Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney (Faber, $33)
When Sally Rooney's debut novel Conversations with Friends was published in 2017, it wasn't met with much buzz in New Zealand. I was a bookseller at the time and my rep tried to give me a copy of the book twice but,at a glance, I dismissed it as looking lightweight.
Then in April 2018 I interviewed one of my favourite writers and cultural critics, Olivia Laing. I asked her what books she'd been loving lately and she said, "It's not out until September but there's a book called Normal People by Sally Rooney." Laing was right. Rooney struck me with her remarkably seasoned take on relationship and friendship dynamics, class and privilege. I then became quite evangelical about her novels.
Rooney is a literary phenomenon who catapulted to extraordinary fame and critical acclaim with ardent fans across a wide readership from tweens to 94-year-olds. The question on everyone's lips is, can Rooney's hugely anticipated third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? be as good as her previous two?
In it, a semi-reclusive 29-year-old writer named Alice has just recovered from a psychiatric breakdown after skyrocketing to literary stardom at 24. Alice is working on her third novel in isolation while renting a seaside rectory in a remote part of Ireland. She worries that she has only two books in her. "I'm burned out. I only had two good ideas," she anxiously tells a friend. In Rooney's case, this is untrue. Charged with layers of complexity, philosophical enquiry and the same look at class, politics, power, friendship, sex, relationships and family tensions as Conversations with Friends and Normal People, this may be her best book yet.
Beautiful World charts the intense friendship between Alice and her best friend Eileen, an editorial assistant for a literary magazine in Dublin, and their respective romantic relationships. Millionaire Alice meets Felix, a warehouse shift worker, on Tinder. A sharp reader of people, Felix is unmoved by Alice's reluctant literary success and blown away that Eileen has what he perceives to be a glossy and glamorous job and yet he makes more money than her at the warehouse. Rooney casts a canny eye over inequality and the idea and meaning of work, labour and status.
Sally Rooney. Photo / Supplied
Eileen has a murky intimacy with older childhood friend Simon, a Catholic political adviser for a left-wing political party. Simon is accused by Alice of having a messiah complex, and he jokes that he falls in love whenever a girl asks him to open a jam jar. Rooney perfectly captures the clammy anxiety of being inexplicably trapped in something, feeling a gravitational pull towards something that isn't quite working yet can't be shaken off. Her characters navigate the pain of miscommunications and mixed messages of relationships both platonic and sexual.
While there's a pleasant hum of melancholy here, there is also fire and wit. Alice and Eileen write each other long emails where they riff on art and life, anxiety around the climate crisis, civilisational collapse, conservatism and rapacious market capitalism. Eileen says, "Aren't we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?" These exchanges are smart, witty, and provide a platform for Rooney to throw in barbs directed towards the publishing world, the fear of "selling out" and being "over-marketed until the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along." Like Rooney herself, Alice's books were published to adoring press attention followed by negative knee-jerk opinion pieces reacting to the initial positive coverage.
Alice asks, "what is the relationship of the famous author to their books, anyway?" These fiery missives are thoughtful and well-written. It's no surprise that Rooney was a champion teenage debater, the top competitive debater on the continent of Europe, in fact. Rooney is an attentive but unpretentious, unflashy writer, and while many publishers love to pump out books by authors they claim to be "the next Sally Rooney", Rooney herself is an authentic voice who elegantly writes about concerns with a nuance, depth and angle that is her own style. Like Conversations with Friends and Normal People, Beautiful World is moving, with a satisfying ending, sustaining momentum in a richly immersive way.
As Alice and Eileen ponder how political vocabulary has decayed so much that there is no image to make sense of the present historical moment, they also question the idea of beauty. They dismiss the "profoundly ugly" meaning of the word in dominant culture and the "plastic" beauty industry. For them, beauty is found in the experience of life and connection. Eileen says of her friends that as long as they live, the world will always be beautiful for her. Rooney writes with a verdant freshness, and the real beauty is right here, in these intoxicating pages.
