Apocalypse Never
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (2021)
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.(John Ashbery, Some Trees)
Few people can claim to speak for a generation the way Sally Rooney can. Her nervous, overeducated characters are relatable in their fumbling attempts at love and friendship, but their strident ideals always leap past the mundane reality of life. “I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent”, writes Eileen in an email to best-friend Alice, “to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse. But at the same time that is what I do everyday.” (111)
Beautiful World, Where Are You is another millennial novel about the social entanglements of two precocious-but-uninspired twenty-or-thirty-somethings. Alice, a world-famous writer, is coming out the other end of a mental breakdown brought on by her sudden, unwanted celebrity. She’s now met a bloke called Felix on Tinder, and while they have nothing in common—he’s a laddy lad’s lad who works in a warehouse and doesn’t read or care about books—he might just be the dose of normality she needs. Bestie Eileen, meanwhile, rekindles things with on-again off-again childhood friend/lover/fuckbuddy Simon. What are they? What aren’t they? To complicate matters, Simon is a Catholic in an open(-ish?) relationship.
Alternating chapters are written as back-and-forth emails where the girls tell the lurid details of their lives and explicate the political and philosophical ideas they have recently skimmed off Wikipedia:
Your paragraph about time also reminded me of something I read online recently…. ‘centralisation, specialisation, complexity, and top-heavy political structure’ made Late Bronze Age civilisation particularly vulnerable to breakdown. Another of the theories is headlined simply: ‘Climate change’. I think this puts our present civilisation in a kind of ominous light, don’t you? General systems collapse is not something I had ever really thought about as a possibility before. Of course I know in my brain that everything we tell ourselves about human civilisation is a lie. But imagine having to find out in real life. (40)
These passages, which “take place” online, are written in a much more fluid and lively style than the bits that happen in “real life”, where the social interactions are clipped and oblique, the conversations and intentions pre-emptively wrapped in protective irony. At one point Eileen opens up a new tab and searches her own name before suddenly shutting it again, as if needing the external validation that she still exists.
The only one who manages to cut through the bullshit is Felix. He likes to stir things up occasionally, as when he puts Simon and Eileen into a tizzy by asking them why they didn’t come visit Alice sooner. Much is made of Felix’s working-class background. He doesn’t know or care that Alice is a famous novelist; he has a down-to-earth lad-like charm; he can also sing, and enjoys busting out an Irish folk song or two when out on the piss. The other three, by contrast, are more intellectual types, hung-up over ideological quibbles and the performative guilt of the upper-middle class. Only Felix can dislodge them from their terminal passivity. Because he is willing to enjoy life, he seems to understand it a lot better than they do, and is the catalyst for them to mature emotionally.
The use of emails allows Rooney to employ a form of dramatic irony where one person might tell another what they think of a third. It all feels very gossip-y and schoolgirl-y without us having to hear every single Chinese whisper. By crossing and re-crossing the line between the real world and the online world, a disjunction opens up between lofty ideals and shameful reality; between fact and report; between speech and action; between self-image and the perception of others. Alice and Eileen’s musings on civilisation and the loss of the human capacity for love and beauty are, by themselves, superficially plausible, but when juxtaposed by their personal failures to be good friends and family members (there are parents in bad health and estranged sisters about to be married), we see these stances are mostly just projections and postures. They tell us more about the people pronouncing them than about the ultimate fate of the universe.
It is telling that, in a book underlined by anxiety of a looming climate catastrophe, there is not a single description of nature, excluding a throwaway mention of composting at the end. There is never a moment’s contrition for jet-setting Air BnB weekends away in Rome or Paris at sleek literary conventions. There is never a genuine reckoning with the fact that the two main characters, being graduates of Dublin’s Trinity College, are members of a social elite, even if their livelihoods are precarious (an observation that only makes sense if you think brilliance should be rewarded financially). As Alice herself notes, the fact that she can pursue something as useless as literature is an indication of her privilege. Guilt about this fact is part of the reason why she is unhappy.
When we interpret the sophomoric debate as apocalyptic chatter, we see its millenarian undertones much more clearly. Concern for political and social issues, ossified into a set of ineffectual gestures, contribute to a powerful, paralysing sense that the world, being irredeemable, will only get better when we burn it to the ground and start again. When Eileen and Alice discuss the merits of Simon’s Catholicism, they do so with a cagey respect, lining up the two equally exhausted dogmas side-by-side so they can take out all the good bits of both. Though loath to cede any intellectual ground to Christianity—and unwilling to acknowledge that it fulfils basically the same role as their own professedly Marxist convictions—they nonetheless appreciate its offering of a positive, concrete vision of human flourishing:
Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose… but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad, sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life. Of course if we all stay alone and practice celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems can be avoided, but it seems we will also have nothing left that makes life worthwhile. (186)
Reflecting on her own aesthetic sensibilities, Alice concludes that her “mania for culture” is little more than a “form of vanity… such a gulf of sophistication that it’s impossible for [my parents] to touch me now or to reach me at all.” (187) Yet she doesn’t feel sad about this impassable distance. She feels glad, vindicated, safe. Again, if we’re not even showing up in our own lives for love and friendship, what exactly is left that makes life worthwhile?
Beautiful World, Where Are You is almost a moving critique of the blathering millennial mindset. Times change, and the next generation will always upset and disappoint the previous one; that said, most of what the Boomers say about us is true. We are self-aware and self-centred to an alarming, blinding, suffocating extent. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if anyone by the book’s end actually realised that about themselves. At least they had put their true feelings out there, turned up for each other, and mellowed out somewhat. Alice and Eileen are grateful to have each other as friends, and have locked in their men of choice for the foreseeable future (the next stage in life, not depicted in this book, can be summed up with the Dutch phrase “huisje boompje beestje”).
I don’t think this book worked on any level. As a piece of social criticism, the characters are caricatures, representing types more than people. They lack individuality. Each one sounds the same. They have the same querulous, argumentative tone. They shuffle through pre-fabricated parties letting rehearsed words fall out of their mouths (I disagree with the claim, sometimes seen in book reviews, that Rooney writes good or even realistic dialogue). Nor is there much in the way of a story; a distracting amount of sex passes between any two events of significance. Rooney also has the annoying habit of over-writing inconsequential passages, as when she describes the blue dot that marks your location on Google Maps, or how to open a new tab in an internet browser.
Is the book an intentional self-parody? Are the characters bizarre cardboard cutouts because they live in an impersonal society that no longer values conviviality? Is the writing intentionally awkward and self-conscious because the characters are awkward and self-conscious? If the novel is a self-similar manifest of everyday mundanity, it is because this is what capitalism has turned us into: animal laborans, degraded beyond the point where even the purest act of stylised imagination can produce a vivid alternative. Alice seems to agree with this, diminishing the novel as a depleted, irrelevant art-form. A novelist should be the last person defending this sort of cultural pessimism. I think a pure act of stylised imagination can still produce a vivid alternative. I think it should produce a vivid alternative. This book never did that for me. That is why I didn’t like it.