I still have yet to read Normal People, Sally Rooney’s hit novel, or watch its adaptation. I do a lot with Irish literature, but somehow that hype train mostly bypassed me (and I’ll be honest, it’s probably due at least in part to the snobbishness of the rather arbitrary line between literary and mass market fiction–I love some mass market but the fact that this is work for me means I prioritize the literary stuff). Nonetheless, her follow-up, Beautiful World, Where Are You? was chosen by the book club of one of my professional organizations, so I thought, why not? Let’s check this out. And I’m still not entirely sure what I think of it.
“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.”
The plot follows two best friends: Alice, who has written two very successful novels but is recovering from 
serious mental health issues, and Eileen, an underpaid editor at a literary magazine whose life seems marked by unfulfilled potential and her pining over her longtime hometown friend, Simon. Eileen and Alice share no scenes until late in the novel, but their respective storylines are punctuated by the long, discursive, philosophical emails they send to one another, which mingle love and resentment. (Love for their shared history as best friends and the mutual experiences and concerns and passions that they share; resentment over many things, from the obvious like success and money, to the more slippery, like how present they have been in each other’s lives.) In the meantime, each of them pursues their own romantic and professional fulfillment, with Eileen alternately chasing and repelling Simon and Alice striking up a spiky friendship-with-benefits with a local working class man, Felix.
Both main characters seem very clearly to draw from parts of Rooney herself: it’s hard to look at a character who has written two novels and is struggling to produce a third and not think of Rooney, who has been quite candid in interviews about how hard it was to write another novel after the smash success of her first two. But Alice is no Mary Sue: she’s a bit self-absorbed at times, holding Eileen at arms-length without explaining why, and she picks quarrels with Felix at times and turns cold and distant on him. I’d be projecting to guess how Eileen is some side of Rooney, but it’s easy to see the squandered potential of someone who was seen as brilliant and perfect all the way through university as something lurking inside all high achievers.
First, I have to note that I went in pretty blind as to the hallmarks of Rooney’s work and definitely did not anticipate the numerous fairly detailed sex scenes, which were definitely something to have in my ears as I walked my dog through the neighborhood. Second, and more substantively, I’m still wrestling with an element of this book’s style: namely, the almost total lack of interiority on the page. Do the characters have internal lives with complex thoughts? Clearly, yes. Does Rooney let us see it? Almost never. She opts to almost never narrate their thoughts; most often, we see them reacting to the moment by interacting with technology, particularly social media (she does quite faithfully narrate their WhatsApp messages, texts, and who they’re insta-stalking). In truth, Eileen and Alice’s epistolary exchanges are the most interiority we get.
“I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.”
It’s Rooney’s most intriguing but also most frustrating stylistic choice and, as noted, I’m still trying to figure out what I think of it and exactly why she would choose to do this. Both Alice and Eileen are wrestling with a sense of loneliness and disconnection, and Rooney seems (quite fairly) to see social media as both a tactic we use to try and stave off those feelings as well as the very thing that creates them, in part because it, too, masks interiority. I feel like I can see what Rooney is doing with this choice; the thing I’m struggling with is whether I’m won over by it or not. The beauty of the work has to come primarily from the epistolary exchanges in which our main characters reveal their thoughts, fears, hopes, and desires, fleeting and elusive as these moments and exchanges are. Without them, I think I would struggle to like Alice and Eileen much at all, and hence some of my struggle: if the strength of the work depends so heavily on these interludes, is the work as a whole strong at all?
I still don’t really have an answer for myself on that point. I do keep thinking about what Rooney has done, so that’s a measure of success: a disposable novel is one I forget almost instantly, and I don’t hate this book, that’s for certain. I may not be sure I like this one, but I do keep thinking about what Rooney has tried to do, and that, surely, is a win for a writer, to stick in the memory well after the book has ended.
(Anyway, I’m not rating it because I just can’t settle on a rating!)
