Dear Readers:
Each month, you will receive an email from me about the boredom & the horror & the glory. This is the 38th one.
Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? is such an annoying book, because it’s kind of not-good, but it’s not at all dismissable. Like her other two novels, Normal People and Conversations with Friends, it has a child’s understanding of adulthood. All three books desperately force a happy love-ending that seems to betray everything the book has asked us to care about. The main characters have all this trauma and deep complexity that prevents them from being in loving long-term romantic relationships, but at the end of each novel, they enter relationships anyway, showing that their trauma and deep complexity have been resolved. Poof!
Rooney’s novels have endless descriptions of the late-capitalist bourgeois accouterments that they claim to be critiquing–but either Rooney (the Marxist) doesn’t care to imagine a character who exists outside of those trappings or she isn’t actually critiquing these things at all. For example, in my least favorite part of Beautiful World, we get a scene where the four main characters have dinner. Check it out:
When they had finished eating, Alice got up to clear the plates from the table. The rattling and scraping of cutlery, the noise of the tap. Simon was asking Felix about work. Tired now and contented, Eileen sat quietly with her eyes half-closed. A fruit crumble warming in the oven. On the table the detritus of the meal, a soiled napkin, sodden leaves in the salad bowl, soft drops of blue-white candle wax on the tablecloth. Alice asked whether anyone wanted coffee. For me, please, said Simon. A carton of ice cream melting slowly on the countertop, wet rivulets running down the sides.
Ew, I hate this! “The rattling and scraping of cutlery, the noise of the tap.” Who’s washing the dishes? Is Alice doing it, even though she cooked the whole dinner? Or is the mention of Simon and Felix in the next sentence meant to suggest that they’re doing it, because they’re such progressive young millennial guys? Why won’t she tell us? And in the descriptions of the food, even the syntax is overwrought. “A fruit crumble warming in the oven”; “A carton of ice cream melting slowly on the countertop, wet rivulets running down the sides.” The “to be” verbs in these clauses just refused to show up. They were as disgusted as I was.
This scene is a cliché of a bourgeois dinner party, the “sodden leaves in the salad bowl, soft drops of blue-white candle wax on the tablecloth,” but there is little reason to think we’re supposed to feel ironical toward this scene. We’ve been wrapped up in these characters’ inner and outer lives and uninteresting romances for hundreds of pages at this point.
But–but–earlier in the novel, Alice, the Sally Rooney-like character who inflicted this dinner party on us, writes a letter to Eileen that suggests that Rooney may also be slightly disgusted by the dinner scene. Distraught at the life of lies and illusions her literary success has forced on her, Alice has moved to a rural town, and she and Eileen (her best friend) write each other emails in which they express themselves more clearly than they ever do within the action of the novel. Struggling with the ethics of being a contemporary novelist, Alice writes,
The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the “main characters” of the novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. …Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world, packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together–if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e., everything.
My own work is, it goes without saying, the worst culprit in this regard. For this reason I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel again.
The more I read this passage, the more interesting it becomes. “The contemporary Euro-American novel” is such a broad phrase. I wish Alice would name names. Edward P. Jones? Michel Houellebecq? Sheila Heti? Detransition Baby? The Old Drift? Rachel Cusk? The Swimming Pool Library? It’s funny and also difficult to think of this character taking direct aim at any one of these—which makes me think she’s just talking about herself, “the worst culprit,” which is much less exciting. (It would be so cool if she were talking about Rachel Cusk!) I introduced this quotation saying Alice is struggling with ethics, but that actually doesn’t seem right—as she says, it’s a matter of taste and artistic success: she thinks it doesn’t make a good novel to include “the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live.” But that’s another broad phrase. By putting it that way, slapping the words “poverty” and “misery” on “millions of people,” she makes those peoples’ lives sound unnovelistic, too big and important and real for a novel. Saying it like that, she sets up her own failure (“I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel again”) and then sulkily condemns us to the result for the rest of the book.
The dinner party scene appears way later in the book, far enough away that it’s not unreasonable that we would forget about the letter, or not think about it in direct relation to the dinner party. Did she write this scene in a paroxysm of Marxist rage, or sheepishly, hoping that we would forget all the nasty things Alice had said about people like Alice? Is this book good or bad?!
The dinner party scene ends like this: “Everything in one place. All of life knotted into this house for the night, like a necklace knotted at the bottom of a drawer.” But these are virtually the only characters in the book, and certainly the only characters who we are asked to follow, to care for. There is no threat, ever, of anything outside their lives in this book. Everything is always “in one place” here. Aside from that letter to Eileen, the book never threatens us with “the lived realities of most human beings on earth.” Eileen’s and Alice’s epistolary critiques of “the contemporary Euro-American novel” fade away as their romances heat up; the last two letters they send each other make no mention of these concerns. So what in the world am I supposed to make of this? Does Rooney hate this book? Hate these characters? Hate me, the reader? Does the apparent unanswerability of these questions mean she really is the first great millennial novelist? I have no idea.
Beautiful World is weirdly similar to Elif Batuman’s Either/Or (which I wrote about last month) though on their “glittering surfaces” they are quite different, because Either/Or is a hilarious comedy, while Rooney’s novels are deadly serious. (The characters she has introduced us to over the past few years are less interested in humor and jokes than anyone I’ve ever known.) But Beautiful World and Either/Or are both riffs on the epistolary novel, using email as the mode of epistle. They both are “political” in a duty-bound kind of way. They’re both partly about the miseducation of a young novelist and partly, graphically, about sex. And Alice, Eileen, and Selin (Batuman’s protagonist) all read Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady…and none of them seem to like it! What the hell? I want to tell you much more about that, and I will, next month.
Sincerely,
Lucy