Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Author: Sally Rooney

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Date: 21 September 2021

Rating: 3.5 stars

Review: So, I read quite possibly 2021’s most anticipated release. After the crazy success of Normal People, both the book and the TV series, (The latter I totally get. What an attractive cast!) I think the entire book community was dying to see what Rooney would do next. I have yet to read her debut novel, Conversations With Friends, but from what I gathered, BWWAY’s cast is a more mature one as compared to her previous work. With characters, as unlikeable and complicated as Normal People or maybe even more, in their late 20s and early 30s Rooney delves into aspects of love and ‘grown-up’ relationships and friendships in this one.

First of all, let me just get this out of the way, why does the title not have a question mark? In the acknowledgements, Rooney mentions the poem that inspired the title of this book. It is a great idea and the sentiment of both the poem and this line suit the themes explored in the book. But why is there no question mark!? Clearly, I am extremely frustrated by this. With no quotation marks and a missing question mark, Rooney's relationship with punctuation drove me a little crazy. 

BWWAY follows two friends Eileen and Alice. Alice is a writer who has received a ton of accolades for two books that she had written but the pressure of the entire industry and the expectations from her get too much and she has a nervous breakdown. After getting out of the hospital, Alice moves to a small town, leaving her best friend Eileen in Dublin, to recuperate. There she meets warehouse worker and brash Felix on a Tinder date and starts, what I can only call, a toxic relationship with him. Meanwhile, Eileen has just got out of a long relationship and is feeling lost. She slips into a comfortable flirtation with her childhood friend Simon and has to decide which she considers more important, her friendship with him or the blossoming love between them. After every chapter of the book, we see conversations between Alice and Eileen over mail, as they discuss their lives and relationship, but also the world and their very cynical views on it.

I read an article on LitHub recently that basically had the thesis that contemporary authors, Rooney being the most prominent example, do not have a characteristic writing style. There was a time you could read a sentence from any page of an author’s book and correctly guess the author even without understanding the context of the story, but now that is no longer possible because MFA degrees churn out authors with very clean writing styles, no word out of place and paragraphs that tell you exactly what to feel after reading them. (Or abandonment of Literary Voice for Literature of the Pose, as he calls it.) While I understand what the author of the article was going for, and even agree with some of the points he mentions, I have to say that I will probably be able to recognise even Rooney journal entries as being written by her. This woman has a whack writing style, which is somehow beautiful and annoying at the same time. 

Let me explain to you, with an example, what I mean. At one point during the book, as a strange pick-up move, Felix shows Alice a classic Funny Animal video of a raccoon eating cherries. There are only so many ways an author can describe this situation, here’s how Rooney does it: “The video showed a raccoon sitting up in a humanoid posture, legs splayed, a bib tied around its neck and a bowl of black cherries in its lap. The raccoon reached into the bowl with its tiny clawed hand, grabbed a cherry and began eating it, all in a very anthropomorphic fashion, nodding its head in gourmet appreciation of the cherry.” (I used quotation marks, blasphemy in the Rooney Cinematic Universe.) What is this language? She is describing a video that people wouldn’t even look twice at. Yesterday, I saw a video of two cats boxing. With gloves on. I don’t think I gave it more than two seconds of thought. A part of me finds this characteristic writing style of Rooney funny in an easy to parody, Joey from Friends using the thesaurus kind of way, but another part can see the beauty in it. 

The story of BBWAY is simplistic at best. It isn’t something we haven’t seen multiple times before, except no other author would dare to give us such dull, unlikeable characters, but it is Rooney’s writing that makes reading the dull adventures of these unlikeable characters also beautiful. Simon is clearly sexist and has a strange saviour complex. Eileen is depressed and enjoys said saviour complex. Alice is rude and loves Felix because she thinks she won’t receive the same love from him. (Does she also hope that when he eventually does leave her it will spark the idea for a novel like her last heartbreak did?) And Felix is horrible to Alice. He is probably the worst character to read about. But there is something so compelling about Rooney’s writing that I couldn’t stop reading it.

My favourite part of this novel had to be the mails that Alice and Eileen send each other. It is this idea that even though we know that the human race has basically ruined this world and we are staring into the possibility of everything ending, we find beauty in the mundane and care so deeply about relationships and sex. The mails are pretentious and sometimes awkward, like most of the conversations between these characters, but they also spark questions. Rooney is slowly garnering this name as the writer to represent all Irish authors, a very debated stance in the industry, but her insecurities about her work are clearly visible in every conversation that Alice has about her writing. Alice is, at least I think and many other readers agree, a fictional version of Rooney herself. 

I didn’t care whether the two relationships in the book would work out. I found the characters obnoxious and the sex scenes gave me the creeps. If I had to read about the sad miscommunication between these characters or that one of them stood in silence, exchanged a glance, smiled faintly, etc., etc., once again I will probably shoot myself in the forehead. The only time I found myself caring about the plot was during the last chapter, but that also could have something to do with the mentions of the lockdown. But the writing! The writing got under my skin and I’ll probably pick up the only book, as of yet, by her that I haven’t read soon. I think that’s the real mystery behind Rooney’s success. She should take classes on how to hook someone with your writing while being completely pretentious. Let me end by asking, once again, what’s with Rooney and the missing punctuations!?

Link to the article mentioned: LitHub