I recently started seeing a therapist who is also an Orthodox rabbi. He’s much cheaper than other therapists in New York, and I like going through the metal service door into the basement where he keeps his office. He eats Raisin Bran while I talk. On one wall is a large portrait of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the rabbi some people think is the messiah and others think is a heretic. There is nothing else on the walls.
My rabbi-therapist told me that people are generally divided between those who think that life is about the search for meaning and those who think it’s about the search for attachment. Whether or not this is a useful division of the human race, it’s a pretty decent framework for understanding Beautiful World, Where Are You, the new novel by Irish-millennial-Marxist ‘it’ girl Sally Rooney. It’s a book about characters who think they’re searching for meaning but are actually searching, if somewhat halfheartedly, for relationships.
Beautiful World is about two female friends and their two male, and quite masculine, love interests. In their lengthy, cerebral email correspondence, these not-quite-30-year-old women — one, Eileen, an editor at a publicly funded literary magazine, the other, Alice, a Rooney stand-in famous for two massively successful novels about sexy young Irish students — muse about climate change, the civilizational collapse of late antiquity, and the function of art in an unjust society. One sleeps with an unconvincingly Catholic government aide, the other with an unconvincingly bisexual warehouse worker, both in slightly masochistic ways (“I do find his paternalistic beliefs about women charming,” Eileen writes to Alice), while half-avowedly yearning for proper coupledom.
I can’t say quite how I feel about Rooney. Obviously, I envy her success (she’s only two years my senior), and I have to admit that she’s intelligent and talented. But her novels have had zero durable impact on me. I loved reading this one, sitting by an open window on the first crisp day of the year. But already, I’m rapidly losing whatever tenuous interest I had in these loosely sketched, interchangeable characters, however compelling it was to imagine their green cardigans and tortoiseshell hair clips on rainy Irish beaches. Likewise, with her first two books, Conversations With Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), I felt energetic and virtuous while reading them but forgot about them almost as soon as I finished. Indeed, I may have returned them to Amazon, the way you’d return a travel pillow that arrived too late for your trip. These just aren’t the kind of books, such as, I don’t know, The Magic Mountain, that teach you “how to live.”
Nor do they teach you much at all. Though Rooney’s books have been praised as novels of ideas, their ideas have never been very impressive. Conversations With Friends, for example, has a pivotal scene in which the protagonist breathlessly admires her brilliant friend as she excoriates monogamy, which, as she explains, permits patrilineal inheritance by ensuring men that their wives’ offspring are their own. Later, in a ceaselessly reprinted exchange, the narrator says, “Love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect.” What did we learn? That someone, clearly, took an introductory women’s studies course.
But in Conversations With Friends, the characters were 21-year-olds in their last year of university, and the sophomoric quality of their conversation felt true to life: This wasn’t a novel of ideas — it was a novel about promising students who enjoyed having ideas. It really is thrilling to be young and nervous and to feel as though you are on the verge of something very, very important.
But what if that something never comes? Rooney’s novels are not a series, but they all feature Rooney-like characters at various stages of young adulthood, and by book three, with pseudo-Rooney approaching her 30s, things are starting to get depressing. Conversations With Friends was a first-person novel narrated by a character observing herself from a distance, discovering, with some surprise, that she was the type of person to have an affair with a married man. At least she was discovering something! Beautiful World, Where Are You has such willfully distant, cold narration that it’s hard to care about anyone in it. I got the feeling, as the just-back-from-mental-hospital Rooney character putters around and the hyperobjective narrator talks more about her impressive lamps than her neonate fragility, that Rooney was just indulging in sumptuous detail because she had nothing more profound to say.
What is the point of this emotionally withholding narrative style (“They appeared to be the same age…” “She seemed to be writing an email…”)? At times, it enters the heads of the characters. At other times, in prose reminiscent of Michel Houellebecq’s blackpilled spin on Balzac, it summarizes their lives in such telescopic terms as to grind them into insignificance. I suppose there’s some obvious way to explain these narrative tactics: The contrast between the scientifically described but uninterpreted appearances of people and the baroque introspection of the emails is supposed to signal, a la Middlemarch, that no one appreciates that other people have rich inner lives, too.
But do these characters have rich inner lives? Or do they just recite self-flagellating cliches about the dangers of climate change and the ethics of art in the era of political polarization? Breathy reviewers have praised supposedly novel observations such as, “So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world — packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text.” But this critique of aestheticism was made in the late 19th century by the naturalists, repeated by decades of social realists on every continent, and made banal by Jean-Paul Sartre’s call for littérature engagée. It’s not that one must abandon the novel to write anything other than predictable romances — it’s that predictable romances are all Rooney seems capable of writing.
That said, Rooney has sold millions of books for a reason. Sometimes, when she’s being a good psychological realist, her novels really do wallop you with the texture and beauty of life, with the way shared lives accrue shared and shifting meaning over time, the way love is a function of persistent coexistence.
There’s this beautiful prolepsis at the end of the fourth chapter of Normal People that kills me. Marianne, the pseudo-Rooney, has just told Connell, her manly lover, that her father used to hit her, and Connell says he loves her. We read that even years later, Marianne would think of that moment: “Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.” And there’s this gorgeous analeptic chapter toward the end of Beautiful World, at Eileen’s sister’s wedding, in which we suddenly enter into the heads of all the characters: Eileen, her lover, her family. Her father remembers the strangeness of his wife’s first pregnancy, a memory intercut with the air in the leaves, with his daughter’s nose getting makeup on the window of the car. Rooney’s great here, mixing the sensual power of any single moment on Earth with the emotive power of so many lives, together, with the details of all their failures and all their triumphs swarming from mind to mind.
But that depth can only ever last a few sentences. And then we’re back to the irony, back to the distance. Rooney was, famously, a keen debater, and in her breakout essay about the activity, she wrote about her burning desire to win, to be the best, to be the smartest — an urge that made her waste away her weekends eating awful granola bars with smelly guys and astutely arguing for morally disgusting positions. At some point, she gave up in disgust — but having won. As her last line goes, “Even if you beat me, I’m still the best.”
Did she ever grow out of this meaningless desire to win? Or did she merely graduate from debate success to literary success, dashing off novels that are intelligent enough to win high praise but that, whenever things start to lag a little, reliably send a virile Irish hand to slide across damp panties? Will her novels forever be about intellectual young women unable to feel emotions with any sort of immediacy, except when they’re enjoying lightly masochistic sex with handsome men who always, in the end, love them back? There’s a character in John Williams’s novel Stoner who says, “Lust and learning. That’s really all there is, isn’t it?” But that book, sweeping and deep and ambitious, believes that there is more. When Beautiful World’s Alice writes, “here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?,” the answer is: nothing.
That’s what’s sad about Beautiful World, Where Are You. There’s something nice, of course, about the implied answer to the question in the title: The beautiful world is right where we are, loving one another. This is, after all, a post-marriage marriage plot novel, where every end gets tied up into a happy ending. But what about all those protestations of philosophy? They’re a mockery, ultimately, of the philosophical or at least intellectual novel, and all of Rooney’s public-facing defenses of novels about romance diminish what literature can be, what life can be, and what human beings can be.
In this sense, of course, she is the best millennial novelist.
Ann Manov (annmanov.com) is a writer in New York. Follow her on Twitter @ann_manov.
