Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Okay, this is Sally Rooney’s latest book and the winner of the 2021 Goodreads’ Fiction category. Fiction is a pretty broad category so I was kind of ready for anything. Sally Rooney’s a very popular author (in recent years) and I hadn’t read any of her work so I didn’t know what to expect. Right off the bat, the writing and the overall tone of the book really reminded me of Anxious People by Fredrik Backman that I read last year. It takes a little getting used to without any quotation marks and sometimes long (and I mean pages) paragraphs of unbroken narration that can get a little confusing. But let’s get into it.

“At twenty past twelve on a Wednesday afternoon, a woman sat behind a desk in a shared office in Dublin city centre, scrolling through a text document. She had very dark hair swept loosely back into a tortoiseshell clasp, and she was wearing a grey sweater tucked into black cigarette trousers. Using the soft greasy roller on her computer mouse she skimmed over the document, eyes flicking back and forth across narrow columns of text, and occasionally she stopped, clicked, and inserted or deleted characters…”

Okay, so the above paragraph (or half of it) is pretty standard for the writing throughout the book. It’s so… descriptive? Essentially we’re just being told Eileen, one of the four characters, is sitting at her desk proofreading an article, which is her job. But the oddly detached narration and the almost excruciating attention to detail is so DIFFERENT than most other books. To be fair, this definitely isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It can drag and when I first started this novel I was pretty confused but after getting into it, I actually really like the way the author uses this objective but descriptive language throughout the book, from introducing the characters to just describing what they’re doing. And this is kind of crucial because there really isn’t much plot going on here so it’s a couple hundred pages of SOMETHING but if you’re looking for an action-packed, plot-driven book, this ain’t it. But for those of you who are people watchers or like to observe and are curious about the day-to-day lives of rather ordinary people, this is it. Eileen, Alice, Simon and Felix are just four almost thirty/thirty-something year olds holding rather regular jobs (well Alice is a famous author but that’s besides the point) and this novel chronicles a couple weeks (maybe a few months?) of their lives. And not much is going on. Alice recently recovered from a mental breakdown so is recouping in an isolated house in middle of a small town, where she meets Felix on a dating app. Felix works at a storage facility sorting boxes. Eileen is Alice’s best friend since college and she’s working as a copy editor at a magazine (the above paragraph describes her) and is making barely enough to support herself. Simon is her childhood friend and they definitely have a little something going on that’s more than just friends. But that’s it. Nothing really is happening, no major changes in their lives or plot twists, just four people and their day-to-day lives as they navigate through relationships and friendships.

“So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship.”

Alice and Eileen are separated since Alice went to go live in a remote town so they’re pen pals through much of the novel and the chapters alternate every two between Alice/Felix and Eileen/Simon’s daily lives with the emails that Alice and Eileen write to each other as every other chapter. And these emails… well they’re something. To be honest, I found a lot of the topics covered in these emails a little…pretentious? Maybe it’s because I’m not interested in politics, ancient writing systems, hot takes on popular authors, the ending of the world, the ugliness of plastic etc. but it was pretty wild. There was definitely a few interesting topics sprinkled in like Eileen talking about how she was able to find happiness/beauty in everyday moments but had lost that perspective (relatable!) or her practice of writing a “life book” when she writes one memorable good thing from each day. Don’t get me wrong, some of the topics were actually very interesting and got me thinking (like the ugliness of plastic!) but maybe I’m just a little dumb but there was definitely more than a few moments in these emails that I was like WHAT THE F ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT. But I think this is part of it, because as Alice points out, they always bring it back to their own relationships. No matter how wild and out there their emails start, like with the ancient writing system of the Bronze Age, they always circle back to themselves and the people in their lives. That makes sense. You can read and think all about religion, politics, the world and even the universe but in the end, we all circle back to our everyday as we have to live our lives in the present no matter how hard we try to rise above the mundane. Does that make sense? I’ve been reading about Buddhism lately and the eight-fold path towards enlightenment. And when I’m reading and for a little bit afterwards, I feel a sense of…we’ll just say “enlightenment” (used very loosely here) and I think about how joyful life is, how we have a perfect Buddha nature in us and commit to being kind and seeing life through other people’s perspectives etc. etc. But then the next day or even a few hours later if something doesn’t go my way, I slip right back into being annoyed and dragged back down into the everyday. And that’s fine because it’s an ongoing journey. But all that’s to say is I really relate to these out there discourses in the novel, even if many of them went right over my head!

“We met when we were in college, she said. Eileen was like a celebrity then, everyone was in love with her. She was always winning prizes and having her photograph in the university paper and that kind of thing.”

There’s a lot of interesting points in this novel but one of them is definitely how differently the characters see themselves vs. how others see them. Eileen is extremely miserable with a job she doesn’t like, making a barely livable wage, and generally feeling lonely all the time. She basically has no close friends other than Alice and Simon and constantly is thinking about how alone she is. And the chapters from her perspective definitely gave me those feelings, she went to work, chats a bit with her coworkers, does her work, eats, and goes home alone to an apartment that she shares with a couple that she doesn’t really know. But the way Alice describes her above is SO different and I was confused at first. Maybe Alice was playing up her best friend to this new guy or something? But I realized as I kept reading that it’s a perspective thing. To Alice, Eileen really was like a celebrity in college, beautiful and well-liked, while Eileen thinks of her time in college as barely making it through with her only friend being Alice. It was especially notable in this book because the way the characters describe their own lives is so miserable (without exception they really do all seem to be leading quite depressing lives, which I’ll get into next) but their friends all think they’ve got it good and are kind of living the life, at least relative to themselves. Brings to mind all the cliche sayings like “you are your own worst critic” or “the grass is greener on the other side”…

“If I tried I’m sure I would fail and that’s why I’ve never tried.”

Okay, one overarching thing in this novel is that all the characters are really quite miserable. I don’t know if this is supposed to be a realistic portrayal or modern life or if the point is that they’re all quite unhappy. It’s kind of scary that it really could be either or. I kept getting annoyed because it seemed that the characters, especially Eileen (and Alice a little), were purposely making themselves unhappy and making choices that almost made no sense to me. Like Eileen has been and clearly still is in love with Simon. And Simon is very much so in love with Eileen. But she keeps getting close to him and then frustratingly drawing away and being very hurt by her own actions. And it’s so maddening because I CAN SEE how easy it would be if she just stopped ruining it for herself for literally no reason. But in the final encounter, Simon sums it up well: “But the problem is that you seem to be drawn to people who aren’t very good at giving you those responses.” And I get it now and I agree. We all do it, that is, ruin our own happiness. We set expectations that are unachievable, we expect others to read our minds while never saying what we actually want and then we’re inevitably disappointed because things didn’t go as we planned (but how could it have??). It’s a hard habit to break out of. I don’t know if it’s because we want to preserve our image or not appear needy or pushy but we’re always fronting aren’t we? And the worst part is that we have the highest expectations for the ones closest to us to be able to tell and somehow respond accordingly. But I for one have terrible emotional intelligence and if you don’t spell it out for me, you can be sure I didn’t get it. And I know this about myself and yet I still struggle with being straightforward because of a variety of reasons. But it’s something I’m working on because speaking clearly and honestly makes me happy – life is just too short to be spending my time playing mind or word games and as we can see from Eileen’s miserable time before Simon finally gets through to her and their happy times after, life is just so much better this way!

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was a little hard to get into but I felt strangely compelled to finish it and see how the four characters ended up. It’s a book about love, sex, friendship and muddling your way through life with every mundane and awkward encounter included. I kind of loved how awkward it was actually because even though I’m no longer a teenager with every insecurity, I still feel uncomfortable in many situations (especially social) so it’s a nice reminder that our day-to-day truly is filled with these slightly embarrassing d’oh moments. But that doesn’t mean we can’t also appreciate all the beautiful little moments in life as well. There’s a lot of things, actually almost everything, that we can’t control in life but we can control our perspective on how we let life and events affect us. And this book was a good reminder of that. Happiness is within everyone’s reach, just depends on if we want to go for it or not! So, all that is to say, good book, would recommend 🙂 Just beware of the long-ass paragraphs and meandering pace. But the time you spend on this book (at least for me) was well worth it in exchange from what I got from it so take a few hours and get into it!