The Latest Sally Rooney Novel
A look at the conversation around it + my review of Beautiful World, Where Are You
I feel bad for Sally Rooney. Sally Rooney, the author. It must be difficult to be one of the biggest names in literary fiction if you care deeply about your craft. It is a challenge to create the space for your readers to engage with your work on its own terms, not filtered through discourse. I imagine it is less difficult to inhabit the position of famous author if you are a writer who is concerned with celebrity.
In Beautiful World, Where Are You, one of the main characters, Alice, is a successful novelist who has a career path not unlike Rooney’s. On celebrity, she says:
People who intentionally become famous - I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it - are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill.
…
What is the relationship of the famous author to their famous books anyway? If I had bad manners and was personally unpleasant and spoke with an irritating accent, which in my opinion is probably the case, would it have anything to do with my novels? Of course not. The work would be the same, no different. And what do books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralising specificity? Nothing.
I don’t feel bad for Sally Rooney, the person. I don’t know who she is, neither does it matter to me as a reader. But in engaging with Sally Rooney’s work, this was my experience as a reader — her reputation preceded her writing. I knew her as the author whose books graced the bookshelves of fashionable and, occasionally, unserious readers. A lot of people I respected liked her, more people I respected dismissed her. I read Conversations With Friends. I disliked it immensely. In fact, I am guilty of having fired off a glib tweet after reading it. Something about it being about white people problems. I don’t regret it because I think Sally Rooney needs better press. I regret it because it was a dishonest reading, I wasn’t reading the book on its own terms.
According to Lit Hub, Beautiful World, Where Are You is the most reviewed book of all time. Some of these reviews are fantastic but some are, I think, proof of a Sally Rooney Derangement Syndrome. There’s something about engaging with Rooney’s writing that pushes critics to untenable conclusions. In Jessie Tu’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald (“Surely there are better literary heroes for our generation than Sally Rooney?”), she presents an ungenerous read of Rooney’s Normal People (“He’s white, so he’s inherently interesting. Please. Save me from another story about a basic white guy who is, “actually really smart, if you get to know him.””) and hedges against the reader’s disagreement by saying “If you think I’m being too hard on Rooney, you’re probably white”.
I recognise Tu’s perspective because it feels close to my assessment of Conversations with Friends. But thinking back to what I said then, I don’t believe I was responding to the book. Instead, I was responding to the overwhelming hype surrounding Rooney’s work and feeling rankled by popularity which I didn’t understand. There’s a larger conversation to be had about the mammoth marketing budget that BWWAY has and the relative lack of attention that books by non-white authors (or honestly, any writer who isn’t Sally Rooney this week) have received from critics.
That her publishers thought pouring resources like a coffee cart and bucket hats into promoting Rooney’s book would be a good decision probably has little to do with Rooney or her writing. It was a business move that has paid off. It sold 40,000 copies in the UK in just 5 days. I received a copy of BWWAY from Faber, by way of Times Distribution. It came with a badge and a bright blue tote bag. Judging by Times’ Instagram feed, many other people (Bookstagrammers, other kinds of influencers) received proof copies too. Hype generates hype.
(I did not receive a Sally Rooney bucket hat. It seems to be an FSG thing rather than a Faber thing. I would not be mad if one came my way. I think sunshine yellow does wonders for my skin.)
In a long, rambling piece for Lit Hub, Stephen Marche writes about how Sally Rooney is at a particular moment in literary history where we are collectively moving from the “literature of the voice” to the “literature of the pose”. A lot of his basic, factual, assertions are wrong. He attributes many of Alice (the character’s) words to Rooney (the writer), taking Alice’s suggestion that she might not ever write a novel again as proof that Rooney won’t. He also suggests that another main character, Eileen, works at the London Review of Books, despite the book clearly being set in Dublin. Such a poor reader shouldn’t get this many words to be wrong.
According to Marche, “contempt and social anxiety” are the dominant modes in the novel. He accuses Rooney of being “obsessed with how not to say the wrong thing” and concludes that this sums up the “literature of the pose” — a proclamation that flies suspiciously close to crying that PC culture is ruining contemporary literature.
Critics should read a book in conversation with its contemporaries but I wonder if all of this focus on what the book is not doing is taking away from actually reading it.
Sally Rooney is often celebrated as the voice of the millennial generation because she chronicles our common experiences. While relatability isn’t the marker of a good book, it is frequently the marker of a likeable book.
The plot of Beautiful World, Where Are You is fairly pedestrian. The characters are in their late-twenties to early-thirties and a lot of the action focuses on the mundanities of their jobs. Simon, who works at a left-wing parliamentary group in Ireland, is often on the phone to unidentified callers while multitasking. Eileen works at a literary magazine, we first see her as she is standardising the spelling of ‘W.H. Auden’ in a manuscript. Felix, the only blue collar character in the foursome, pushes carts and scans packages in a warehouse. Only Alice, the superstar novelist, has a work life that can be described as interesting. She jets around the continent giving interviews, hosting readings, and accepting literary prizes. Yet, she seems the most unfulfilled with her lot. The book starts after she’s had a nervous breakdown, left hospital, and moved to a coastal town to get away from it all.
When reading BWWAY, I thought a lot about Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be which I read back in February. They are different books stylistically but the questions they raise are similar. What does life look like when you’re done coming of age? What are the most moral choices to make? How do you be a good person? How Should A Person Be?
About half of the book is written in the form of emails between Alice and Eileen. They are best friends from university and their relationship is intellectually intimate. In the same email, one of them could be updating the other on their sex life while also wondering how to live under global capitalism. This is an excerpt from one of Eileen’s emails to Alice:
For me, it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth. And I always end up thinking: I don’t even want to be up here. I don’t need all these cheap clothes and imported foods and plastic containers, I don’t even think they improve my life.
This could be the inner life of any of my friends, down to Eileen’s parenthetical admission of her relative privilege: “(Not that I’m comparing my dissatisfaction to the misery of actually oppressed peoples, I just mean that the lifestyle they sustain for us is not even satisfying, in my opinion.)” Now that I’m in my late twenties, so many of us are shunted into jobs we do to get by or chasing a “dream job” that comes with burnout or responsibilities that seem superfluous to the work. Our conversations flit in and out of the acknowledgement that we live in apocalyptic times. The stakes in Rooney’s novels are low, all her characters really stand to lose are relationships, but the larger stakes loom in the background. Climate change, income inequality, global fascism. But there’s nothing her characters (or we) can do. All of that frustration and worry just metabolises into anxiety — an emotional individualisation of a structural problem.
There is recognition of this impotence. Eileen calls herself a Marxist but we don’t see her engage in political action outside of arguing with acquaintances at a bar about the definition of the working class. Alice wonders what the point of fiction is, who cares what happens to a novel’s protagonists, “when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species”. Simon has the most explicitly political job but he worries that he has been turned into an ineffective bureaucrat. The characters are weighed down by guilt. The book isn’t about guilt. It’s about relationships.
Beautiful World, Where Are You opens on a Tinder date.
He ordered a vodka tonic and a pint of lager. Rather than carrying the bottle of tonic back to the table, he emptied it into the glass with a quick and practised movement of his wrist. The woman at the table tapped her fingers on a beermat, waiting. Her outward attitude had become more alert and lively since the man had entered the room. She looked outside now at the sunset as if it were of interest to her, though she hadn’t paid any attention to it before.
When the novel isn’t written in emails, it is written in this screenplay voice. We are largely denied access to the characters’ interiority. We observe them from a distance, the narrative voice sometimes zooming out from the character’s actions in what feels like a fade to black. It cloaks some of their choices in ambiguity. We only know as much as they are willing to say.
We meet Alice and Felix on their date. They don’t hit it off immediately. Eileen and Simon are nursing old feelings for each other. Will they get together or won’t they? That’s the forward thrust of the novel. We care about what happens to the novel’s protagonists. The contradiction between the characters’ intellectual concerns and their passions is at the forefront of this book.
When Eileen writes back to Alice in response to the problem of the contemporary novel, she suggests that human beings are wired to care about the intensely personal.
After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person? So in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call ‘breaking up or staying together’ (!), because at the end of our lives, when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about.
To me, this sums up Beautiful World, Where Are You. The beauty of real life is found in other people and we cannot help but orient ourselves thusly. Eileen writes this email right after a happy development in her love life. The arc of these characters’ lives tends towards the traditional: monogamy and material comfort. They are not blueprints for radical living. They make baffling choices, they don’t communicate well. I saw myself in these characters, pondering the same questions as them. Things work out for them, I hope things work out for me too. Their belief in a beautiful world is comforting.
I’ve said a lot but I just wanted to share some reviews of Beautiful World, Where Are You that I appreciated, in case you’d like to read more about the book or just plug into the dominant conversation of today’s literary world.
James Greig for Tribune, this is probably the review I agree with the most
Sean O’Neill for Gawker on Sally Rooney’s Irishness. Essential reading, especially as her Irishness is often overlooked in the interest of making her a universal writer
And here’s a negative review from Christian Lorentzen in the London Review of Books for balance
love this