Book Review: Beautiful World, Where Are You

The day after my sixteenth birthday, I read my first Sally Rooney book: Normal People. I had read it in one sitting but decided by the end that I did not like it. Like many of her critics, younger me didn’t like that there was “no real plot”. I resented the ordinariness of the people and their problems. It felt like I had stumbled onto a reality TV show, watching people cry about their lives, and then feeling that initial pang of “why should I care?”.

Having lived a bit more life, I reread Normal People. Then I got it (why everyone was so obsessed with it). Because it is about us.

The title says it’s about normal people - in first world countries, at least. And the mundanity of these problems, in contrast to the breadth of the characters’ emotions, were written so cleanly as if to reflect the readers, which spans throughout Rooney’s oeuvre.

So now, on the edge of nineteen years old, I’ve come back to the reflection once more.

“Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney.

Sally Rooney’s third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, follows the lives of two best friends and their brushes with romances as they stand at the border of their thirties. Alice is a famous novelist who meets Felix, a warehouse operative, on a dating app. After a week of correspondence, they travel to Rome together. The other half of the pair, Eileen, is in the process of getting over the end of a relationship. She falls back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Elementally, we follow four people just trying to be happy. Having finished the book, I immediately turned back to page one. I won’t hesitate to admit it has a place within my favourite pieces of literature, like the Before trilogy by Richard Linklater or Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, which largely focus on human connection and meaningful conversations. All in all, media for people who like to talk and listen.

Like Normal People, I read this in one sitting. I find there is something so binge-able about Rooney’s writing. Though she is criticised for her unconventional dialogue style, whereby speech isn’t punctuated with quotation marks, I am part of the minority that like this about her style. It feels as though the dialogue is molecularly inside of the novel’s body. What the characters say is as significant as the action and description. It all blends together to push one of the core themes Rooney has a particular affinity for: communication. Moreover, Rooney’s writing makes it as if you are engaging with people with recognisable specificities in their speech. The masterful command of language presents clearly who is talking, which is a truly admirable craft.

What I find particularly profound, alongside the imitation of reality in the dialogue, is the validity of the characterisation. Each of the main four characters have a veil of moral ambiguity about them. They say things that they don’t mean and hurt people when they think what they are doing is best. I have to admit that I preferred Alice and Felix’s story compared to Eileen and Simon’s. One of my favourite scenes in the book portrays Felix admitting to Alice the morally bad things that he had done and he feels guilty, even embarrassed, about them in retrospect. I hadn’t read vulnerability and shame exposure from a masculine character before. I thought the openness and acceptance of his moral ambiguity was refreshing in a world where people self-fashion themselves into their best and unrealistic versions.

Felix was my favourite out of the main four, as I felt like he was the least pretentious of them. But that is not to take away from the validity of the other three whose pretentiousness is most certainly a product of their class and social circles. I mean, even as an Art and Humanities student myself, I found myself reminded of conversations from my life and text messages I’ve sent to friends paralleling the same level of pretentiousness as Alice and Eileen’s emails. “This is how my friends and I speak”, I’d say to myself. Especially when conversation veered towards more complicated topics about devastation in other areas of the world, for example. These concerns come from real life, this is what young adults in the 21st century think about.

But amidst talk of world issues, I did not leave the book concerned about that, rather, about the beauty of the indomitable human spirit. I felt endearment towards these characters as if I fell in love with them and alongside them. The detail in terms of setting, characterisation, and the individual relationship that Rooney weaves throughout the novel - from romantic to platonic - is so human and mundane, that there is an air of familiarity despite its specificity. It can only be described as comfort.

Rooney displays a sense of self-awareness in this third book, indirectly responding to those who criticise her writing about sex, love, and relationships, claiming them as unimportant topics to be concerned in the tumultuous modern age. Through this book, she argues that love is not a weak thing to do or write about, and that to love in spite of everything is one of the strongest things a person could do, because it is all about people. The characters themselves feel guilt surrounding their concern about arguably pointless matters, but the truth is that you cannot help what you care about or that your life is the way that it is, in all its first world privilege and triviality. Eileen says it best in her email to Alice, “when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources [...] we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other”. By the end of the book, I felt like I’d accepted the small beauty of life with the characters, but not just to cope with the wider brutality of the world, but because it is real, it is the present truth. It boils down, as always, to love and wanting to be loved, as if it’s a reminder that you are alive. Many cannot seem to see the significance of Beautiful World, Where Are You, as if they are asking that titular question themselves about the book. I urge those to stop looking so hard for what you are looking for is right here. You are in it.

Edited by Megan Gibson