Sex and Friendship at the End of Times in 'Beautiful World, Where Are You'
“Do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?” wonders Eileen, a character in Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You. Eileen’s lofty question effectively crystallizes the novel’s blueprint in miniature. In Beautiful World, a soaring new outing from a global phenom, Rooney hammers out the problems and promises of contemporary novels and contemporary life—all while reminding us of her distinctive style’s disarming intimacies.
Like Conversations With Friends, Rooney’s acclaimed debut novel, Beautiful World centers around a quartet of intertwined lives. At the novel’s beating heart are two long-distance best friends: Alice Kelleher, a wealthy wunderkind novelist who has moved to the Irish countryside following a psychiatric breakdown, and Eileen Lydon, a discontented editor at a Dublin literary magazine. Cast opposite these women are their paramours: Felix, a local warehouse worker with whom Alice begins a noncommittal romance, and Simon, Eileen’s on-again, off-again friend from childhood, a handsome and devout parliamentary advisor. As one has come to expect from Rooney, their trysts, yearnings, and miscommunications form the plot’s thin architecture. Some literary critics have taken aim at Rooney for her trademark structure, dismissing her stories of making up and breaking up as skimpy on plot; through Eileen, Rooney fires back. “There is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call ‘breaking up or staying together’ (!),” Eileen argues, “because at the end of our lives, when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about.” But don't mistake Beautiful World for a defensive crouch; this is Rooney stepping into herself as a fully-formed artist, ready to defend the validity and originality of her methods.
Get unlimited access to all Esquire's books coverage with Esquire Select.
Where Conversations With Friends and Normal People captured the rocky transition from adolescence to young adulthood, Beautiful World entertains the questions of purpose, meaning, and fulfillment that torment us in our late twenties, all of it tempered by the political and environmental collapse this generation stands to inherit. Is it ethical to have children in a ravaged world? Is happiness attainable when the doomsday clock is ticking down? Rooney’s disaffected dreamers seem already to know the answers to these bleak questions. "I think of the 20th century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong,” Eileen muses. “Aren't we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us."
Beautiful World’s real heft is in the emails Alice and Eileen exchange: lively, peripatetic missives about everything from faith to fame to late Bronze Age civilizations. In these fervent messages, which consume the bulk of the book, the enduring question of the novel’s title (a line of Friedrich Schiller verse) comes into view. Have we forsaken a better, more beautiful world, full of meaning and beauty? Or can we still grasp it from where it hides, somewhere beyond the veil of modern life? “The instinct for beauty lives on,” Alice insists, but where can we find it?
Among Alice and Eileen’s very best exchanges are their assessments of fiction’s worth in this grim historical moment. Alice takes aim what she considers the uselessness of novels in a burning world, and at the cogs in a soulless publishing machine who write them: “They open up the old MacBook to write a beautifully observed little novel about ‘real life.’ I don’t say this lightly: it makes me want to be sick.” Through Alice, whose musings verge on autofiction, Rooney thrashes out her anxieties about precocious literary success. Hailed as the Great Millennial Novelist, Rooney evidently wears the mantle uncomfortably. “What is the relationship of the famous author to their famous books?” Alice wonders in a discursive email to Eileen. “What do the books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralizing specificity?” Rooney’s own sense of anxiety about celebrity's corrosive influence on the self creeps in as Alice goes on: “I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me. Confronting this fact makes me feel I am already dead.”
Beautiful World combines the intricacies of Rooney’s lightning-rod style, like her deep well of sympathy for her characters and her precise economy of language, with a growing maturity. This is a more spiritual book than her previous novels—one that holds more wisdom, digs deeper into self-reflection, and lives more fully in its questions. It’s also Rooney’s rousing defense of her methods, her obsessions, and why we still need stories of “breaking up and staying together,” even and perhaps especially now. “Here I am writing another email about sex and friendship,” Alice writes. “What else is there to live for?”
You Might Also Like