The Beautiful World is Right Here

By Aleksandra Goldberg

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU
By Sally Rooney

Millennial Irish author, Sally Rooney, took the literary world by storm when her sophomore novel, Normal People, rose to popularity in 2019. The earnestness of her characters and their tame exploration of social and political progressiveness captivated readers, earning Rooney the title “Voice of A Generation.” In her third book and newest release, Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rooney once again narrates the lives of people—distinctly men and women—interacting and engaging in their overlapping relationships.

The novel follows college best friends, Alice and Eileen, as they carry out a long-distance friendship while Alice recovers from a psychotic break and extended hospital stint in the countryside of Ireland as Eileen carries on at home in Dublin. Alice meets Felix on Tinder. Eileen is in the middle of a confusing shift in her relationship with her childhood best friend, Simon. Despite an uncomfortable first date, Alice invites Felix to Rome where she has a “famous author” work obligation—contrary to her restful reports home to Eileen. Eileen and Simon are in love, but both have trouble getting past their elementary nervousness around each other. Through the women’s penpal email correspondences, we bounce back and forth between Alice and Eileen’s increasingly separate lives and follow their clumsy, mostly agonizing, love stories.

Alice and Eileen’s emails are moments in which Rooney is unusually direct, almost scholarly. Eileen writes to Alice, “What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress…What if things just rise and recede naturally like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same as always—just to live and be with other people?” Rooney’s proud Marxism, lacking in her other novels, overtly shines through in Beautiful World, adding contextual depth to the women’s lives.

The lack of quotation marks around dialogue sets a tone of matter-of-factness. The character’s words are definitive. They serve as the story’s action. As their relationships grow and the four characters become entangled in each other’s lives, worlds collide for better or worse.

Beautiful World, Where Are You’s release received some pushback. Rooney has been criticized for continuously telling stories centering privileged Irishmen and this novel is no exception. All four characters are white, college-educated, and at least middle class. They’re all cisgender people in heteronormative relationships. They embody people who have long been represented. But that doesn’t discount the story she’s telling. To say Rooney or any other singular author is the voice of a generation is a gross underestimation of the multitude of stories out there and distracts from what the author is bringing to the table. The critiques of Rooney could be critiques of anyone—she isn’t alone in writing strictly from her own experience—and shouldn’t be used as judgment as to whether her new novel has merit or not.

While a slow start, Beautiful World, Where Are You develops into an overview of what it means to choose to love someone and indoctrinate them into your world. The constant push and pull between the characters mirrored by the yo-yo email structure constantly keeps you moving through the story and reaching for resolution. When it comes to long-term love, secrets and distance are sometimes part of the deal. Relationships are constantly growing and changing. Rooney shows us that’s where you find beauty. As Eileen writes to Alice about her and Simon, “wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.”

 

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU
By Sally Rooney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 356 pp. $30.