Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney Review

Bestselling young Irish author Sally Rooney Alice Kelleher has a nervous breakdown, escapes to the countryside for some R&R, and embarks on a relationship with a local fella called Felix. Meanwhile, Alice’s mate Eileen has an on-again/off-again relationship with her childhood friend Simon - but where will they land, on or off?! Welcome to Conversations with Friends 2: Out of Things to Say!

I’m a huge fan of Normal People and was really looking forward to what I thought was going to be one of the best books of the year, so I’m quite disappointed to say that Sally Rooney’s semi-epistolary novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, turned out to be so empty and boring.

Rooney’s novels are more character-focused and less plot-driven, which is fine, but the characters in this book are so lacking that it only highlights how little is going on in the story. Eileen is an ordinary woman who does little and says nothing remarkable and her pursuit of equally dull boyfriend Simon left me shrugging the whole time - I didn’t care about either or whether they got together or not. And this is pretty much the entire novel!

Felix is similarly uninteresting, though Alice is more compelling if only for being Rooney’s proxy (if you believe she is, of course), in which case you can glean Rooney’s thoughts on literary success post-Normal People, what she thinks of the book business, the state of the modern novel, etc.

Viewing Alice as Sally Rooney could provide any meaning the novel might have. Normal People was a massive success, commercially and critically, and so this follow-up could be Rooney’s way of reconciling her feelings about it. On the one hand, she’s aware that her novel is a contrivance (like most novels) as it actively ignores the bulk of human existence - the suffering millions endure each day - to focus on a tiny cast of characters and their relationships. She ends Alice’s diatribe in Chapter 10 with “My own work is… the worst culprit in this regard.”

And yet, she’s doing exactly that again in this novel. Beautiful World is about a small cast of characters and their relationships - there’s nothing here about poverty, genocide, etc. Which is ok with me - I don’t agree with Alice’s view that a contemporary literary novel has to address everything going on in the world every time; that sounds exhausting and tedious, and anything that regulates art with rules like that only limits its potential to produce new and exciting perspectives. And Rooney seems to have made her peace with her own interests too, having Alice conclude her email in Chapter 14, “... here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?”

So Beautiful World could be seen as a novel about Rooney butting up against her limited storytelling range, while also coming to terms with literary fame and success, and reconciling both with a “It is what it is” kind of answer. Fair enough, but that doesn’t really make Beautiful World any better a novel.

Or maybe I’m like one of the people she criticises in Chapter 29, who “because she has seen my photograph and read my novels, (thinks) she knows me personally” and is “quite literally insane”! In which case I’ve read too much into Alice’s character and this is just a rather dreary novel about ordinary people embarking on awkward relationships.

Which isn’t to say I disliked the novel entirely. Parts of it are engaging like the fight towards the end, and some of the content of Eileen and Alice’s emails, when they pontificate on past civilisations (though their characters’ voices are so indistinct that, unless they’re named at the start of the chapter, or they’re talking about specific parts of their lives, I wasn’t sure who was addressing who). The dialogue rings true throughout and the novel as a whole is well-written and accessible.

But because she didn’t make me care about the characters at all, I didn’t care about anything that happened to them (which isn’t much either - the ending to this book is the blandest thing she’s written to date). Rooney’s written better characters having more compelling relationships before so this novel suffers for the comparison. It’s essentially a weak rehash of ground she’s covered before.

Normal People really is as good as everyone says - I highly recommend it if you’ve not read it before - but Beautiful World, Where Are You is an uninspired, slow-moving read about vapid people and their uninteresting relationships, with occasional jabs at the literary world. An underwhelming follow-up to the modern masterpiece that is Normal People.