“I think this puts our present civilisation in a kind of ominous light, don’t you? General systems collapse is not something I had ever really thought about as a possibility before. Of course I know in my brain that everything we tell ourselves about human civilisation is a lie. But imagine having to find out in real life.”
-Beautiful World, Where Are You
I believe it’s needless to say that I’m an anxious person. A counselor in college declared it so, but the best way of describing what this means is whenever at work someone tells me not to worry about something, I respond by telling them that I worry about everything. At its best, it’s a kind of general caring about others and the world that makes me want to do my job, and my life, well, and at its worst it’s lying awake at night thinking about things like general systems collapse or the fact that it’s sunny and fifty in December at the time of writing this blog post. For one of my friends, it’s the persistent threat of nuclear Armageddon. For another, the climate. For another, the radical dems in congress robbing our way of life. For yet another, the radical repubs in congress robbing our way of life.
Earlier this year I tried talking to my parents about the generational anxiety so many of my friends feel. The usual culprits are all there, of course: the polarization of media, social media’s trigger-laden spell over all aspects of our lives, increased isolation and economic threat due to COVID. In truth, I think I failed in describing just how acute a pervasive sense of existential threat can seem to one living in the day to day.
Sally Rooney described it perfectly:
“Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.”
What Rooney manages to capture in the (textually-admitted) modernist and flowing narrative through the pages of Beautiful World, Where are You is the weight of a generation viewed through the lens of the thing Rooney is most adept at writing (at least in my experience): complicated relationships. The backbone of the book remains firm in the delicate balancing act of distant, struggling friendships and the disconcertingly vague way humans deal with each other sexually, romantically, and platonically. All of this remains framed, however, in that weighted sense of permanent existential threat, and when it works it works spectacularly. As I begin to look back on the stories which impacted me the most this year (a blog for a future date), I already know that Beautiful World, Where Are You will be near the top.
I believe, as I do about other of Rooney’s books, that this one will be divisive. This is mainly because it has similar appeal, style, and substance as, say, Normal People (one of my favorite books of all time). The substantive nature of this is what drew me first to it, and as stated above that is complicated interpersonal relationships. What Rooney does well is capture the nature of human interaction with an almost cold, but not uncaring, lens, rendering it sharply apparent for its failings and its graces. It is jarring, at once romanticizing and deploring and acknowledging the occasionally melodramatic ways we live and contextualize our relationships. See the opening of one of the early chapters:
“You should know that our correspondence is my way of holding onto life, taking notes on it, and thereby preserving something of my- otherwise almost worthless, or even entirely worthless- existence on this rapidly degenerating planet… I include this paragraph chiefly to make you feel guilty about not replying to me before now and therefore secure myself a swifter response this time. What are you doing, anyway, if not emailing me? Don’t say working.”
Or the fantasy between Eileen and Simon cut short then spurred to life by the acknowledgment of the truth between them:
“With mock indignation, Eileen interrupted: Certainly she’s not me. For one, thing, I’m a lot better read than she is. He went on smiling to himself. Sure, he said. But once I find her, whoever she might be, will you and I still be friends? She sat back against the sofa cushions then as if to consider the question. After a pause she replied: No. I think when you find her, you’ll have to give me up. It might even be that giving me up is a precondition for finding her in the first place.
“As I suspected, he said. I’ll never find her then.”
I think the appeal and the hesitation about getting involved with any of Rooney’s work is the author’s perceived will and desire to depict the unflattering examples of human behavior in an almost neutral light. Getting into a novel like Beautiful World, Where Are You is an understanding that you may find yourself beaten down by a cold, judgement-free world, that the parts of humanity you yourself ignore will be put to light simply as they are. That’s the impression, anyway, and it can be as demoralizing as it is inspirational.
The tension between those two emotions remains present through the novel as explored by one of the character’s ruminations on writing itself, the other primary reason I was drawn to read this book. It’s an internal struggle that seems to highlight and compliment the complicated nature of the lives swirling around the book. If it is demoralizing, it is because it is familiar, and if it is inspiring, it is because it is comforting. I think I wrote something similar in my review of Normal People, that it was like a friend’s comforting shoulder to cry on who would let you keep crying.
If that’s the case, I feel like Beautiful World, Where Are You is the friend who comes over with shots to comfort you. It is potent and cutting, an immaculate encapsulation of that sense of the world ending, of friendships ending, of standing at the edge of a new age and clinging to whatever is nearby and familiar to keep yourself feeling you. Even if:
“I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe she is me. Confronting this fact makes me feel I am already dead.”
Then, afterwards, you do wake up a little hungover. Maybe there’s regret, or maybe there’s catharsis. I can’t say for sure, only that there definitely was an impact. But I think the best compliment, besides the others I’ve already awarded the book above, I can offer is that this book did, and does, make me think. For all its talk of religion (and I did not touch on that in this blog post but there are some poignant reflections on religion and society), Beautiful World, Where Are You can read like some great philosophical text. At its best, the book is rooted in stories that show their lessons. If you sympathize with the grand existential questions of a generation, then even the long stretches of stream-of-consciousness philosophy as correspondence will grip you. If you can handle staring into the interplay of complex and stupid, disappointing and inspiring, caring and brutal people, then you can find yourself lost in the story as it is. It’s an experiment, at times going badly and at times seeming like the only kind worth having. At the end you’ll find yourself staring out at the world, wondering where you can find beauty in your own life and how to help others see it in theirs, too.
“For six years Morisot came to his studio, chaperoned by her mother, and he painted her, always clothed. Several of her own paintings hang in the museum too. Two girls sharing a park bench in the Bois de Boulogne, one in a white dress, wearing a broad straw hat, bending her head forward over her lap, maybe she’s reading, the other girl in a dark dress, her long fair hair tied back with a black ribbon, showing to the viewer her white neck and ear. Behind them all the lush vague greenery of the public park. But Morisot never painted Manet. Six years after she met him, and apparently at his suggestion, she married his brother. He painted her just once more, wedding ring glittering dark on her delicate hand, and then never again. Don’t you think that’s a love story? It reminds me of you and Simon. And to give myself away even further, I duly add: thank God he has no brothers!”