Beautiful World Where Are You a Mess

 

BEAUTIFUL WORLD WHERE ARE YOU? (2021)

By Sally Rooney

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 352 pages.

★★

 

 

 

If you have trouble with novels about people in their 30s who are trapped in perpetual adolescence, avoid Beautiful World Where are You? As you will probably infer from the title, this book centers on people in search of something. What, exactly, is the question.

 

Its major character is Alice Kelleher, another in the (too long) line of fictional characters who have written their way to renown and financial security. Yeah, like that like happens to so, so many novelists. Not! Alice had a breakdown (of a barely explained sort) a few years earlier and she’s still a bit loopy. She goes on a blind date with Felix Brady and by all accounts, it’s a bust. So, naturally, they will end up going on more, she will take him on one of her book tours, and they still don’t like each other very much, though Alice enjoys having sex with Felix. It makes as much sense as Alice’s best friend Eileen Lydon, who decides to sleep with the hunky Simon Costigan, a really nice guy though he’s more like a big brother and has a steady girlfriend. Not creepy enough for you? It seems as if the entire circle of people in Alice’s circle are bonking each other, though nothing seems to last longer than it takes to change the sheets. They are all competent in using technology and assuming affected hipness, but they are clueless about adulting or long-term relationships.

 

Alice doesn’t even do tech or hip; all she knows is books. So of course, she keeps sleeping with bad boy Felix, an inarticulate warehouse worker with debts, a taste for drugs and booze, and an abiding hatred for his brother. Simon is religious; Eileen is a drama queen and editorial assistant who knows a lot about art, but is seeking a “central principle.” She loves Simon but fears getting deeply involved with him because what if (gasp!) they got together and then broke up? Then he’d not be in her life. Duh!

 

There are more serious themes yearning to break out, if you call comments on celebrity culture weighty. Or an attempt to piggyback on the Covid pandemic. Alice writes, “It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasized to fill the emptiness left by religion. Like a malignant growth where the sacred used to be.” To be hip about that question, isn’t the answer obvi? But wait, there’s more. There is the question of whether having a baby is the right thing to do in a world threatened by Covid and climate change. I don’t know, but shouldn’t one actually pay some attention to maturing before even making such queries?

 

The title comes from both a poem by Friedrich Schiller and a biennial art exhibition Rooney attended in Liverpool. Schiller’s poem was titled “The Gods of Greece” and is a lament for the loss of paganism, the coldness of Christianity, and nature’s lost magic. I’m not sure how this fits in Rooney’s novel. I suppose the biennial factors into Eileen’s love of art. At heart, though, there aren’t many true-sounding chords struck in Beautiful World Where are You?

 

 Ireland’s Rooney has been lucky; at 31 she actually has won a bit of acclaim. I liked her 2018 novel Normal People, but my view of Beautiful World is that it’s a freaking mess. Get back to me with these characters when they’ve got something to say.

 

Rob Weir