Highly-Anticipated Book Review: "Beautiful World, Where Are You" by Sally Rooney

“On a Bench in the Bois de Boulogne” by Berthe Morisot. In Beautiful World, Where Are You, Alice writes about viewing this painting in the Musée d’Orsay and I think perhaps we’re meant to think that she sees herself and Eileen in these two girls.

I thought the description of Sally Rooney’s new novel sounded like self-parody, I thought I was immune to all the marketing hype, and then I impulsively picked up a copy of it from my library’s “Lucky Day” table and have decided to make it my personality for the rest of 2021?

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

By my count, I have read about twenty novels since the pandemic hit. And some of them were excellent, and many of them were entertaining, and I suppose that each one, in its own way, has helped me get through it. But Beautiful World, Where Are You is the first book in all this time that has truly made me feel less alone.

Which is really astounding, when you consider that this novel is focused on romance and friendship—and has a lot of sex scenes in it. How in the world did it comfort me, rather than making me all-too-aware of my pandemic singlehood and loneliness? Well, it reassured me that I’m not the only person who has ever felt this way. I’m not the only millennial who has big overweening thoughts about the state of the collapsing world, while also being desperate to get my little bourgeois life in order! There are other people like me out there, trying to connect, Facebook-stalking their exes, drinking wine at house parties, dramatizing their post-college love lives and trying out their latest intellectual theories in emails to friends.

Let me back up: this isn’t my first Sally Rooney. I read Normal People about a year ago (yes, during the pandemic) and generally found it admirable, but I didn’t go crazy for it, maybe because I’ve never had an on-again off-again, Connell-and-Marianne-type relationship. If anything, I thought that Connell was a more astutely drawn and relatable character than Marianne, which surprised me because it’s sort of unusual to find a young female author who’s better at writing male characters. However, the central figures of Beautiful World are both female, and they both rang very true to me. So maybe my thesis, and that of many literary critics, still holds true: the people who like Rooney’s novels the most are the people who relate to them the most. And I get the sense that I am supposed to feel vaguely ashamed about that, but in an atomized world where any kind of connection and comfort is precious, can’t I just have this one thing?

While reading Beautiful World, I tweeted that I thought I was developing a parasocial relationship with Sally Rooney, and upon further reflection, I think that the structure of this novel encourages that. It is easy to assume that Alice, the wildly successful young Irish novelist with a complicated relationship to her newfound fame, is a Rooney self-portrait. (Has anyone else pointed out that “Alice” is kind of a phonic anagram of “Sally”?) And it is also easy, if you are a bookish young woman who’s been through a bad breakup or two, to relate to the character of Alice’s friend Eileen. And because the core of the novel is the two women’s relationship, including the long emails they write back and forth to one another, the lines between fiction and reality sort of blur, and you can find yourself wondering if this is what it’s actually like to be Rooney’s best friend from college.

And how glowing Alice’s emails are, how effusive in their praise of Eileen! “Friend of my heart! […] One doesn’t think of you as a corporeal being really, but as a beam of pure intellect.” OK, there’s probably a hint of mockery here—these phrases echo the pretentious cadences of Bougie London Literary Woman. Rooney is sly; Rooney is clever. I mean, I’ve spent one-and-a-half paragraphs discussing how this novel made me wish I was her friend, even as, in its final pages, Alice fiercely decries that aspect of literary fame: “They really cannot tell the difference between someone they have heard of, and someone they personally know. And they believe that the feelings they have about this person they imagine me to be—intimacy, resentment, hatred, pity—are as real as the feelings they have about their own friends.”

(Speaking of literary critics, and literary culture, and Rooney’s cleverness: absolutely nothing irritates me more than the guy I saw on Twitter saying something like “Yes, this novel appears to have moments of irony, but does Rooney know they’re ironic?” People always say this sort of thing when a young woman writes something that operates on more than one level—they doubt that she knows what she’s doing, and it pisses me off.)

I have more thoughts, but this review is getting long enough. I want to talk about the parallels between this novel and Fleabag: a messy, quasi-bohemian young woman (who has a more poised, conventional older sister) falls in love with a faithful Catholic man and begs him to tell her what to do—she gets horny for his sincerity and conviction. (Fleabag: “I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that’s why people want someone like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it.” Eileen: “I think I enjoy being bossed around by you. A part of me is just like, yes, please, tell me what to do with my life.”) I want to ask why this trope resonates so much with millennial white women. I want to ask my fellow playwrights if they see any link between Rooney’s art and ours: in the narrative chapters of the novel, she deliberately doesn’t tell you what the characters are thinking and feeling, so it’s kind of like watching a play. I want to talk about it at a house party over glasses of wine. I want to have conversations with friends. I want us to reassure one another that we are normal people. I want us to muddle through it all, to dwell in the beautiful world.