Beautiful world, where are you — Sally Rooney
“So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship.” If we changed “another email” for “another novel” we would have Sally Rooney talking about her new book. Although maybe “another novel” is too generic of a term to describe a book such as this, so full of compelling reflections. Beautiful world, where are you is the third novel by the young Irish writer, who at 30 years of age has achieved a level of fame not often seen in the world of literature. The expectation for her new novel was so high that advanced copies were being sold for hundreds of dollars before its publication. Sally Rooney is, perhaps to her chagrin, a true literary phenomenon.
Her first two novels Conversations with friends (2017) and Normal people (2018) were a smashing success, and both have now TV adaptations (the first one hasn’t been released yet). In Conversations with friends, we met a foursome who becomes a sort of love square. In Normal people, a couple going from adolescence to early adulthood, crossing the line between friendship and romance again and again. Now, in her third novel, we have four characters as protagonists once again, although we mainly focus on the friendship between Alice and Eileen, who spend the majority of the book sending emails back and forth in which they discuss their love lives and a myriad of existential questions.
Alice is a writer who has achieved immense success at a very young age, which has provided her, on top of fame and money, a nervous breakdown from which she is recovering. When we meet her, she is on a date with Felix, a guy who is both obnoxious and insightful, and can be difficult to like. Eileen, on the other hand, is unhappily working as an editor at a small literary magazine and we meet her right after a big breakup which has left her without a purpose and without a home. She seeks comfort in Simon, who she has known since they were kids. An attractive, intelligent, and charming guy, although not very expressive, who is sometimes a friend and sometimes a little more.
Plot is not a priority for Sally Rooney, it is pretty much non-existent in her books. Instead, the focus is on the characters, whom I usually don’t find very believable, but always have fascinating conversations. They tend to be self-centered but also self-deprecating, aware of their privileges and irrelevance. It is precisely that tone in which Alice and Eileen discuss the limitations of capitalism, the rise of right-wing politics, the irrelevance of art, the inevitability of global warming and much more, while also discussing that which occupies their minds a whole lot more: family, friendship, love and sex.
Perhaps there lies part of the reason for the author’s success, in the fact that her characters are very much like her readers and like herself, I guess. They are young, middle-class, interested in current issues without being the immediate victims, with more freedom than their parents and grandparents but also more pressure to feel worthy of such freedom, divided by the desire for more traditional paths such as marriage and children and the possibility of finding happiness in other ways, both marveled and overwhelmed by technology. Sally Rooney is a writer of the here and now, who manages to articulate the distress of a particular segment of the youth of our time, without forgetting that behind it all, there is always something that we all care about more: ourselves.
This review was originally published in Spanish at Cuaderno Reciclado.
