Warning: mild spoilers ahead. If you’re intending to read the novel you might want to skip this review.
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Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino writes a good review of Sally Rooney’s new novel, "Beautiful World, Where Are You", in Jacobin magazine*.
The setting: 'Eileen and Simon are childhood neighbors whose ongoing flirtation and friendship has recently crossed the threshold of platonic deniability. They can’t imagine a life without the other in it, but their fear of losing what they do have together threatens to prevent their connection from moving further.
'Felix and Alice, a warehouse worker and a successful novelist who has recently moved to his small town, meet on Tinder and embark on a mutual infatuation that mystifies everyone around them due to the gulf in their class backgrounds and interests (Alice is rich and famous, while Felix has a backbreaking, mind-numbing job; Felix never reads Alice’s books).'
Initially the reader struggles with Alice and Felix's relationship. Felix is crude and uneducated, a druggy and a thrill-seeker. He's the kind of person you'd cross the street to avoid. How plausible is it that middle-class Alice would take up with such?
Suspend your disbelief. Felix is fundamentally better than we are led to believe - and Alice worse.
Amelia summarises the Alice-Eileen relationship.
'Alice and Eileen have been best friends since college, and they maintain an email correspondence encompassing intellectual and philosophical debates as well as their romantic involvements.
“In the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?” Alice writes to Eileen.'
While Alice is a rich and successful novelist (an empty celebrity existence in her own estimation), Eileen is a poorly-paid assistant editor on a Dublin literary magazine which only survives on state subsidies. She feels her own life is empty and pointless, going nowhere, while the world is heading for disaster.
“I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse,” says Eileen. “But at the same time, that is what I do every day.”
Amelia notes that while 'Eileen argues about Marxism with acquaintances at a party, defending a definition of the working class that includes anyone forced to sell their labor to survive. … the closest any one of them seems to come to actual political involvement is Simon, who works as some sort of low-ranking legislative aide in an unnamed left-wing party.'
Eileen, Alice and Simon continually obsess about refugees, climate change and plastic, fear the imminent demise of civilization - and bemoan their utter irrelevance to any of these issues. What really energises them is the endless ebb and flow of their mutual relationships and their jagged emotions.
In another kind of book, Felix might have been the proletarian socialist hero, transmuting the others’ existential angst into a political agenda for change. But here he's both acultural and apolitical. Instead he's the voice of a common sense which no longer considers it remotely possible to think or act big.
The final resolution, although emotionally satisfying, appeals to a kind of nostalgic traditionalism. The comforts of hearth and home, or the sturdy framework of great religion - in the Irish context a kind of Jesus-centric reimagining of the Catholic church. Simon is there already while Alice seems halfway to following. There is a collective retreat into private spaces.
Sally Rooney may have little to say in this novel about any resolution to the crisis of the Marxist left, now marginalised by the shallow crassness of modern Critical Theory, but her invocation of such contemporary dilemmas, particularly her character development, is superlative.
The novel is a page-turner: you care what happens to Eileen and Alice, Simon and Felix. And you may appreciate Rooney's deft scene descriptions and compelling depictions of interpersonal dramas.
Recommended.
