is that you seem to be drawn to people who aren’t very good at giving you those responses,” says Simon when Eileen becomes upset.
In Beautiful World, Rooney dials in on the unique experience of female friendship and how exhausting and exhilarating it can be. How, as teenagers, you create a relationship so intimate that, in order for the friendship to continue into adulthood, you must spend later years unravelling yourselves to find space for boyfriends, girlfriends, hobbies and careers. “Alice said that Eileen was a genius and a pearl beyond price, and that even the people who really appreciated her still didn’t appreciate her enough,” Rooney writes, “Eileen said that Alice was an iconoclast and a true original, and that she was ahead of her time.”
By writing a friendship so suffocating and intense, Rooney gives herself space to write her romantic relationships in a different way to her previous books. There is still yearning, miscommunication and heartbreak but the scenes between the two couples are light and often funny. Felix provides multiple moments of comic relief, generally oversharing at any given moment and being less intellectual but far more emotionally intelligent than the other characters – telling them truths they are unable to admit to themselves. Through Simon, we learn about Eileen’s childhood, her amusing friction with her sister and trace the beginnings of their longing for one another, and a clichéd but endearing will-they-won’t-they relationship.
The reader witnesses a painful transition stage of Alice and Eileen’s friendship as they grow older but there is never any doubt of their love for one another. Between chapters narrating their lives apart through their actions and speech (only once does Rooney describe Eileen’s thoughts), the women communicate their thoughts in long emails. This is where the book has faced most criticism, the emails fail to develop characterisation or add much to the narrative and it seems wholly unrealistic that two best friends would communicate solely through long emails about the Bronze Age, right-wing politics, philosophy aesthetics and climate change when instant messaging exists. Instead, these emails seem to function as a distracting device allowing Rooney to refute accusations that her novels lack political substance and a chance to express her frustrations at literary fame through the character of Alice; “People who intentionally become famous – I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it – are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill,” she writes in one email.
Unfortunately for Rooney, she is very, very famous and this book will only make her more so. It can be difficult, with an author like Rooney, to divorce yourself from the reviews and reception of a novel and enjoy it, or dislike it, authentically. But at its essence, Beautiful World is a beautiful book – it is “Rooney-enough” to keep the fans happy, but has the mark of maturity too. As her audience grows older, perhaps the trend will continue and so will her characters – in that case, I look forward to a lifetime of reading Sally Rooney.