Reading Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, felt like the culmination of the many years of hype and interest surrounding her work, it’s the rare novel that builds upon the themes of the writer’s previous work in all of the best ways. The novel centers on Alice Kelleher, a successful Irish novelist who has escaped the bustle of Dublin and all-consuming literary fame to a small coastal town, where she meets Felix, a local factory worker whom she connects with on Tinder. Alice and Felix begin a strange sort of companionship and romance, they travel to Rome together after only meeting a couple of times, but the massive financial divide between them is constantly present and getting in the way of true intimacy. Throughout the novel, Alice maintains an email correspondence with her college friend Eileen Lydon, an editorial assistant at a prestigious literary journal, who has reconnected with her childhood neighbor Simon, a companion whom she fears losing due to her strong romantic attraction to. Simon and Eileen also begin a strange sort of romance, and when their flirting becomes more serious, they need to decide where to take their relationship.
The novel orbits these four characters in such mesmerizing ways, dipping in and out of their romances and friendships with a fascinating clarity. As is her signature, Rooney’s dialogue is just about perfect, and the companionship between these two whip-smart women who often struggle with real intimacy and romance is just so impressive to behold. All of the relationships in the novel are touched by questions of sex, politics, and privilege, and each character must grapple with the way they relate to the people around them. The romantic relationships progress in a very pared down style, with sparse conversations and scenes that have so much going on under the surface. As the characters struggle with self-sabotage especially relating to sex and love, there is this encouraging thread of connection constantly throughout the novel. The way these four characters relate to each other forms the magnetic core of the novel, it is almost impossible not to get swept up in the romances and friendships and just root for the characters’ happiness, one of the unique joys of reading fiction in my opinion (which Rooney also points to in a really fascinating meditation on Christianity, fiction, and selfless love in one of the email passages).
The politics of Rooney’s novels—i.e. questions of class divide, labor, and Marxism—have been central to her critics’ attacks on her work. Many call her characters toothless, point out that none of them are actually revolutionaries or activists, just comfortable white people noticing their privilege. Her novels can be lumped into a category, both stylistically and thematically, with other slick novels by women like Jenny Offill, Rachel Cusk, Ali Smith, Maggie Nelson, or even Ottessa Moshfegh, who write about women feeling a general malaise in the face of societal ills like climate change and the global wealth gap. These novels, written in a sort of fragmented and detached form, can feel indulgent and numbing. Many critics complain that Rooney is asking us, like these other writers, to congratulate her characters just for realizing that there are problems in the world, without taking any risks or action to solve them. These arguments are certainly not without merit, and are crucial points to understand for any reader trying to actually engage with the work, as Rooney certainly has them in mind in this novel, especially in the character of Alice. In one of her emails, Alice complains 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?”
Another part of the backlash against Rooney’s success has been from the more entrenched white male literary types, who deem her writing on sex and relationships to be frivolous. I think what angers the traditional literary scene most about Sally Rooney is that she speaks to an audience that they aren’t a part of. Her novels have generated a legion of young fans, many young women, who aren’t used to writers speaking directly to them. It is rare for a piece of literary fiction to so smartly take on the questions of young adulthood: the confusion, the anger, the searching for one’s adult self, and treat those like serious central questions in a novel. Beautiful World, Where Are You, even more than Rooney’s other novels, speaks to the blurred lines between the personal and the political that emerge in young adulthood, when it feels like one’s central focus is to craft a self according to one’s values and interests, informed by the world around you. The email correspondence between Alice and Eileen was a really strong literary device that allowed Rooney to pose central questions of love, art, literature, and friendship within the context of an intimate friendship between two young women who are constantly questioning their place in the world and looking for worthwhile experiences. The emails really stood out to me as a commentary on self-presentation and the personhood that we craft out of exchanges of art and ideas with loved ones, and they read as such an earnest examination of the questions plaguing those in early adulthood.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is by far Rooney’s most ambitious effort to date, but also in a way her most comforting and sweet. The novel delights in the simple joys of friendship and love with a sort of unabashed spirit that feels rare. In a fascinating metatextual passage, Alice complains to Eileen that her work is morally worthless because it engages in the “trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse”, to which Eileen responds that novels about relationships signify that “we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive — because we are stupid about each other.” And while this novel is ultimately not making any major waves in terms of politics and can sometimes feel like a ‘wealthy white woman sighing at the problems of the world’ type of book, I think this novel accomplishes so much in terms of forcing readers to get familiar with a lot of uncomfortable realities. Rooney is so generous with her characters, and this novel is a beautiful and complicated meditation on human connection, desire, and friendship, giving its readers something solid to hold onto amidst the storm.
Further Reading: Rooney’s first two novels: Conversations with Friends and Normal People are also strong achievements in young adult fiction. If you like her writing style, check out anything by Jenny Offill, Sheila Heti, Elif Batuman, Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, or Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan.