Sally Rooney's Beautiful World

The other day, I saw a woman on TikTok comment that the reason she didn’t like Sally Rooney’s novels was because she didn’t see, in the characters, a desire to be morally better or to make better choices. We are all free to have any opinion on a book and choose to read that which we feel we would enjoy the most or would satisfy our literary tastes best, but making characters strive to be “good” people is rarely the point of any book. As Ottessa Moshfegh, author of the popular My Year of Rest and Relaxation points out, “I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an “afternoon special” or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. A novel is not BuzzFeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let’s get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason… We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?”

Moshfegh’s characters tend to fall into the grotesque, warped actions that make readers want to turn their backs and walk briskly away from the scene. Her characters, while largely not people you’d necessarily want to befriend, challenge readers to better understand themselves and their relationships. Rooney’s are no different. She routinely ponders pettiness and jealousy in friendships and relationships, self-hatred, mental illness, loneliness, love, the workforce, the end of the world. None of these are easy, morally clear points that tie up in neat bows. The exploration of these topics won’t see an end in the near future, and readers’ ideas about them will no doubt live in contention with one another.

Readers connect with Rooney so widely precisely because she is posing these questions and encouraging readers to examine their own humanity, their mortality, what they are presently contributing to the world and what they have the potential to bring.

It’s no surprise that this debate wound up again upon the release of Beautiful World, Where Are You. Rooney’s books and characters often get dismissed as whining, millennial, only “posing,” without a voice. However, I think her often clinical style of writing is actually sharp, astute, and even poignant, providing clarity on difficult feelings and characters who aren’t always going to make choices the reader agrees with.

On the frequent discussion of how “unlikeable” her characters are, Rooney commented, “I believe that, while not everyone is “likeable,” everyone is loveable. Part of what motivates me as a novelist is the challenge implicit in this belief. I want to depict my characters with enough complexity, and enough depth of feeling, that a reader can find a way to love them without liking them. Or even like and love them despite everything—as I do.”

This brings me to my own personal point of connection with Rooney, particularly in Beautiful World, Where Are You. I’ve seen many a Goodreads review calling this novel a departure from her previous work, and while I agree that’s true in cosmetic ways, such as the omniscient point of view and epistolary chapters, she’s largely exploring the same themes she did in her earlier novels, albeit from a different angle. How do the ideas of love, friendship, and family evolve in your late 20s? What does it mean to confront the dreams you once had for your life with the knowledge of your current reality? And perhaps the central question, can and does a beautiful world exist, even with the pressures of capitalism, climate change, an uncertain future? She’s always brushed against these questions in her writing, if you were looking for it. This time, we as readers face these questions through Alice, Eileen, Felix, and Simon, their relationships weaving and revealing over the course of the story.

In the vein of a “beautiful world,” Rooney permeates this work with many aesthetically and sensually pleasing descriptions of nature, for example: “Dry upturned sycamore leaves scuttling like claws… Pale-yellow sky in the evening. Thomas Street draped in mist,” as well as the sensory experience of it, “The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on.” Rooney elevates the mundanity of our interactions with the Earth and imbues it with deep meaning, tethering humanity to the world we inhabit. Several artists releasing pandemic work also turned to nature to guide their creative sensibilities; it’s clear that time off allowed us to absorb nature’s small gifts, and Rooney relates those moments of vivification to share a type of meaning with us.

Early on, in an email from Alice to Eileen, Alice writes, “At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape. So a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child,’ and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or for worse… what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind?” Throughout the novel, the characters struggle to define their relationships, and their own personal relationship to those relationships. Alice ponders a question that seems to put into words a theme across Rooney’s writings; what if we just connected to others on a human level?

Ultimately, the conclusion that arrives is again reminiscent of her prior books: the idea that the people we cherish and love give life meaning, that their presence is sacred, something to hold reverently in our hands.

This idea of reverence to someone in a religious manner is twice explicitly mentioned in her books: in Normal People, Connell tells Marianne, “I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me,” and in Beautiful World, Where Are You, Simon tells Eileen, “If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn’t have made me who I am.” From characters who largely deny the existence of God (except in the case of Simon), invoking the concept of divine creation in regards to a partner is incredibly romantic, marveling that only a higher being could have brought them together.

In the vein of cherishing those in your life, Eileen writes to Alice in a remark that I believe sums up the book quite succinctly, “I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.”

For all their obvious flaws, fears, doubts, or selfishness, Rooney’s characters have always touched me because of sentiments like these. They’re unflinchingly real, and they aren’t trying to be a one to one representation of Rooney or her exact personal beliefs. They have lives of their own, and those lives are compelling, regardless of their literary significance.

Rooney’s status as the voice of a generation isn’t a label she ascribed to herself, but her apparent status as just that should indicate her ability to reach deeply into the emotions of readers, allowing them to pull out of themselves reflections of their own lives and loves.

For those that might argue Rooney’s writing is trite, only posing as novels without a voice, I direct them to this novel, which is filled to the brim with a life that is not attempting to coolly arrange millennial ennui but to wholly embrace love and connection in a world set on separating people from it.