It is frustrating, isn’t it, to believe, to have staunch principles, and yet to act like they do not exist? It is what some would call the contemporary condition, because social media has turned our thoughts into manifestos, our ambiguities into certainty. (Try drafting a 240 character tweet that is tonally ambivalent.) And yet, real life can never be lived with theoretical clarity.
Sally Rooney always pitches her characters in that hazy, contested zone between principle and practice — between what we believe to be true and what we end up doing anyway. This is most clear in her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You. Notice that the title is a question, but there is no interrogation mark. It doesn’t demand an answer, merely expresses a rhetorical exhaustion with our world as it is.
Life and e-life
In this book, we get absolute access to the principles of two of the four main characters — Alice, the celebrity novelist who suffered a mental breakdown in the aftermath of fame, and her best friend Eileen, who works for a literary magazine in Dublin. They exchange page-long emails explaining their world views, the Wikipedia articles they read, and their unbaked, pretentious theories of aesthetics (“human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence” or “Human beings lost [the instinct for beauty] when the Berlin Wall came down”). Every other chapter in this novel is an e-mail, written and responded to alternately. In between the emails, their lives unfold.
Alice, who has retreated to the Irish countryside to recuperate and is living in a palatial rectory with a view of the ocean, has taken to Felix, whom she met on Tinder. He works in a warehouse and has an abrasive, almost confrontational energy that Alice finds irresistible. Eileen has her heart set on the church-going Simon, five years older to her but a constant in her life since childhood.
The tensile quality of the Eileen-Simon, Alice-Felix interactions, buoyed up by luminous, step-wise-consensual sex — Simon asks Eileen, “Can I put you lying on your back, would that be okay? I think I could get a little deeper inside you that way, if you want that” — builds up through the novel till all four of them are physically united and the languor of the emails recedes.
The chapters between the emails seem to be told at times by a clueless third-person narrator — “On the platform of a train station, late morning, early June: two women embracing...” — who, at other times, has an intense, invasive access to their past. The whole of Eileen’s childhood and growing-up years is vomited out in one hurl of a chapter.
The first-person emails, coming after the chapters in the voice of the unnamed narrator, serve to clarify what the character was actually thinking in the preceding chapters. It is an exciting set-up — the events in one chapter and the interiority of the events a chapter later — but the need for the characters to posture as intellectual beings throughout completely undoes the format.
Barren patches
Rooney notes in the acknowledgements that a London Review of Books article on the collapse of the Bronze Age
helped her write Eileen’s emails, where she pontificates on civilisational catastrophe. It is a section that feels utterly barren because it is insincere — it’s like writing what you think you should be writing. Eileen, Alice, and Rooney herself seem to be reacting to issues such as class, climate change and collapse at an intellectual level, which has no effect whatsoever on how they lead their lives.
Does Rooney’s unparalleled ability to craft tense conversations have something to do with this uneasy coexistence? While her dialogues are precise, at times they are too measured, almost rehearsed. “Oh Simon, you’re so important-looking, I’m afraid you’re going to be assassinated” sounds both crackling and dubious. The dialogues of Eileen and Alice are also tonally indistinguishable from their emails.
They say that all of Sally Rooney’s women are the same — witty and cutting, with strong ideological spines, but in the face of desire, resigned to the men in their lives. Willing to be “laid on the ground and… [walked] over,” like Marianne in Normal People, or allowing the lover to do “whatever [he] wants with [her]” in Conversations With Friends . In Beautiful World , when Felix asks Alice, “But what do you think about when you come?” she replies, “I think about you coming.”
The men are at various stages of being emotionally neutered — in ideology or in practice. This makes me question if desire is intensely gendered or if that is a sexist notion. Alice is said to be bisexual, as is Felix. How would they behave with same-sex lovers, I wonder.
Beautiful World, Where Are You; Sally Rooney, Faber & Faber, ₹699
The writer is a critic with a weekly online newsletter titled prathyush.substack.com
