Sally Rooney is a divisive figure. It’s easy to put down her work as self-involved millennial bullshit. It’s equally easy to paint her detractors as oblivious neoliths. Still, I feel that the most common criticism levelled at her work is also precisely the point.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is about Alice and Eileen, two thirty-ish university friends who lead very different lives. Alice is a successful novelist; she has published two books and travels the world doing interviews. Eileen, intelligent and once promising, works a dead-end job at a little-read literary magazine, making 20k per year. They are friends and send each other long emails, but invitations for visits are declined, postponed or fobbed off indefinitely. There is also Simon, Eileen’s sole childhood friend and her occasional lover. Simon is a good person and, somewhat incongruously in Rooney’s world, a practising Catholic. And there is Felix, Alice’s tinder date, a somewhat enigmatic figure who works at a local warehouse.
I loved Normal People. I liked Intermezzo. I think I liked this book, too. It’s hard not to think of the two main characters as Rooney’s alter egos: the one she is and the one she might have become. That makes Alice’s excoriations of contemporary literature and the life of a successful author a tad awkward to read. I don’t know if it’s meant to be cynical, or whether Alice (and Rooney) genuinely mourns the loss of her personhood. The emails she and Eileen exchange in which they agree on the fact that civilisation is coming to an end reads like they are, well, written by the sort of people that Rooney’s detractors hate.
Other than that, it’s Rooney’s usual fare (and I say that with a lot of love): relationships are complicated vessels that have to be navigated through choppy waters. Eileen and Simon clearly want to be together and neither of them seems to understand what’s stopping them. Felix and Alice are still in that early, somewhat awkward stage where they’re still trying to get a feel for each other, to see whether they like each other just enough. There is a lot of sex in this book: good sex, bad sex, mediocre sex. It’s rather graphic but also surprisingly touching and mundane. The entire thing ambles about at a leisurely pace, until the explosive final chapters. The descriptions are sometimes brief, sometimes lumbering, but always brilliantly accurate, from the colours of a beach towel to the selection of ready-made meals in supermarkets. I also liked that this novel has an actual, honest to God resolution, something that moves the characters forward. At the end, we get a feeling that both Alice and Eileen have gotten over – well, something. Themselves, possibly. People finally figure things out. The last chapters take place during the pandemic; a throwback I see occasionally in novels that makes me think ‘oh yeah, that happened’, but if anything it acts as a sort of timestamp rather than an actual plot point.
I can see why people would dislike this book in particular, or Rooney’s work in general. It’s easy to think of these characters as hopelessly self-involved; they make life more difficult for themselves than it has to be, and that can be frustrating. It rings true, however; people frequently do make their lives harder than they need to be. The millennial generation in particular is one that is oft-scorned and put away as lazy and unambitious, conceited and obsessive, and for better or worse, Rooney’s is a voice that lends credence to this group. Perhaps that’s why I, as a member of the same generation, like her books so much.