Questions of life
Literary sensation Sally Rooney is back with a deeply serious and thought-provoking new novel, in which four young adults come to grips with their place in a world with an uncertain future.
Literary sensation Sally Rooney is back with a deeply serious and thought-provoking new novel, in which four young adults come to grips with their place in a world with an uncertain future.
Shortly before Sally Rooney’s first novel was published, I had a downbeat conversation with a UK literary agent. It was all over with the novel, she said. It was difficult to sell serious fiction; where was there to go after Knausgård? Perhaps the only way forward was creative non-fiction. “Ever thought about writing fantasy?” she asked.
There was one upcoming novel, though, the agent noted, that people were talking about: Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney, a writer in her twenties. It was rumoured, she said, that this book could renew enthusiasm for literary fiction.
As it happened, the rumours were right. The book restored faith in the novel as art form, and also (important for the agent) as commodity. It was a worldwide sensation that sold in vast numbers, and it managed this seemingly while retaining its artistic integrity.
The novel’s subject, solely and without gimmicks, was ordinary people: the intensely experienced lives and relationships of a group of young Irish folk.
In a subsequent exchange, the agent identified a fashionable hook in Conversations with Friends: Rooney’s decision to give one of her characters endometriosis. If a disease can be said to be au courant, that one was. The agent found its inclusion cynical; I thought not necessarily. Or, even if Rooney had an eye to trends, it didn’t seem to matter. Given her huge achievement in a difficult climate, who would begrudge a dash of canniness? It was no different from Dickens’ eye to the market, his keen attention to readers’ preoccupations and tastes.
These vaguely doubting exchanges might have been typical at the time. Was Rooney merely a craze? Could a writer so commercially successful really be genuinely talented?
Conversations with Friends was followed by Normal People, another hit that was made into a TV series. Again, Rooney enticed readers in with her finely drawn character studies and intense attention to the nuances of relationships. Her characters were subtle, their dramas were low-key and interior, and the novel was entirely compelling.
In follow-up interviews, Rooney hinted at giving up writing fiction. This didn’t happen, fortunately. Her new work, Beautiful World, Where Are You, is absorbing and beautifully balanced, a step up, a novel to enjoy and admire for its grace and wit.
It’s set in the years of Trump and Brexit, just pre-pandemic – the first lockdown appears right at the end. It’s a deeply serious novel, and a thoughtful one. The central preoccupation, played out in the lives of four young friends, is the current human predicament. The tone is world-weary, wry and occasionally despairing as the characters circle around urgent, fundamental questions. How to find meaning in a world ruined by rampant capitalism and ugly consumerism, with climate change looming over all. Why so much injustice and inequality? What does it mean to live now? How to retain hope?
Alice and Eileen are friends in their late twenties. Alice is a writer who is recovering from a psychiatric breakdown. She’s living alone on the west coast of Ireland, running away from her own success, haunted by a sense of shallowness. She has a disturbingly selfdestructive streak, explored with great subtlety in her edgy hook-ups with Felix, a stranger she has met online. Meanwhile, Eileen is struggling to understand her relationship with Simon, a devout Catholic.
Neither woman is finding what she wants in life; each is searching for meaning in a bleak and uncertain time. They are often online, but there’s no inane social-media shorthand here; rather the women write long, intelligent emails, and their letters form a significant part of the novel. There’s no mindless social-media narcissism either; they’re preoccupied with politics and society, with the state of the world.
There’s great pleasure in reading the correspondence Rooney constructs between the pair. The letters are fluent, thought-provoking, often moving. Alice and Eileen explore the big existential questions; they entertain despair, nihilism and selfdestructiveness, yet return repeatedly to a position of cautious acceptance, of faith despite everything, in flawed human beings.
Alice writes, “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. What else is there to live for?”
There’s a yearning, melancholy quality throughout, the sense that human beings are disastrous, but we’re all we’ve got. The humane tone is implicit in this description of the women embracing on a squalid train platform: “Or were they in this moment unaware, or something more than unaware – were they somehow invulnerable to, untouched by, vulgarity and ugliness, glancing for a moment into something deeper, something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world?” l
BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU, by Sally Rooney (Faber, $32.99), is released on September 7.