Review: Sally Rooney’s “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” and the Envy of Faith

Sally Rooney is somewhat of a literary sensation. Heralded as the first major millennial novelist, her books have won remarkably wide acclaim and are followed by the series of detractors and critiques that inevitably follow such a rapid rise to success. In her latest text Beautiful World, Where Are You? her characters have grown up from the early twenties of her previous books and entered the desolate wasteland of late twenties existentialism. If Rooney is a millennial oracle, then her generation is one haunted by faith; longing for a coherent script to follow but simply unable to make the leap.

Beautiful World, Where Are You? follows the friendship of Alice (somewhat of a stand-in for Rooney herself) and Eileen, two young Irish creatives grappling with sex, friendship, love, and meaning in a world which they dread is coming to an end. Paired alongside Felix and Simon, love interests who both reflect and juxtapose the anxieties of Alice and Eileen, the book recalls the general comings and goings of their life, each second chapter interspersed with a detailed email correspondence between the two. It is within these personal reflections especially where they share with each other that we get a glimpse into the inner worlds, their longing for meaning, each other, and satisfaction in life.

As with Rooney’s previous novels, her strengths shine through in characterisation and her descriptions of modern life. In the first instance, Alice, Eileen, Felix, and Simon effectively take shape in expressive and emotionally sensitive ways. They are, perhaps, a little insufferable but such a realisation only exposes, at least in my case, the mirror image they can be to a reader at a similar stage of life and emotional maturity. In the second instance, the digital texture of Rooney’s world building shines through once again. Incorporating the use of text communication without feeling clunky and describing the characters use of technology in mostly seamless ways is no small feat, and its effect is surprisingly potent. Seeing such descriptions of banal digital life on paper rather affronts the reader as to just how much of our daily life and communication is mediated through a device. Rooney, in other words, gives an effective glimpse of life as is experienced by the western, urban, twenty-something facing the 2010s and 2020s. 

Both characters struggle with their lot in life, conscious of how such struggle feels wrong in the face of global inequalities and privilege. In one poignant scene, Alice describes a sudden feeling of dread upon being in a grocery store, realising how the produce, packaging, and products all came to her off the backs of deadly labour from people who live in conditions very different from her own. As the moment passes, however, she realises she cannot sustain such a feeling. After all, “I still have to buy lunch” (p. 18).

Indeed, a general sense of environmental and political apocalypticism pervades the book, juxtaposed with the characters own feelings of helplessness and guilt. Despite this, though “it seems vuglar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse,” what else is there to live for except these moments of connection (p. 111)? As Eileen observes, in the end people see the faces of those they love on their deathbed. This love seems unavoidably irreducible to simply being a lack of political action or conviction. Such connection gives the characters, at least for a time, some sense of peace.

Alongside these themes, one of the more compelling explorations for me in Rooney’s book is its reflections on faith, religion, and God. Alice writes in one of her emails, reflecting of sitting inside an empty church in Paris,

“There I sat for about twenty minutes bathed in the slow serious air of sanctity and cried a few picturesque tears about the nobility of Jesus. This is all by way of explaining to you my interest in Christianity—put simply, I am fascinated and touched by the 'personality' of Jesus, in rather a sentimental, arguably even maudlin way. Everything about his life moves me. On the one hand, I feel toward him a kind of personal attraction and closeness that is most reminiscent of my feeling for certain beloved fictional characters—which makes sense, considering that I've encountered him through exactly the same means, i.e. by reading about him in books. On the other hand, I feel humbled and impressed by him in a different way. He seems to me to embody a kind of moral beauty, and my admiration for that beauty even makes me want to say that I love him, though I'm well aware how ridiculous that sounds. But, Eileen, I do love him, and I can't even pretend that it's only the same love I feel for Prince Myshkin, or for Charles Swann, or for Isabel Archer. It is actually something different, a different feeling. And while I don't, as such, really believe that Jesus was resurrected after his death, it's also true to say that some of the most moving scenes in the Gospels, and some to which I return to most frequently, take place after the resurrection” (p. 185).

We see here that Alice is torn between the rationalism she knows she’s inherited—dead people don’t come alive again—and the rather indescribable allure of the figure of Jesus, one which feels transcendent but of course cannot really be. Julian Barnes famously wrote, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” Rooney’s characters feel similarly tormented by such memories, longing towards something which is utterly irrational. The problem then for postmoderns is that life in the seeming instability of the twenty-first century feels stuck in a perpetual state of longing, haunted by the memory of belief, the stability of ritual, searching for a ground of meaning.

In another reflection on beauty, Alice and Eileen express how aesthetic experience, an increasing rarity, while alluring, cannot have any meaning in and of itself. In contrast to Simon (a practicing Catholic), the incoherency of their own materialistic nihilism is obvious, taunting even, but there doesn’t seem to be a clear way out. Alice comments,

“I suppose the point I’m making is that there is no end of fun to be had once you get into the Christian mindset. For you and me it’s harder, we can’t seem to shake the conviction that nothing matters, life is random, and our sincerest feelings are reducible to chemical reactions, and no objective moral law structures the universe. It’s possible to live with those convictions, of course, but not really possible, I don’t think, to believe the things that you and I say we believe” (pp. 232-233).

For all Beautiful World waxes about the futility and ugliness of contemporary life, it is fundamentally an optimistic take on the human condition. Despite a lack of ultimate purpose and impending ecological crisis, meaningful connection is still possible even across broken and flawed relationships and fragile egos. But, at the same time, the book leaves faith an open question. Can one believe again in a divine ground of all being? Does our human connection—feeble and tenuous as it may be—point towards something beyond the material reality of this beautiful world?

~

Rating: 5/5

Beautiful World, Where Are You? is available from Unity Books.

~

Andrew Clark-Howard is editor at Metanoia.