Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney
Penguin Random House, 2021
Review by Alexandra Trnka
Are the politics of Sally Rooney’s fiction empty or realistic? Such is the question around which critics pivot with the release of each of Rooney’s books. The Irish writer’s first two best-selling novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), have propelled Rooney to literary stardom and placed her work at the centre of a critical debate surrounding the intersection of politics and fiction: namely, whether an author should reflect their personal political beliefs in their fiction, and, if so, whether Rooney—who identifies as a Marxist—is properly demonstrating her socialist ideals in her narratives. Though books should not be read as extensions of an author’s personal politics—and critics such as Rebecca Rothfeld have rightfully pointed out that “a novel is not under any obligation to double as a treatise”—Rooney’s frequent allusions to socialist theory nevertheless invite an examination of the political implications of her fictions. In her newest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, it is not her characters’ explicit identification with socialism that invites this engagement—“everyone’s on it now,” one of the protagonists, Eileen, tells us—but rather that the novel alludes to a deeper critique of capitalism that, by the end of the novel, is abandoned in favour of sentimentality.
Conversations with Friends and Normal People both feature interpersonal romantic conflict between millennial characters who work in the arts, are politically aware in theory but not in practice, and are often plagued by a sense of existential capitalist dread. Rooney’s focus on complex social relationships is a defining characteristic of her work; she tracks the “balancing and rebalancing” of a relationship, and her plot spills forth from this dynamic much like the unfolding of a chess game. In keeping with her previous work, Rooney’s newest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You pivots around two close friends from college who both work in the literary world: Alice, a celebrated and wealthy young novelist, and Eileen, an editor of a small literary magazine. The pair exchange emails from rural Ireland to Dublin, reporting on their troublesome flirtations and expatiating on various topics, including the ontological bond between conservatism and capitalism, and the aesthetic tragedy that “lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life.”
The novel is slower in pace than Rooney’s previous two page-turners, which have been described as being “addictive in the manner of a twitter feed” and feature action-oriented prose, propelled brisky forward by sexual tension. The effect of Beautiful World’s new epistolary format is two-fold: Rooney layers a meditative density to her prose that contrasts with the comparative levity of her previous work, while folding into the emails an acknowledgment of her critics and a defence of the romantic mode. In descriptions of her own novels, Alice condemns the hypocrisy of the contemporary euro-American novel, which “relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth,” and asks, “do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter.” Alice concedes that her “own work is, it goes without saying, the worst culprit in this regard,” and Eileen provides Alice with a soothing defence of her subject-matter in her response: “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.”
Despite the accuracy with which Alice’s summary of her work describes Rooney’s own novels, Rooney’s interest in Marxism—she describes being brought up in a household where Marxist tenets were repeated like religious aphorisms in others—reveals itself subtextually through the web of relationships that structure the narrative. Each of the novel’s four main characters—Alice, Eileen, and their respective love interests, Felix and Simon—go through phases of feeling more or less estranged from the work that they are doing, despite occupying very different positions in the capitalist workforce. This tension plays out most obviously between Alice, the uncannily successful young writer who lives for free in an unreasonably large home, and Felix, who moves boxes of unspecified products at a warehouse for an unspecified company. During an awkward first date after meeting online, Felix poses a rhetorical question that is revisted throughout the novel’s development: “I fucking hate the place,” he says, “but they wouldn’t be paying me to do something I liked, would they? That’s the thing about work, if it was any good you’d do it for free.” Felix’s question alludes to an intersection at the centre of the novel’s romantic entanglements between work and pleasure, and whether these two pursuits are mutually exclusive; this exploration is Rooney’s engagement with the politics of labour at its most compelling.
In contrast with Felix’s resignation to his place in the capitalist workforce, Alice psychoanalyzes the labour dynamics of her work as a writer obsessively. She views herself as a drained resource from which a finite amount of artistic output may be extracted and commodified. “Whatever insignificant talent I might have, people just expect me to sell it,” she writes to Eileen. “I mean literally sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left.” Alice describes her own exploitation much in the same way that Marx describes proletariat worker alienation. “The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces,” he writes. Alice asks Eileen, “what is the relationship of the famous author to their famous books anyway?”—a rhetorical question with an implied Marxist answer: “the worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him.” Alice’s horror is in reaction to her theoretical rather than her material exploitation. Despite her abhorrence toward the notion that her writing, something in which she takes pleasure, be commodified, Alice benefits from this commodification through immense material benefit, unlike Marx’s proletariat worker, who quite literally “loses his reality to the point of dying of starvation.”
Felix, in contrast with Alice’s intellectual self-indulgence, expresses his capitalist dread when he lies in bed with Alice and observes his hands. “It’s hard to believe I have to use the same body for both things,” he says. “These hands touching you now, I use them to pack boxes? I don’t know.” Rooney’s fixation on Felix’s hands is a reversal of the classic Dickensian synecdoche in which the labourers in Dickens’ Hard Times are named and thus reduced to their most productive part: “The Hands.” Rooney reverses the synecdoche by individualizing Felix and pointing to the apparent incongruity of capitalist alienation and sexual intimacy.
However, the capitalist anxiety that Rooney develops when establishing the novel’s interpersonal relationships seems to resolve itself by the novel’s end. Both Alice and Eileen seem to be plagued by existential anxiety and horrified by the wealth gap in contemporary society—Alice describes feeling “ill” thinking about the rest of the world living in abject poverty—until they too compartmentalize these concerns and find peace when their uncertain and frictional romantic relationships become more concrete. Alice and Eileen ultimately find the beautiful world they have been searching for, amidst the ugly urban wasteland, in their friendship with each other and their relationships with Simon and Felix. They adopt Eileen’s suggestion that “maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.” In short, they succumb to the hypocrisy that Alice identifies as the driving force of literary production, to focus on love and relationships while the world burns.
Equal parts poetic and politically pacifying, Rooney’s conclusion succeeds where it fails; it both accurately captures the state of contemporary political engagement and undermines the more substantial and compelling aspects of the novel’s capitalist critique by neatly resolving the tension between sex and work. Whether or not the effect is intentional by Rooney, her conclusion is both empty and realistic, as she relies on cliches while simultaneously capturing the inevitable pipeline of politically-engaged student to cynically passive adult—whereby the injunction to find beauty in the everyday seems to be the only accessible response to capitalist dread when other modes of political engagement seem futile.
Alexandra Trnka writes fiction and essays from a desk in Montreal. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies and English Literature from McGill University and is on the board of directors for Riddle Fence: A Journal of Arts and Culture. Her recent work has been published in carte blanche, PRISM, Senses of Cinema, the Montreal Review of Books, and the Journal of Newfoundland and Labrador Studies.