Youth and love in the time of general systems collapse
It’s very Gen X to complain about stardom, to make a show of resisting it. A bit ironic then, if understandable, that Irish novelist Sally Rooney is chafing at her fame. If you read only glancingly about literary culture, you could be forgiven for thinking that she is less a writer than a piece of $20 avocado toast, an excuse for people to express bafflement at the very idea of millennials and what they might be after or up to.
Generational profiles often have broad truths to offer, but Rooney’s youth (the author of “Conversations With Friends” and “Normal People” is just now 30) seems to have short-circuited many observers. The discussion around her can feel so extraliterary that it’s easy to lose sight of what she does well on the page, which is quite a bit.
Rooney’s third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” is about four people, first among them Alice Kelleher, a clear stand-in for the author. Alice has written two novels, become unexpectedly rich and famous from them and has moved into an old rectory in a remote town, looking for solitude after a stay in a psychiatric hospital. On a Tinder date in the opening scene, she meets Felix, a local warehouse worker.
The novel’s third-person narrative alternates with email exchanges between Alice and her friend
Eileen, an editorial assistant at a literary magazine in Dublin. Both women are 29. Eileen is obsessing about an ex-boyfriend, and also possibly kindling a romance with Simon, an Oxford-educated political
adviser she’s known since childhood. Simon, is five years older than Eileen; when she was a child, he loomed unreachable in her affections.
The bond between Alice and the spiky, decidedly unliterary Felix might flummox. She explains it to Eileen by saying that “our lives have been different in basically every respect,” but “there’s a lot we recognize in one another.” Alice is, like many of Rooney’s characters, both confident and self-hating. “You must think you’re very special,” Felix says to her at one point early on. She does and she doesn’t. The same night Felix says this, Alice impulsively invites him to join her on a publicity trip to Rome. Her tolerance of his antagonism reinforces the sense we have of her unease about the life and work she’s built.
In scenes driven mostly by talk and those emails, Rooney’s characters chew over the ubiquity and ethics of pornography, the thriving industry of public contrition and forgiveness, the framework of victims and oppressors in identity politics.
But despite spirited inquiries into these subjects, Rooney’s fiction to this point remains philosophically anchored in the realms of friendship and romance. Alice doesn’t love this. We care, she writes to Eileen, “whether people break up or stay together if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e., everything.” And in case you think you have the drop on Rooney — ahem, Alice — the next line is: “My own work is, it goes without saying, the worst culprit in this regard.”
Alice is a more obvious avatar for Rooney than Eileen, but it can feel as if the author is having Socratic conversations with herself through the correspondence between the two. In response to Alice’s note about love stories, Eileen writes:
“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.” And this, she says, is a good thing: “It’s the very reason I root for us to survive — because we are so stupid about each other.”
Impassioned, intellectual 20-somethings discussing their vexed feelings is a road made mostly of potholes. Rooney avoids almost all of them. The fact that her characters speak and feel the way they do while rarely making the reader feel embarrassed for them is an achievement. It’s an uncomfortable line to toe, but Rooney succeeds by standing so close to it.