Title: Beautiful World, Where Are You
Author: Sally Rooney
Genre: Literary fiction
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: September 2021
Format: Hardcover
Length: 356 pages

Rating:

I’m always a little trepidatious before I start a piece of literary fiction. I think it’s from the scars of reading so many books I simply didn’t enjoy throughout my education that my confidence in the genre has been shaken. I was particularly nervous about Sally Rooney since people seem to be adamantly for her or against her, but it turns out I needn’t have worried because she was exactly what I needed.

Beautiful World, Where Are You was such a poignant, emotional look into what it is to love and live and grow older. It was an eerily familiar depiction of the existential crisis that sometimes hits when you look at your life and it isn’t what you thought or expected it to be. I loved the way that Rooney so fluidly rotated perspectives, and that the characters she created were somehow irrationally intellectual and also completely accessible. It was a combination of so many things that I enjoyed that I can’t exactly pinpoint just one aspect that made it feel so compelling—it was just the feelings that were evoked, and all the different ways that Rooney was able to pull those feelings out of you. 

I can see why Rooney might not be for everyone. Beautiful World, Where Are You was definitely a more unique approach to a narrative, but I really, thoroughly enjoyed it. I will definitely be picking up other works from her.

The Book: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You begins rotates through four 30-something main characters: Eileen, an Editor at a literary magazine who is struggling with the various ways that she’s dissatisfied with her life, Alice, a novelist of some fame who is recently recovered from a nervous breakdown and is Eileen’s best friend, Simon, an activist and parliamentary assistant who has been a lifelong bachelor and Eileen’s unrequited love, and Felix, a warehouse labourer in a rut who finds himself entangled with Alice. They’re all in varying states of disarray and disillusionment about their lives and their potentials and whether or not they’ll ever live up to their own, or to society’s, expectations of them.

As the plot moves forward, they each become more entangled with each other as they try to work out essential questions like whether or not they’re happy, whether their jobs or their contributions to society have any meaning, and whether or not they’re in love and if they are, if that love is enough. They’re all carrying baggage from childhood traumas and/or family dynamics and trying to find a way to extrapolate themselves from those issues. Alice and Simon have achieved more conventional levels of success, but neither has felt particularly fulfilled as a result. Eileen and Felix feel more like they’ve been shafted, like their potential has been wasted and they’re completely stuck in unsatisfying positions that they’ll never be able to climb out of. As they come together, all of this angst and strife and anxiety will come to a head as they try to figure out who they are, who they want to be, and how they fit together (if at all).

The Review

I felt like this book was such an interesting approach to growing older and the perception of success and fulfilment. All four characters are in their 30s, some with more conventional success than the others, but none really seem to feel as though the life they envisioned for themselves, or the happiness and fulfillment that they assumed they’d achieve, has really come to fruition. They toy with each other’s emotions and they dance around what they mean because the situations they’re in are hard and awkward and painful to deal with. I felt like Rooney did a really good job of creating these characters who feel kind of intellectual but who have that common ineptitude we all have when we’re ignoring our problems or suppressing what’s really going on in our heads and our hearts. They make very human mistakes and hurt each other in really human ways because they’re still coming to terms with what they need and want and how to articulate those things to each other.

The dynamics between the characters were also super compelling. In fact, the dynamics were so important that I don’t think I would have been able to stand any of the characters on their own without the ways that they interacted with each other. They were all deeply flawed in one way or another, and I’m not sure that any of them were actually super likeable on their own, but when they came together, the way that they interacted and the emotion that Rooney pulls from you through their relationships made them so much more compelling. By the end, I felt really invested in their relationships and where they might go in the future. I’m particularly sad we didn’t get to read more about Felix in the pandemic because that would have been a whole subplot that I think would have been wildly entertaining.

It’s been a while since I read a book that I felt quite so reflective and emotional about. There were a lot of times when I’d put the book down after a chapter and just think through the ramifications of what had occurred and how realistic it felt. I really enjoyed this book and the style that Rooney used to bring it to life. It’s made me a fan and definitely has me wanting to pick up her other works to see if they hold the same weight for me.