I'm right over here.

Yeah whatever it's a Sally Rooney post.

Berthe Morisot à l'éventail, Édouard Manet

Sally Rooney is a lot of things—among them, famous and adored (and disliked, by some).¹ The entire apparatus of marketing that’s surrounded her new book, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, has made me feel secondhand embarrassment so intense that it has been at times physically painful. Bucket hats, pop up shops…it was all too much, particularly when put next to Rooney’s own statements to the press about how much she hates publicity and fame.

I don’t mean her statements were disingenuous, but that it reminded me a little bit of going to see Keats’s grave. There’s Keats’s tombstone, with his name left off per his desires (maybe), and then next to it is another grave that basically says, here lies the best friend of John Keats, who is buried to the left, he’s the guy over there. Some wishes are doomed from the start and when you are an author who reliably makes your publisher money your wishes for privacy are especially doomed. Her attitude of complaining about what she can and washing her hands of the rest seems sensible.

I was (and am) a big fan of Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends. But the novel that really made her big and famous was the second one, Normal People, and that book I’ve always felt pretty cold on. Most of what had made Conversations with Friends so interesting to me just wasn’t there: the focus on the interplay of many relationships (not just one couple), the use of intellect to avoid intimacy (never works), the flirtations with Catholicism from a plausibly ironic distance (maybe somebody should wear one of those god loves me sweatshirts). It’s entirely possible that Normal People would grow on me with a reread. But I’ve never been that interested in giving it another shot.

So it was with some trepidation that I started Beautiful World, Where Are You? But if Normal People was a misstep, Beautiful World goes back to where Conversations with Friends left things and then goes further. In so doing it loses some of what made Conversations with Friends good; but it gains things, too.² What follows isn’t a formal review but some typed up thoughts after reading the book. If you care about “spoilers” you should probably stop reading around here.

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The scene in Beautiful World where it began to cohere for me comes around a quarter in. Famous novelist Alice has gone to Rome with Felix, a guy she doesn’t really know. When they’re getting dinner, she mentions her friendship with Eileen, her onetime roommate, and another of the novel’s main characters. Alice remarks that while Eileen was popular and beautiful and much-sought-after, she, Alice, was a weirdo and a loner: “I was like her sidekick…. Nobody really understood why she would want to be friends with me, because she was very popular, and everyone kind of hated me. But I think perversely she enjoyed having a best friend nobody liked.”

Not that unusual a remark, except that we have already seen Eileen’s version of this, in which Eileen, coming from a childhood in which she had no friends, meets Alice and is smitten. In Eileen’s telling of their friendship, it is true that she is more socially popular than Alice, but she is cast as the dutiful grind to Alice’s abrasive brilliance, and in any case the tables have turned since graduation. Alice is now famous and much desired, and Eileen is working a dead end, if “intellectual,” job. They live far apart now—though, not that far apart—and thus the mythology of which way the imbalance in their friendship goes can continue unchecked by any intruding reality.

Alice’s comment is really significant for what it reveals about their friendship: both of them think of themselves as the one who needs the other more. Since Alice and Eileen’s friendship is the heart of the book, meticulously documented in long emails back and forth, this sets us up for what will happen when the two of them are eventually reunited, i.e., a huge fight about who has been more devoted, and thus, more ignored.

Beautiful World’s use of email has proven divisive, on the level first of plausibility (do late twenty somethings write emails?) then on the level of content (aren’t these emails a bit overwrought?). Since most people in the novel don’t write emails, but text each other, I think the emailing conceit is supposed to come off as a little odd, and telling about the friendship itself. Alice and Eileen are best friends, but their friendship either requires the constant, low-boundary access that being roommates supplies, or else something more formal and constrained. Texting isn’t intense enough.

But Alice and Eileen’s mutual hesitance to see each other in person again also indicates that there’s a fear of that twenty four seven-ness either coming back or not coming back; after their fight, Eileen and Alice have the following exchange:

I just want everything to be like it was, Eileen said. And for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different. Alice was smiling sadly. But if things are different, can we still be friends? she asked. Eileen put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. If you weren’t my friend I wouldn’t know who I was, she said. Alice rested her face in Eileen’s arm, closing her eyes. No, she agreed. I wouldn’t know who I was either.

Obviously one note captured here is wistful nostalgia for the kind of atmosphere friendships can have in college, the access to exciting new ideas without having to make yourself look for them, having time that’s structured but also your own. It’s this feeling that I think is captured in a very familiar way in the emails. But I also thought the comment about not knowing who you are significant because sometimes you don’t want to know who you are, you want the possibility of being somebody that isn’t the person you’ve come to be vis a vis your friend.

The looming backdrop of this conversation, and all their conversations, is Alice’s past mental breakdown, which Alice first tried to hide from Eileen and which subsequently made her dependent on Eileen for support. If who you are is the crazy friend, if your love of your friend seems to reveal an insufficiency in yourself, then the friendship becomes a trap. The defensive form of the email is one way of trying to make sure your friend is never close enough to tell if you’re going crazy again.³

In a different context, in one of the emails, Alice mentions longing for relationships that are entirely formless, “to pour the water out and let it fall.” This is in a conversation more at heart about romantic relationships than other kinds of relationships, but once the water falls, wherever it is that it goes, it does form something—a groove, a stain. Even friendships acquire forms and even friendships can be trapped and even killed under shared intimacy.

Rooney’s characters use intellectual activity as a way of deflecting their own feelings but also as a safe place for emotional intensity; what works about the emails is not what is in them so much as the way they are a formal reconstruction of talking about anything and everything with a friend for hours, with the digressions and spit-balling and occasional grandiosity and getting in over your head that all these things entail.

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But on to what I really want to talk about.

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You would not know this from reading about it, but Beautiful World has a lot about God, and Catholicism specifically, in it—most blatantly in the emails between Alice and Eileen, where Alice in particular flirts with what you could call a left-wing conservatism: something anti-capitalist, free of the problems of old forms of life, but with the old forms back, purified somehow. “I guess you could say the old ways of being together were wrong—they were!—and that we didn’t want to repeat old mistakes—we didn’t,” she writes to Eileen.

But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing.

In his review of Beautiful World for the London Review of Books, Christian Lorentzen singles out a passage from one of Alice’s emails, in which she agonizes about a prepackaged sandwich: “It was as if I suddenly remembered that my life was all part of a television show—and every day people died making the show, were ground to death in the most horrific ways, children, women, and all so that I could choose from various lunch options, each packaged in multiple layers of single-use plastic.”

“What strikes me about this passage,” Lorentzen notes, “is the latent sadism and vanity at play in imagining that whole populations are being ground to death so that you may be served a sandwich or whatever.”⁴ I would agree this is present, but what also stands out in this passage is that the concrete expression, ultimately, of Alice’s political commitments is feeling bad about a sandwich that you’ll eat anyway. “Maybe for the rest of the day I feel bad,” she concludes, “even for the rest of the week—so what? I still have to buy lunch.”

Alice and Eileen’s politics are an intelligent fatalism: the world is bad, everything participates in exploitation, but unless you’re going to kill yourself, all you can do is remind yourself of it from time to time. Guilt is praxis. But this is also, it has to be said, how many people engage with politics: yo-yoing between self-condemnation and consumption.⁵

The sandwich scene has two counterparts: one in Conversations with Friends and one in Beautiful World itself, both centered on moments of interconnection which are also vertigo-inducing, but in a different mode. From Conversations with Friends, when Frances, our heroine, wanders into a church after a series of personal tragedies:

I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I’m sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight. And even things built by machines were really built by human beings, who built the machines initially. And human beings themselves, made by other humans, struggling to create happy children and families. Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me here in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others.⁶

It would of course be obscene to rebrand actual exploitation in this fashion, but in the church, struggling to pray, Frances has a moment of seeing that people are more than guilty individuals, that dependence is not wrong, and that all of the ways in which our lives shape and are shaped by other people are, or can be, beautiful.

And this fits with how things are in Beautiful World: Alice and Eileen cannot believe wholeheartedly in the salvific nature of beauty and art, as a generation before them could.⁷ In another email, Alice writes about her own work: “Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter?”

But then the politics that have come after the pursuit of art are a dead end, even if the beliefs that constitute those politics are true, and retreating into everyday happiness is also unsatisfying if you are aware it is enabled by economic exploitation. Conversation and sex provide the actual ground on which Rooney’s characters meet and connect, but conversation itself isn’t a way of life and the connections made in sex, real as they are, do not translate clearly or obviously to the life outside of it. The other player in this dynamic, the proposed solution, much as it is in Conversations with Friends, is Catholicism.⁸

To be clear: I don’t mean that Beautiful World is a brief for becoming Catholic (it isn’t a brief for anything… it is a novel). I mean that the consistent alternative in the book itself—the possibility that unites living a human life, loving and cultivating beauty, and working for a better world—is Catholicism, as embodied by one of the characters (Simon, Eileen’s love interest, who goes to Mass and is the only one who works in politics) and flirted with by the others. It is not an especially realized Catholicism (aside from going to Mass, there’s not much that’s clearly Catholic about Simon),⁹ but it’s there and takes up a substantial part of the story.

Beautiful World’s own moment of transcendent interconnection comes at the wedding of Eileen’s sister Lola—who is, to put it bluntly, a huge bitch—which is also the moment, plotwise, that precedes the promised moment of connection between the two parts of the story we’ve been following for so long (Alice’s life in Mayo with Felix, Eileen’s in Dublin with Simon). The chapter initially slides from each member of the family to the next as they remember or reflect on their family life together, starting with Lola, who—despite being, well, see above—gets a memory of being pulled out from the sea by her father, and lingering afterward on the fringes of adult conversation. Lola is given beauty and is the occasion for beauty, no matter how she was before and how she will be after—which is grace.

The wedding provides a moment of individuality and of unity, of tension and of reconciliation, through its journey among the memories of the attendees. That it is a wedding—one of the old forms that Alice feels such nostalgia for, while also condemning—is, obviously, part of why it can do this. I think there is a suggestion here that no matter what kind of a person you are, weddings themselves are simply sincere—they cannot be ironized or distanced—the same way that, later, having a child is sincere. Having sex is also (probably?) always sincere, but localized.¹⁰

Am I sold on this idea? Well… hmmm… ask me another time, but it’s true that this polyphonic quality of the participants, this consecration of the past and the future, is something always present to me in weddings and in marriages. But in the transfiguration of Lola I do think something is real is being expressed, that sometimes we get moments where we are better than what we are, or perceived so that something latent in us becomes legible, and that may not stay, but it’s always real; people become who they are, in an everyday sense, through a hundred factors, but they are capable of becoming who they really are, in a higher sense, if the light comes through, in the right way, at the right time.¹¹

The wedding scene is crucial partly for lifting the book’s flirtation with Catholicism out of the realm of the instrumental. It isn’t simply that Catholicism could provide a psychological release, that it’s a vessel for a “meaning” the characters are largely too modern to believe in (if not to want), or that rituals give us something important, though all of those things are true. It is instead that there is a possibility of being changed, being transformed, seeing the world suffused with love, in a way that is not individualistic, not (in the political sense) quietist. What if aesthetics and politics and morality and everyday human happiness all cohered in something that was bigger than them, and what if all that was as simple as believing in something and going to church?

It isn’t that simple—including if you believe it¹²—and I think the undersketched quality of the Catholicism in the book speaks to this; real Catholicism, with its real ugly (and sometimes not) history, its real saints and its real dogmas and its real kitschiness, might (really) be all of these things, but as I guess I am often saying, religion is not by itself a solution, nor does it promise to be, it’s just a different way of seeing and understanding the problems. You will still feel guilty, overwhelmed, alone, and so on, even if you go to Mass every day. The ultimate longing in Beautiful World is for something, not “not” political, not pre-political, but beyond the political, encompassing it, reinforcing it, but beyond it.

But no one, Simon aside, goes to church, nor do they even do something as basic as believe in God; Alice will say that she loves Jesus as a real person without in fact believing him to be so, Eileen will go to Mass and be moved, Felix is immune to the allure of the church altogether, but crossing the line into real belief is not something anything they’re going to do. Once again I think this comes down to sincerity; to insincerely believe in God is quite possible, to view God as a nice concept is easy, but to sincerely go to Mass is, to invoke a term Rooney never does, cringe. It would, at the very least, require a measure of doing something embarrassing that goes beyond the intellectual.

Is that impossible for these characters? No, or at least I don’t think so; but if it happens, we don’t get to see it. What we get to see instead is moments of beauty. If that’s all there ever is, is that not, in its way, enough?¹³ And if our four characters are not quite as sincere as they’d like to be, we nonetheless observe them first in a very cold, hostile, and distanced third person that by the end has dissolved into the warm first person of the email. You can stay outside of your life forever, but then, you could step inside. Maybe life and beauty is just the old, unsatisfying humanism back in another guise. But maybe it could be something else, too.

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Anyway, I’m sending this lieu of the Wednesday roundup / Friday essay. Sorry if you don’t care about Sally Rooney… but then you’re probably having a bad time anyway. There’s honestly plenty of other stuff to say about the book. Furthermore, I worry a little that my discussion of the role of religion above has made it sound more didactic than it is—it is mostly a romance where you’re going, get together you dumdums! But I wanted to write a bit about the God stuff because I haven’t read a lot about it.

1. Sally Rooney fans have a case of sore winners, which is hopefully a dynamic that won’t be reproduced here. But this also isn’t going to be an argument with her critics, except in a few spots.

2. Conversations with Friends is very funny… Beautiful World isn’t really.

3. That Eileen is constantly asking Alice if she should really be traveling for work, etc., indicates that this isn’t a problem that just Alice has.

4. I wanted to quote Lorentzen’s review here mostly because I emailed with him about it a little and that was why the sandwich passage came to mind, not so much to single it out.

5. Not really where I’m going here but one could also note that Alice has to eat lunch, which is not actually the same thing as having to buy lunch.

6. I didn’t want this quote to get too long but the rest of the paragraph is also relevant: “Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.”

7. This is one reason I think Lauren Michele Jackson’s comparison to Elizabeth Costello is very apt.

8. It really is Catholicism rather than religion as a category, or even Christianity as a category, which could just be a function of Rooney being Irish. Anyway I don’t think it’s meant to be Catholicism as opposed to other religions exactly, but it feels disingenuous to pretend her focus could be more general.

9. It’s an interesting question how it could have changed the dynamic of the book if Rooney had allowed him a few annoying beliefs—in particular, that he and Eileen are clearly in love with each other but don’t date each other has been singled out in some reviews as improbable. I didn’t find it too improbable, but if Simon were, i.e., committed to not having premarital sex, that could represent a clear reason that they weren’t dating, though I’m not sure it would have made the book more interesting. In the book, Simon’s religiosity mostly manifests through eating shit, which, to be fair, isn’t nothing.

I’ll also say that there’s a level of hostility toward Simon for being religious in the book that I found improbable… but that also might be the difference between an American context and an Irish one. Alice’s belief that religion is the solution to all her problems but also unavailable to her for… some reason… is the attitude I, personally, am more familiar with.

10. I think criticisms of Rooney as sexually reactionary (in terms of viewing BDSM, hookups, etc as “bad”) are basically right and I think this question of sincerity is a big part of it, but I am not going to write that essay.

11. i.e. sin makes us less human, not more.

12. Not to pull rank.

13. Claire Jarvis mentions the singling out of the reading from the Song of Solomon at the wedding here: “O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely.” I have always regarded the Song of Solomon as the light counterpart to Ecclesiastes (which is not quoted, but certainly echoed in some parts of the book), in its celebration of a particular kind of earthly happiness that looks heavenward, it’s just that they get there in very different ways. That the book starts from the position all is vanity and ends your voice is sweet, your face is lovely, seems true to me. But this is my own little thing, not Rooney’s, so it’s going in the footnote.