Beautiful World Where Are You
Author: Sally Rooney
Published by: Faber & Faber
Pages: 338
Format: Paperback
My Rating: ★★
Published by: Faber & Faber
Pages: 338
Format: Paperback
My Rating: ★★
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in.
Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in.
Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
My thoughts:
Beautiful World, Where Are You builds on the conventions of Rooney’s prior work, exploring themes of millennial romance, female friendship, post-2008 economic struggles, class differences, and the existential unease of how a (white middle-class) person should be.
Rooney’s novel is centred on the romantic entanglements of two best friends, Alice and her old university friend, Eileen, both turning thirty. Alice is a novelist with one successful book under her belt, but she’s also recently had a nervous breakdown that landed her in a psychiatric facility for a short time. Burnt out after her time in New York, Alice feels she “only had two good ideas.”
Eileen is beautiful and works as an assistant at a literary magazine. Alice is busy pursuing Felix, a working-class man she has recently met on Tinder. While Eileen is pursuing her old crush, a handsome family friend named Simon.
Rooney is now three novels deep in what appears to be a project to update the Austen-style marriage plot for the 21st century. Her stories don’t focus on the actual legal institution of marriage, but rather the ‘love match’ that was Austen’s staple. I think it’s part of Rooney’s enigma that she manages to be incredibly popular for doing something so seemingly unfashionable.
For such stories to work, you need exemplary characterisation. As a reader, you want to be invested in the outcome and for that the characters must seem real. It’s fine for them to be unlikeable; it’s a problem when they are unconvincing and uninteresting, and that was my main issue with Beautiful World Where Are You.
I did not care about these characters at all. And that's not because I think they are unsympathetic people, but the phase of life and the way that they are written about by Rooney was not interesting or engaging to me whatsoever. I had no patience for their struggles and generally didn't find them very likeable. While this is also true of characters in other Rooney novels, in those instances I felt the writing was more immersive and the plots themselves were more engaging.
For me, the best parts of the book were the emails and friendship between Alice and Eileen. I really enjoyed learning about them through the way they write to one another. This also allowed Rooney to develop some deeper themes and ponder them in almost essay form, as the emails at times can read like short essays.
I know many readers loved this, I just didn't really connect with it. It's not that I hated it, it's more that I was indifferent, to the characters of the successful writer, Alice, her best friend, Eileen, warehouse packer, Felix and Simon, the relationships and interactions with each other. To me, they came across as medicated, laboured and labouring, masquerading as real people, but with little depth.
The novel poses an interesting overarching question of whether it’s okay to focus on friendships and relationships when the world is collapsing, however, I wish that the characters in this novel were better developed to allow for a deeper exploration of that question. I was tempted on several occasions to give up reading, and I also found the ending quite disappointing.
The book simply lacked charm and authenticity, as did literally everyone in it. I had such high hopes for this novel, but it ended up being a long slog that went nowhere.
Overall reaction:
Beautiful World, Where Are You builds on the conventions of Rooney’s prior work, exploring themes of millennial romance, female friendship, post-2008 economic struggles, class differences, and the existential unease of how a (white middle-class) person should be.
Rooney’s novel is centred on the romantic entanglements of two best friends, Alice and her old university friend, Eileen, both turning thirty. Alice is a novelist with one successful book under her belt, but she’s also recently had a nervous breakdown that landed her in a psychiatric facility for a short time. Burnt out after her time in New York, Alice feels she “only had two good ideas.”
Eileen is beautiful and works as an assistant at a literary magazine. Alice is busy pursuing Felix, a working-class man she has recently met on Tinder. While Eileen is pursuing her old crush, a handsome family friend named Simon.
Rooney is now three novels deep in what appears to be a project to update the Austen-style marriage plot for the 21st century. Her stories don’t focus on the actual legal institution of marriage, but rather the ‘love match’ that was Austen’s staple. I think it’s part of Rooney’s enigma that she manages to be incredibly popular for doing something so seemingly unfashionable.
For such stories to work, you need exemplary characterisation. As a reader, you want to be invested in the outcome and for that the characters must seem real. It’s fine for them to be unlikeable; it’s a problem when they are unconvincing and uninteresting, and that was my main issue with Beautiful World Where Are You.
I did not care about these characters at all. And that's not because I think they are unsympathetic people, but the phase of life and the way that they are written about by Rooney was not interesting or engaging to me whatsoever. I had no patience for their struggles and generally didn't find them very likeable. While this is also true of characters in other Rooney novels, in those instances I felt the writing was more immersive and the plots themselves were more engaging.
For me, the best parts of the book were the emails and friendship between Alice and Eileen. I really enjoyed learning about them through the way they write to one another. This also allowed Rooney to develop some deeper themes and ponder them in almost essay form, as the emails at times can read like short essays.
I know many readers loved this, I just didn't really connect with it. It's not that I hated it, it's more that I was indifferent, to the characters of the successful writer, Alice, her best friend, Eileen, warehouse packer, Felix and Simon, the relationships and interactions with each other. To me, they came across as medicated, laboured and labouring, masquerading as real people, but with little depth.
The novel poses an interesting overarching question of whether it’s okay to focus on friendships and relationships when the world is collapsing, however, I wish that the characters in this novel were better developed to allow for a deeper exploration of that question. I was tempted on several occasions to give up reading, and I also found the ending quite disappointing.
The book simply lacked charm and authenticity, as did literally everyone in it. I had such high hopes for this novel, but it ended up being a long slog that went nowhere.
Overall reaction: