Sally Rooney’s Novel of Letters Puts a Fresh Spin on Familiar Questions (Published 2021) (2024)

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU
By Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney’s new novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” has the arid, intense melancholy of a Hopper painting. The novel follows Alice, a writer of global acclaim, and her best friend, Eileen, who works at a literary magazine in Dublin. Recovering from a breakdown brought about by complications of modern fame, Alice is morbid but openhearted, a secret idealist in wolf’s clothing. Eileen is the standard Rooney protagonist — ambivalent, sensitive, lethal in conversation. She’s got the classic mistrustful delusion of a younger child, needy and convinced of her own victimhood.

The novel opens with a familiar scene: Alice sitting in a bar waiting to meet Felix, a guy from an app. They engage in some first-date talk, and Alice takes him back to the huge house she’s borrowing, prompting Felix, who works in a warehouse, to ask, “What kind of things do you write? If you’re a writer.” Her reply: “I don’t suppose you think I’ve been lying. I would have come up with something better if I had been. I’m a novelist. I write books.” Felix rallies, “You make money doing that, do you?” Alice ends this line of conversation with defensive finality: “Yes, I do.” This anxious, thwarted flirting perfectly captures the preoccupations of “Beautiful World, Where Are You”: class, gender, power and sex.

After the terrible date, Alice writes a long email to Eileen. Their messages crosshatch the novel with funny, often profound ruminations on things like the Bronze Age, climate change and the nature and purpose of aesthetic beauty. In these sections, particularly passages written in Eileen’s voice, Rooney sheds the stiff pelt of scene-building and attains a clarity reminiscent of Rachel Cusk’s in her “Outline” trilogy.

We find Eileen restless in Dublin. She works at her desk, goes on lunch breaks, reads the social media feeds of her ex-boyfriend and rekindles a flirtation with Simon, a man she’s known since childhood. She hates her roommates; they seem to hate her. The novel switches back to Alice and Felix, who have another awkward run-in — and then, for reasons that seem to evade even her, Alice invites Felix to Italy for a work trip. They become intimate. They have sex. Things get complicated. They stop speaking. Another email to Eileen, who is again sleeping with Simon and dealing with her sister’s impending wedding. The novel spans a year or so as these four people fall in and out of love and try to figure out what it means to act with agency.

There is an argument to be made that “Beautiful World, Where Are You” is the kind of plotless un-novel we’re growing accustomed to. The characters banter about the uselessness of modern structures and our lack of faith in overriding narrative. While the techniques of modernism and postmodernism have been borrowed, assembled and arranged like items selected from an Ikea catalog, the contemporary un-novel has none of modernism’s or postmodernism’s desperate crisis of faith. That is, “Beautiful World, Where Are You” is carefully formless and its characters are fluent in our lingua franca of systemic collapse, that neoliberal patter of learned helplessness in the face of larger capital and labor systems.

Alice summarizes it neatly when she says of contemporary novelists: “Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism — when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in The New York Times?” I laughed at this line, and underlined it. I wrote “too true bestie” in the margins. Later, she says, “The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful.”