REVIEW: ‘Beautiful World, Where are you’ by Sally Rooney
It took me a while to decide if it was worth me adding my thoughts about this book to the universe because it’s every where. If you’re involved in the book world at all then it’s been pretty inescapable since it was even announced. But I read it, I have thoughts and it’s my (and Sarah’s) website and I want to talk about it! So brace yourselves.
In you have managed to avoid the Rooney discourse, this is what her third novel is about:
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They worry about sex and friendship and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
I really loved ‘Normal People’, which was my first Sally Rooney novel, and I enjoyed ‘Conversations with Friends’, but I think ‘Beautiful World, Where are You’ is my least favourite so far. ‘Normal People’ crept up on to me and into my heart unexpectedly; it’s thoughtful and clever and quietly enthralling. With ‘Conversations with Friends’ I struggled with the pretentious and infuriating characters, but ultimately I was still utterly captivated, and with ‘Beautiful World, Where are You’ the characters were pretentious and hard to empathise with, but there wasn’t enough of the previous magic to win me over.
Rooney’s writing is beautiful. There’s no doubt about that at all. She captures authenticity and the gritty realness of emotions, friendships and relationships perfectly, but this missed the mark for me because of the characters. I can deal with unlikeable or unsympathetic characters, but I need a hook, a way in, a way to make a connection with them and that was missing for me in ‘Beautiful World’. Alice was pretentious (as expected), Eileen was whiny, both Felix and Simon weren’t appealing love interests in any way and even problematic - there was no way in for me. I couldn’t relate to them and I found myself getting impatient and tired of them after only a few chapters and that didn’t let up at all. As the novel was basically plotless, the entire novel was focused on these four people and I just wasn’t very interested in what they had to say.
For me, the most interesting aspect of this novel was how Alice’s position as an author allowed Rooney to discuss the way authors are as present in the literary world as their novels are when they’re successful, and so are equally open to criticism, questioning and pulling apart. It’s absolutely true, and an interesting take on how harmful and isolating that can be once that Sally Rooney level of literary fame has been reached. This is the dream of most writers so it was interesting to see it from another angle. It was also just really funny for the book of a publishing darling to be taking aim at publishing!
Sally Rooney is a talented writer, but she has a formula and when it disappoints like ‘Beautiful World, Where are You’, it makes her feel like a one trick pony. I gave the book 3 stars on Goodreads, and most of that was for her writing. I’m not sure if I’ll bother reading her again.
I bought the Audible version of this book using a credit from my own Audible subscription.
Written by Sophie
