Alice is a rich, prize-winning novelist who has had a mental breakdown and moved to a house by the sea. She met her best friend Eileen while they were both studying English at university in Dublin. Eileen works at a literary agency and has an on-off thing with Simon, who is tall, handsome and religious. Alice meets Felix on Tinder. Felix, who is small with dark hair and a nice voice, has a boring job in a warehouse. Alice takes him on a book tour and eventually goes to bed with him.
The bleak declarative style of that summary, or something like it, is Sally Rooney’s hallmark. Her writing can be so prosaically functional as to be disconcerting: in chapter 13 of Beautiful World, Where Are You we are told that “Felix found a solution for the issue with the shower unit.” What motivates such remorseless banality?
Rooney has won renown (and prizes) for her analytical detachment and spare, disinterested handling of messy relationships between men and women. As a teenager, she applied to read English and sociology at Trinity College, Dublin, but was accepted to read English alone. Perhaps it is a lasting consequence of this minor detail on her CV that she has sought to convert English literature into a branch of sociology; one reviewer has gone so far as to call her “more of a sociologist than a novelist.”
Professing herself a Marxist who does not believe in “the idea of the individual,” Rooney has said that she is attracted to investigating interpersonal dynamics. What this tends to mean in practice is that we witness her fictional people responding to one another verbally and physically from the outside and from a distance. Sometimes we don’t really see them at all. Eileen, we are told, “was funny,” but she says and does nothing to raise a laugh—making the narrator’s observation either suspicious or meaningless. Simon’s finding “everything” that she says “amusing” is similarly unsupported. All this telling without showing makes for a curiously sketchy, rootless experience, which thousands of readers clearly enjoy a great deal.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a departure from Rooney’s two earlier titles. Less downbeat than Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), the third novel (as we are told in the acknowledgements) takes its name from the opening line of Schiller’s “Die Götter Griechenlands,” or “The Gods of Greece” (1788), a poetic lament for a lost ancient realm of harmonious nature, culture and divinity. But Rooney has removed Schiller’s question mark. Towards the end of the book, that question mark returns when the narrator, who has brought her two heroines together for the first time, asks whether they were “somehow invulnerable to, untouched by, vulgarity and ugliness, glancing for a moment into something deeper, something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world?”
“Three novels could not have appeared so quickly unless they were all doing and saying pretty much the same thing”
Rooney does not elaborate but these observations suggest that beneath the surface of the novel we too might apprehend something more meaningful than the bitty, fragmented encounters and discussions that go nowhere. Alice later writes to Eileen that she feels “rightly or wrongly, that there is something underneath everything.” She defines this in secular rather than religious terms as her belief in “the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything.” This principle, put into the mouth of a novelist, is as close as Beautiful World comes to announcing a creed or moral of the story.
Rooney told one interviewer that she thought of Conversations with Friends—still her funniest and most inventive book—as “my trial novel, so it gave me a huge amount of permission to write the same thing over again.” Three novels have now been published in four years (another is apparently in the offing). Despite the loftier feel of Beautiful World, the books could not be appearing at this rate unless they were all doing and saying pretty much “the same thing.” Rooney’s fiction is openly iterative, circling back on and around itself, both within and across the three published works.
All her books dwell on what it means to be “normal.” Conversations with Friends and Normal People take place in and around Trinity College, and follow a group of combative, sensitive undergraduates falling in and out of love. In the first two novels, one member of the central couple is singled out for literary fame. All three include novelists as characters and present us with fragile, damaged young women who come from violent or hostile families. All three home in on the social and economic disparities between their characters.
Beautiful World repeats and expands on what are now familiar techniques. Conversations with Friends was, among other things, an attempt to capture what its author calls the “email voice.” In the new novel, whole chapters are filled by single long emails from one female character to the other, alternating with chapters narrated in the third person. This arrangement doesn’t work as well as the integration of shorter (and more plausible) emails and texts into Rooney’s earlier fiction, partly because the tone and style of the characters’ dreary emails in Beautiful World isn’t sufficiently differentiated from the tone and style of the narrator. One form of writing may be in the first person, another in the third, but the bland, plonky-plonk manner prevails even when describing or emanating from a notionally impassioned character. It is easy to forget who is writing which email and to whom, since Alice sounds like Eileen and Eileen sounds like Alice. (Felix just seems nasty and Simon vaguely unlikely.)
Rooney told the New Yorker in 2018 that “I feel like you can really get away with putting a lot of your opinions—if you wanted to—in a novel,” and she certainly seems to have done that here. What all the women’s emails have in common is a tendency to rehearse at length, rather than in depth, a political or historical question—identity politics, the demerits of capitalism, the Late Bronze Age, early languages, the pernicious effects of plastic—in a weird mash-up of Wikipedia and student debating societies. The habitual dependence on Wikipedia is openly acknowledged (albeit by a character rather than her author), and at university Rooney was a champion debater. In the many passages of expository prose that punctuate Beautiful World, it really shows. Alongside rehearsals of her own views, she seems to have incorporated the results of a lot of internet scrolling, so that many passages read as if they derive from a website. This is Eileen writing to Alice: “I ended up reading a lot about something called Linear B. Do you know all about this already? Basically, around the year 1900, a team of British excavators in Crete found a cache of ancient clay tablets in a terracotta bathtub. The tablets were inscribed with a syllabic script of unknown language and appeared to date from around 1400 BC. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, classical scholars and linguists tried to date the markings, known as Linear B, with no success…”
And so on. The email purports to have “condensed the story” it is telling, but it appears to be simply regurgitating information without adding anything other than a fake smudge of conjecture in the interests of plausibility. If you check the internet, you’ll find that it was in exactly 1900, not “around” that year, that the clay tablets were found in Crete.
If Rooney doesn’t really believe in individuals, it presumably doesn’t matter to her that her people are hard to distinguish from one another; indeed, that might even be the point. At one stage in Normal People, Marianne reflects that “No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt… go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.” This is hardly a Marxist point, however; especially with those words “for everything,” it sounds more like defeat. Rooney has also said that she finds herself “consistently drawn to writing about intimacy, and the way we construct one another.” What is intimacy without individuality? Pornography, maybe? (Felix, as Alice learns, likes to watch “rough anal” clips on his phone.)
“For Rooney, it doesn’t matter that her characters are hard to distinguish from one another”
All three novels include plenty of sex scenes; these are commendably unembarrassed, but reading about the female characters’ fantasies of submission to a benevolently or sadistically controlling male character is gruesome. It is at least made clear to us in Normal People why Marianne might want her boyfriends to hit her (she has been beaten and abused by her father), but Eileen’s “Princess” and “Daddy” exchanges with Simon feel all the more excruciating because we have so little sense of why either of them might want to inhabit such clichéd roles. If some aspects of Rooney’s work are cutting edge (witness all that technology), the ways in which some of her women yield dreamily to dominant men are surprisingly old hat.
The book that Beautiful World, Where Are You, the most straight-faced of Rooney’s works to date, reminded me of most was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, as well as its later spin-offs. Sue Townsend’s combination of a young person’s neurosis, naivety, intellectual ambition and frustrated hopes with ponderous reflections on the state of the world is equally central to Rooney’s fiction, only here we are not invited to consider the characters as satirical targets. Any number of Adrian’s aperçus would not look out of place in Rooney: “I don’t know why women are so mad about flowers. Personally, they leave me cold. I prefer trees”; “I couldn’t think of anything to say so I kept quiet. I still can’t think of anything to say so I am going to sleep”; “I always knew I had no small talk, and now I know I’ve got no big talk either”; “Reasons for not living: You die anyway. Life is nothing but anguish. There is too much cruelty in the world. Reasons for living: Things might get better” (The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole). Has this become the kind of thing we now take seriously?
The critic John Carey has, in a brilliant throwaway remark, described Rooney’s novels as “sort of desultory.” There is a locally absorbed and ultimately pointless quality both to her characters (who are frequently watching, missing and misunderstanding one another) and to her writing. Yet this is by no means due to a lack of authorial control. Rooney has managed her career flawlessly thus far and perfected a curiously aloof, web-saturated variety of writing that consists of browsing, pausing, describing and moving on. What is unclear is how far it takes us or what any of it means. At 48, I suspect that I am too old to get the hang of it.
