From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject Beautiful World, Where Are You
Date November 11, 2021 1:00 AM
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[Rooney examines meaning, art, friendship, and the price of fame
through the story of two couples.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU  
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Anne Enright
September 2, 2021
The Guardian
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_ Rooney examines meaning, art, friendship, and the price of fame
through the story of two couples. _

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_Beautiful World, Where Are You_
A Novel
Sally Rooney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374602604

There has been such a lot of noise around Sally Rooney’s work, such
an amount of fervour and possibly manufactured division. “The cult
of Sally Rooney [[link removed]],”
says one headline. “Why do so many people hate Sally Rooney?” asks
another. The discussion cannot be about the quality of her sentences,
which are impeccable, or about her tone, which is thoughtful, often
sweet-minded and always rigorous. This is prose you either get or
don’t get; for some it is incisive, for others banal. Which makes me
wonder if it is so clean, it reflects the readers’ prejudices right
back at them.

Rooney is certainly interested in accuracy: her first two novels
managed to be sexually exact without being smutty, and this is an
interesting trick. In its repudiation of shame, the style represents
an advance of some kind, and it may be this autonomy that irritates
those notional critics who are notionally male and notionally
misogynistic. Also – and this really does annoy some people –
Rooney writes about love.

If “romance” is one key insult here, “millennial” is another.
The divergence of opinion is styled, accurately or not, as
generational, and the conversation is partly about what is or is not
to be taken seriously. In her first two books, Rooney wrote
scrupulously about encounters that are usually seen as impermanent,
and therefore a little silly: an affair and first love. The
intensities of experience, so coolly described, are larger than is
socially useful, as society used to be constructed. For the generation
represented in these books, however, those constructions no longer
hold – the young are reaping the ruin their ancestors sowed. (Jane
Austen [[link removed]]’s heroines
were not troubled by apocalypse; perhaps this is why they did not
pause, in love, to abhor the slave trade.)

“Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?”
In Rooney’s third novel, _Beautiful World, Where Are You_, Alice and
Eileen are best friends, about to turn 30, who are agreed that human
civilisation is facing collapse, beauty is dead, art is commodified
and the novel irrelevant as a form. These smart Irish Marxists are
best friends from college, and they have lives that are, in very
different ways, a bit like Rooney’s own. Alice is an unfeasibly
successful young writer and Eileen works for a literary magazine,
earning 20 grand a year. The book interleaves their separate love
stories with the long emails they send each other, in which they have
much to discuss and share.

“We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness,”
says Alice, given that “there is no chance for the planet, and no
chance for us.” And though Eileen agrees, she finds solace in the
ordinary. “Maybe we are just born to love and worry about the people
we know,” she replies. “In fact it’s the very reason I root for
us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other.” Alice
will be stupid about Felix, a possibly dodgy guy she meets on Tinder,
and Eileen will be incredibly stupid about Simon, the friend of her
youth, who is gorgeous, unapproachably moral and, of all things, a
Catholic.

Fans of Rooney’s previous work will relish the ache and uncertainty
of her characters’ coming of age, her way with emotional difficulty
and her brilliance in showing the barriers we put between ourselves
and the love of others. The last third of _Beautiful World, Where Are
You_, when the four characters meet and connect, is a tour de force.
The dialogue never falters, and the prose burns up the page. It takes
some time to get these people in the same room, however, and that
movement towards intimacy is purposely delayed by Rooney’s
descriptive prose, which heats up slowly.

We start the novel knowing nothing – even the writer seems to know
nothing – about these human beings. Actions are described in
microscopic detail, expressions are hard to read. People don’t go
online, they “tap the icon of a social media app” and their
screens take several sentences to load. One of the bravura sections in
the first part of the book describes, with great flattening effect,
Alice’s day promoting her book (or “being famous”) in Rome while
her date, Felix, wanders the city with his phone. One person’s life,
another person’s life; neither is valued, by these sentences, more
than the other. Slowly, this sense of distance becomes erotically
charged; people talk quietly over the phone, screens are blankly full
of possibility, words thrill.

“For no apparent reason, he switched off his indicator light and
continued driving straight” – it’s a bit like reading late
DeLillo [[link removed]], until the
characters have sex, at which point it is like reading Rooney at her
coolest, with her distinctive choreography of the gaze, and of the
breath, and a mighty precision about what-goes-where.

After these opaque sexual interactions, the emails between Alice and
Eileen come in a rush of loquacity. The women write to each other
about societal collapse, and how their lives of easy consumption are
made possible by the misery of millions. They are also interested in
personal goodness; in Jesus, as a written character; in the
relationship between beauty and sympathy; in the uses of fiction and
the emptiness of fame. Alice is questing and disillusioned, Eileen
more hopeful and fretful both. Their response to existential threat is
not to talk of nihilism, but of empathy, morality and love.

Both women have suffered a loss of meaning. Eileen, recovering from a
breakup, has long stopped writing moments down in her journal: “the
world just came to me flat, like some catalogue of information”.
Alice, who landed an enormous book deal at the age of 25, has just
emerged from psychiatric care. Fame has involved, for her, a radical
loss of personhood. She has become something she wanted to be and now
energetically despises; finding versions of herself online makes her
feel she is already dead.

But the women continue to figure things out, and their new sexual
relationships kindle into connection. Recently, Eileen has felt it
again: “the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light
radiating softly from behind the visible world”. Alice remembers how
writing a novel made her feel “like God had put his hand on my head
and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt … desire
to bring something into being that had never existed before”.

After this, there are no more emails and the prose comes alight. When
people gather at a family wedding, one mind gives way to another mind,
histories unfold, similes happen – metaphors, even! The last run of
the novel is all generosity; personal details simply emerge, real
conversations are held, insights abound. The reader will meet all this
with a whoop of recognition, though it is possible that some will
wonder why it took so long.

How do you follow two brilliantly acclaimed novels? Rooney has solved
the problem of success by writing about the problem of success. It is
never clear how we are to relate to Alice, the writer, who feels
separated from her origins by “a gulf of sophistication”. She can
be chilly and intimidating, while her indifference to her finances can
only be a provocation to the people who love her, and who haven’t
got tuppence to their name. Alice hates “the system of literary
production”, which tells writers they are special and removes them
from ordinary life. As far as she is concerned, novels don’t matter
a damn in the general scheme of things, and her reader (she only
mentions one) is online and weird. I found myself wishing that Eileen
would push back more strongly, but the friends’ shared world view
makes it hard to get a proper dialectic going here. Meanwhile, “They
never tire of giving me awards, do they?” Alice writes, and I, for
one, start to think that Rooney is yanking our chain. When a fictional
writer opines that writers’ opinions should not matter, the real
writer is either having her cake and eating it, or enacting the
paradoxes her character so derides.

The exposure of fame, especially sudden fame like Rooney’s, is
deeply shocking. Like any trauma, it empties our lives of meaning, at
least for a while. Afterwards, there is always the hope that a writer
can return to the difficulty and pleasure of the work – that the
world has not robbed them of the very thing we celebrate them for. It
is wonderful to see such a return happen in front of you on the page.
Alice’s conclusions are essentially religious. For the reader,
caring for a fictional character is a way of practising the kind of
“disinterested love to which Jesus calls us”. For the writer, a
novel is a blessing that can not be refused. We must all be delighted
that she, and her creator, have found a way through.

 

Anne Enright is an Irish author. Her most recent novel is _Actress
_(W.W. Norton, 2020).

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