On Beautiful World, Where Are You

I don’t really know what to make of this book. I saw all my Goodreads friends reading it, so I thought it might be good for my end-of-year break where I try to pick up some contemporary fiction.

At its core, this book is about two things: sexuality and friendship. Although there are some sexually explicit scenes here, that doesn’t seem to be the center of gravity. Instead, the questions Rooney raises are more about how does attraction happen, what is the experience like, and what does it mean to be intimate? I know that these are common questions in romance novels, but Rooney handles that aspect quite well. The most important relationship in the book is between two best friends, Eileen and Alice, both are invested in literature and the friendship seems largely realistic. It’s obvious that they care deeply about one another, even if they don’t always express it very well.

The good is that the story is largely cohesive and interesting, even if it doesn’t always seem to have a ton of momentum. This is a character-driven story without too many externalities, and I appreciated Rooney’s ability to keep her characters at the center without losing sight of what she has to say.

But there are some serious flaws with this book. The worst of them is probably the emails. Although the emails give us some insight into the inner workings of Alice and Eileen’s thoughts, they don’t work here. I recognize some of myself in the style that they write, but her characters come off as performative champagne socialists. At one point, Alice talks about the working class and how it’s necessary to work with them for justice, but Alice’s boyfriend Felix is a working-class guy and we see no conversation in terms of leftist politics between the two of them. Moreover, there is some meta discussion here of beauty, the nature of writing and art, and pushing through the cynicism of a specific art form while maintaining that form to produce, instead, sincerity (this isn’t said outright, but I get the sense it’s what Rooney is trying to do). By this, I refer to Alice’s (and Rooney’s) complaints about modern life and celebrity while still maintaining that celebrity and claiming to be able to speak for those who aren’t millionaires. In all honesty, it reminded me a little bit of Bo Burnham’s Inside where he knows his work is, on some level, exploitative, but pushes through it to make something meaningful. Burnham largely (although not entirely, see his song “Problematic”) succeeds here, where I don’t find that Rooney does. Some of the other discussions were interesting, but the real problem is that the emails completely destroy the momentum of the story. Epistolary novels can be good, but sprinkling in epistolary chapters in a novel like this simply doesn’t do the story justice.

The other major flaw is the characters. This is a huge issue in a character-driven novel. Alice and Felix were both thoroughly unlikable, Simon was one-dimensional, and, while I did generally like Eileen, she was deeply self-centered. Part of me thinks that this is the point, the characters aren’t supposed to be likable, especially Felix (who, at times, is outright cruel). But, if that’s the case, they should not get a “happily ever after.” While Alice grates on me, I don’t think she’s a bad person although she is a bad friend. Felix is a bad person. Eileen needs to learn how to advocate for herself, as

Spoiler

she nearly wrecks both her friendship and her quasi-relationship by waiting to say something until the heat of the moment.

Simon just kinda … exists? I can understand making unlikable characters if Rooney is trying to teach us something—Stephanie Soileau does this well in her short story, “Haguillory,” for instance—but I don’t think Rooney is going there with this book, I think she’s trying to do something else, and it just didn’t work for me.

I’m sure that there are plenty of readers who will like this more than I did. As far as I can tell, Rooney is an interesting and caring person, I just wish she did something a little different with this book.