Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life? I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. We can wait, if you like, to ascend to some higher plane of being, at which point we'll start directing all our mental and material resources toward existential questions and thinking nothing of our own families, friends, lovers, and so on. But we'll be waiting, in my opinion, a long time, and in fact we'll die first.

Here is a sentence from Sally Rooney's novel Beautiful World, Where Are You: "When the burgers arrived, they tasted normal." When I lay my head down to sleep at night, this sentence haunts me. When I wake up in the morning, it's running through my mind. When the burgers arrived, they tasted normal. When the burgers arrived, how did they taste? Well, they tasted normal. I have begun to fear that when I am old and in the grips of dementia and all my capacity for speech has gone these will be the only words left to me: When the burgers arrived, they tasted normal.

This sentence--so purposeful, nearly aggressive, in its attempt at capturing the tedious detail of everyday living--is emblematic of the novel's style. Rooney's breakthrough novel was called Normal People, a title which might work as well here, given the intense normality of three of the four main characters: Eileen, an aimless thirty-year old who works in publishing in Dublin; Simon, her childhood friend and new lover; Felix, a warehouse worker living on the Irish coast. The fourth, Alice, is a little less novel, being a newly famous novelist (and obvious Rooney stand-in), but who has come to hate the pretensions of literary life. She says of her fellow novelists, dismissively: "And then they go away and write their sensitive novels about 'ordinary life.' The truth is they know nothing about ordinary life. Most of them haven't so much as glanced up against the real world in decades." For Rooney, the attempt to capture "ordinary life" entails describing in plain language what the ordinary characters are doing ordinarily: taking clingfilm off of bowls and microwaving food; scrolling through the apps and typing names of their exes into searchbars; waiting for their burgers to arrive, which then taste normal.

Is there a beauty in the world that is accessible to us, despite the ordinary stuff that seems to make up our lives? This is the novel's big theme, and it's one of the questions that Alice and Eileen take up in their emails to each other, which break up the novel's third person narration. I was grateful for these sections, which keep the novel from becoming unforgivably tedious, and show that Rooney has, in fact, a pretty decent ear for colloquial speech. The question of beauty is actually the least interesting or meaningful of those the old friends take up, which include the nature of sex and the modern novel and whether art is possible when the world is collapsing. But the epistolary structure makes it so that Rooney doesn't have to commit to any of these ideas, which are sort of incomplete and half-baked, as they would be, in the context of two friends just shooting the shit.

One of the biggest problems of this novel for me was the point of view. Rooney has no compunction about milking the third person narrator's omniscience, as in an early section where we are treated to an enormous information dump about the history between Eileen and Simon, but in other places the narrator becomes too coy to tell us what anyone is thinking or feeling, retreating into a strange half-position, like this:

For a few seconds then he held the phone out at arm's length, headphones dangling loose over the side of the bridge, and it was not clear from this gesture whether he was trying to see the existing image better, getting an ew angle in order to take a new photograph, or simply thinking about letting the device slip soundless out of his hand and into the river.

This was not clear to whom, exactly? Felix makes a cryptic gesture with his phone, but who exactly is providing the various interpretations as to what it is he's doing? Alice, talking to Felix, "seemed to have recognised a kind of challenge or even repudiation in his tone, and rather than cowing her, it was as though it hardened her resolve." She seemed to have done this? Seem means literally to be seen; what does it "seem" like when one recognizes a challenge or even repudiation in someone else's tone? This is probably not all that tricky for someone who doesn't teach about point of view for a living, but my god, it drove me absolutely bonkers. The problem is that it wants to have things both ways: to tell us what's going on in Alice's head and show us also that people are cryptic and difficult to figure out. But it's an unwalkable line; you just can't do both. You can make your characters cryptic or you can make their emotions clear.

By now I guess it's clear that I had a lot of frustrations with this novel. I wanted to see what the fuss is about, and I've got to say, Beautiful World, Where Are You is almost exactly what I expected it to be. But I didn't not enjoy it. For all its tedium, Rooney manages to make the central foursome compelling: aimless Eileen, stalwart Simon, chaotic Felix, neurotic Alice. Alice spends a lot of time complaining about her sudden literary fame in a way that might have been lighthearted ironizing about Rooney's own life, but which I suspect is actually a gauche defensiveness. (She complains, for instance, about the parasocial relationship her fans have with her on twitter--barf-o, Sally.) Yet she, like Eileen, Simon, and Felix, has a richness and complexity.

In the end, I think what made Beautiful World, Where Are You Not My Kind of Thing is not the tedious style, or the bad point of view, or the normal-tasting burgers, but the television-ness of it all: it reads exactly like a treatment for another limited Hulu series. Like some television shows, Beautiful World just believes that the will-they-won't-they drama of young hetero sex-havers is the most interesting thing in the world. No thanks.