Last year I listened to Conversations With Friends and Normal People, both by Sally Rooney.

Recently, we watched the TV dramatization of Normal People (written by Rooney herself, with Alice Birch and Mark O'Rowe). I was moved by the story all over again, and thought the series did the book great justice. Others thought so too, and it got great reviews ("a triumph in every way"; "a lovely series, ... the kind of project that looks easy to do well but emphatically isn't"; showcasing a "trifecta of elegant writing, directing, and acting".) Adding another dimension to the experience was the superb soundtrack (and here is a helpful rundown of every song, arranged by episode).

Anyway, having enjoyed that, I thought it was appropriate to reach for Sally Rooney's third, which had been languishing in my e-library for a while.

This one was published in 2021, and it was the first I had actually read, as opposed to listened to. I could still hear the Irish voices in my head, though, and there is no doubt that Rooney does conversation brilliantly (although personally I miss the inverted commas, the lack of which you don't notice in the audio-version, of course -- I like those little bristles, and find conversations look bald without them).

Whereas I did not like Conversations, but thought it was clever, and liked Normal People, as well as thinking it clever, I ended Beautiful World feeling really ambivalent...

We are introduced to four people. Alice is a highly successful novelist, recovering from a breakdown at a large west-coast property that she has borrowed from friends; Felix, her new sort-of-boyfriend, works in a warehouse, which he hates, and is set up initially as a bit of a bad boy; Eileen, who roomed with Alice at college, is an underpaid editor in Dublin; Simon, whom Eileen has known since childhood, does something high-powered and political, but despite this is a very nice guy.

They all have "issues". Alice's are perhaps the most acute, given that she is not long out of psychiatric hospital. Both the Alice-Felix couple and the Eileen-Simon one are still together by the end of the book (at which point we're in covid lockdown times). In both cases, I guess we're somewhat surprised. Felix seems too different from Alice; he is somewhat unpredictable, and can be extraordinarily cruel; plus he resents Alice's power over him -- all of which seems like a fairly lethal combination, despite the little softening touches that have been applied. Eileen and Simon, meanwhile, seem to have a self-sabotaging mechanism (he has a "saviour complex", and is emotionally inaccessible, while she has a congenital need for reassurance); how that's going to play out when their baby arrives we're not really sure.

There are definite connections with the other novels. It's largely the same milieu: Dublin, lifestyles, students, writers, depression... Trips abroad during which Things Happen in Relationships. A warm but tense and competitive female relationship; a mother and brother ganging up on the daughter/sister...



Rooney's psychology is always her strong point, and as well as leaving us in a place where we think there's definitely scope for a sequel involving these characters, there are also elements from all their personalities that resonate with me.

Eileen is perhaps the most interesting. Here she is emailing Alice: "I do feel like a failure, and in a way my life really is nothing, and very few people care what happens in it. It's so hard to see the point sometimes, when the things in life I think are meaningful turn out to mean nothing... Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person's sense of self permanently." Later, she says: "I know that if I really had any talent I would have done something with my life by now -- I don't delude myself about that. If I tried I'm sure I would fail and that's why I've never tried... I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven't arisen. But what if that's not true? What if I'm the one who can't let myself be happy? ... Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possible straight away, so at least I don't have to feel anxious about it anymore."

And Simon at one point analyses his relationship with his mother like this: "I think she sometimes feels kind of confused and frustrated with me. Like in terms of my career, the decisions I've made... I don't blame my mother for being confused. I don't know what happened to my life either... Whenever I think about my parents I feel guilty. I was just the wrong son for them, it wasn't their fault."

Rooney's politics are also often spot on:

"People think that socialism is sustained by force -- the forcible expropriation of property -- but I wish they would just admit that capitalism is also sustained by exactly the same force in the opposite direction, the forcible protection of existing property arrangements." True, that... Similarly, there's this very astute reflection on conservatism's inherent contradiction in terms: "We can't conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature."

Melding the psychological and the political, the whole book is a fascinating extended riff on the topic that came up in The Aspern Papers. When a work of art becomes available to us, the public, does that give us any right to a piece of the artist?

Not unlike Rooney herself, Alice is an extremely successful writer (a book deal for USD 250,000 at the age of 24, plus multiple awards, some very lucrative). But Alice feels overwhelmed by it all: "Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way. I can't believe I have to tolerate these things -- having articles written about me, and seeing my photograph on the internet, and reading comments about myself. When I put it like that, I think: that's it? And so what? But the fact is, although it's nothing, it makes me miserable, and I don't want to live this kind of life. When I submitted the first book, I just wanted to make enough money to finish the next one. I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing. People who intentionally become famous -- I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it -- are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease."

Alice profoundly questions a literary process that insists on forging a very personal association between a book and its author. This way of doing things, she says, "serves to arrange literary discourse entirely around the domineering figure of 'the author', whose lifestyle and idiosyncrasies must be picked over in lurid detail for no reason". She sums up her experience like this: "I feel like I've been locked in a smoke-filled room with thousands of people shouting at me incomprehensibly day and night for the last several years... My sturdy peasant ancestors did little to prepare me for a career as a widely despised celebrity novelist."

So that's all good. Interesting. Meaty. Thought-provoking.



What, then, did I react against? Well, those great slabs of email for a start... Several chapters consist of emails sent between Alice and Eileen. Example (Alice to Eileen): "You should know that our correspondence is my way of holding on to life, taking notes on it, and thereby preserving something of my -- otherwise almost worthless, or even entirely worthless -- existence on this rapidly degenerating planet." Does anyone actually write emails like this...?

Alice goes on to expand on the iniquities of the convenience shop, with its drinks in plastic bottles and its pre-packed lunches and its store-baked pastries: "This is it, the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations. All for this!... 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... and all so that I could choose from various lunch options, each packaged in multiple layers of single-use plastic."

Eileen replies: "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..."

Now, I occasionally have moments like that. I guess we all do. No-one with a still active brain can live in this world without thinking how fundamentally absurd and tragic it all is in many ways.

But aside from the aesthetics of it -- the clunky juxtaposition of these blocky emails with the free-running conversation -- I found myself wondering, a quarter of the way through: Is this perceptive, or just pretentious? There was a fragile quality to the book, I felt, like tiles breaking under your feet as you walk -- and that's good. But I found myself more and more unsure, as I read certain passages: Is this insightful, or just arrogant; is it clever, or is it cliche? How seriously is Rooney herself taking this characters? Is she perhaps offering them up for ridicule? But I don't think so, because some of what I baulked at came as part of the authorial narrative (as opposed to the first-person emails and text exchanges).



Some examples:

-- Pretentious, or just unashamedly intellectual?

We hear people quoting Rilke, see them reading The Karamazov Brothers (isn't it usually rendered The Brothers Karamazov, by the way?), talking about Henry James, reading an internet article about Annie Ernaux... All that specificity... I guess I still have that working-class thing about not parading your knowledge. Felix knows what I mean. When he takes the other three to meet this friends, he tells them: "Now just be normal, alright? Don't go in there talking about like, world politics and shit like that. People will think you're freaks."

-- Cliched, or am I missing something?

"After graduating, Eileen started a Master's degree in Irish Literature, and Alice got a job in a coffee shop and started writing a novel." Eileen visits Simon in Paris, after he's broken up with his girlfriend: "They went out to museums together in the afternoons and talked about art and politics." Eileen meets a man called Aidan: "In the autumn, they went to Florence for a few days and walked through the cool of the cathedral together." Kind of sounds like automatic pilot... And the clothing details drive me crazy: "Eileen was standing in the hallway wearing a cropped grey sweatshirt and a pleated cotton skirt"; "she arrived at the bar... wearing a grey turtleneck and tapered trousers". These throwaway sartorial mini-descriptions feel, to me, so at odds with the gravity of the novel.

-- Falsely self-conscious, or just politically responsible?

An email from Eileen: "I think I've also experienced that sensation you had in the convenience shop. For me it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I'm standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth." Which sounds awfully empathetic and self-aware -- but actually deprives almost everyone else on the planet of any agency... All those millions stop being people with lives and loves and friendships of their own, and just become poor and degraded; in the name of being high-minded, what is expressed here actually comes across as really callous and demeaning.

Similarly, Alice confesses that when she wrote her novels, it was important to prove that she was "a special person". She continues: "Only afterwards, when I had received the money and acclaim which I believed I deserved, did I understand that it was not possible for anyone to deserve these things, and by then it was too late. I had already become the person I had once longed to be, and now energetically despised. I don't say this to slight my work. But why should anyone be rich and famous while other people live in desperate poverty?" It's all very well to feel this when you ARE rich and famous (Alice reckons she's a millionaire)... But we don't actually see her doing anything to correct the false balance she thinks has arisen. At the end, she's planning to buy the house she has been borrowing, but we don't see her offering to let it out to refugees... It is as though, as Jennifer Wilson puts it, the characters "want you to know they considered alternatives to capitalism"...



-- A tad arrogant, or just sweetly self-deprecating?

Alice again: "They never tire of giving me awards, do they? It's a shame I've tired so quickly of receiving them, or my life would be endless fun." Alice really is tone-deaf when it comes to parading her riches and successes before people with much less to chalk up to their credit (notably Felix and Eileen). Alice is is not necessarily Rooney (although Caleb Crain maintains Beautiful World is "a sort of Being Sally Rooney", and Jane Hu concurs that "it is difficult not to interpret the character as a stand-in for Rooney"). Either way, it's a little too bold, I would think, for a successful author to be entirely pulling the rug out from under the credibility of her field.

-- Just plain wrong?

I don't think any of us should be worshipping at the shrine of literature, and setting its creators up as demigods. On the other hand, if you take your iconoclasm too far, you end up insulting the reader... Eileen, for example, maintains: "I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase... The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant." And then there's Alice, who "can't read contemporary novels anymore", because, she assures us, writers know nothing about ordinary life: "Most of them haven't so much as glanced up against the real world in decades... Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism -- when really they're obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times?... If novelists wrote honestly about their own lives, no one would read novels -- and quite rightly! Maybe then we would finally have to confront how wrong, how deeply philosophically wrong, the current system of literary production really is -- how it takes writers away from normal life, shuts the door behind them, and tells them again and again how special they are and how important their opinions must be... 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."

At this point, I just want to give Alice a reading list... There are plenty of Euro-American novels that deal with the lived realities of at least some of the earth's marginalized. And there are plenty of accessible non-Euro-American novels that can help fill in the gaps for at least some of the rest. Yes, reading and writing are probably always going to be elitist activities. But elites with a wider vision of the world are always preferable to elites stuck in the narrow imaginative confines of their own lives.

-- Self-flagellating, or absolutely right?

Alice goes on: "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? ... So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world... 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, ie 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."

Here you really start to wonder, if you haven't already, whether Rooney is taking the mickey... And that's a slightly dangerous thought to allow to grow in the mind of a reader. At the very least, you feel Hu is right, and the so-correct, so-aware philosophical considerations that are rehearsed in those emails are Rooney's "attempts to preemptively control the cacophony that surrounds the reception of her work".

-- Copping out, or actually onto something?

At the heart of the book is a disconnect between the characters' awareness of world crisis and their day-to-day routine of relationships and jobs. It's not just novels that work "by suppressing the truth of the world". It's daily life; the nitty-gritty of all the stuff that occupies our time; the people we deal with. Our tragedy as humans is that if we daily internalized "the truth of the world", we'd possibly go crazy, and definitely would not have enough physical and emotional energy to get on with the business of living. So we have an infinite number of mechanisms that protect us and cushion us from what is actually just too big for us to handle. One of those mechanisms is the stories we have told each other from time immemorial; another is the network of personal relationships in which every life is embedded.

It's Eileen who summarizes this: "Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing." She later continues: "What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal...? What if these things [civilizations] just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always -- just to live and be with other people?" For Alice, too, the task of life is starting to boil down to "trying to love other people instead of hating them, and there is nothing else that matters on the earth".

*_*_*

The title comes from The Gods of Greece, a poem by Friedrich Schiller first published in 1788. (Franz Schubert set some of it to music in 1819, and there's a version here, sung by Christoph Pregard).

The translation by Richard Wigmore admirably conveys the melancholy, regret, and hopelessness of the original:

Fair world, where are you? Return again,
sweet springtime of nature!
Alas, only in the magic land of song
does your fabled memory live on.
The deserted fields mourn,
no god reveals himself to me;
of that warm, living image
only a shadow has remained.

What can we do then, each of us, in face of this wreckage? Tell stories, surely, about the things that are always going to matter, and try to encourage each other to love, not hate. Which gives Sally Rooney plenty more scope, I would have thought.