The Guilty Pleasure of Sally Rooney’s "Beautiful World, Where Are You"
Sally Rooney’s latest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You follows four millennials who yearn for beauty and goodness in a world on the brink of “general systems collapse.” Over email, Alice, a novelist whose meteoric rise to fame led her to a nervous breakdown, and her best friend Eileen, an editor at a literary magazine in Dublin, muse about the impasse of identity politics (“Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve.”). They angst over convenience-shop lunches implicated in labor exploitation. They despair at the shocking abundance of plastic, the invention of which Alice believes has deprived the world of the “instinct for beauty.”
Writing the experience of modern millennial malaise is Rooney’s specialty. What is new and a little unexpected is the turn to Catholicism in this most recent work. The two male protagonists of the novel represent archetypal attitudes toward religion. Simon, Eileen’s teenage crush-turned-friend-turned-lover, is the only self-proclaimed Catholic in the quartet. Felix, a warehouse worker whom Alice meets on a dating app after moving to the Irish countryside at the beginning of the novel, acts as a kind of foil to Simon and disparages religion. But the novel is less interested in these two positions. It lingers instead on Alice and Eileen’s aesthetic fascination with faith. In an email to Eileen, Alice queries the justification for the objective worth of beauty. She finds one compelling answer in religion:
In Catholic doctrine, as far as my understanding goes, beauty, truth and goodness are properties of being which are one with God . . . Humankind strives to possess and understand these properties as a way of turning toward God and understanding his nature; therefore whatever is beautiful leads us toward contemplation of the divine.
Alice’s interest in the imbrication of the beautiful and the divine in Catholic theology echoes Eileen’s experience at a Mass she attends after spending a night with Simon:
Inside [the church], it was cool and mostly empty, smelling of damp and incense. The priest read from Luke and gave a sermon about compassion. During communion, the choir sang ‘Here I am, Lord’ . . . Bowing his head over his hands, he [Simon] did not look grave or serious, only calm, and his lips were no longer moving . . . She [Eileen] moved her hand toward him and calmly he took it in his and held it, smoothing his thumb slowly over the little ridges of her knuckles. They sat like that until the Mass was over. On the street outside they were smiling again, and their smiles were mysterious.
Whitefriar Street Church Dublin
Rendered in Rooney’s spare prose, the Mass is simultaneously transcendent and evocative. It is as much a sensuous experience as a religious one. But in spite of their enchantment with the divine, the millennial women of Beautiful World ultimately demur from the possibility of true faith. As Alice puts it, “I can’t believe that the difference between right and wrong is simply a matter of taste or preference; but I also can’t bring myself to believe in absolute morality, which is to say, in God.” Their attachment to religion is more aesthetic than ethical. The women are drawn to the coherence of a world in which God exists, but they are unable to bring themselves to commit to such a worldview. Rather than prescribing Catholicism as the answer to modernity’s ills, Beautiful World tarries with the fundamental incoherence of modern life—of knowing that something is good but being altogether ambivalent about seeking it out.
If there is an ethic in Beautiful World, it is an ethic of pleasure. The point of life is aesthetic, and the aesthetic is found in the pleasurable. Is Rooney’s interest in pleasure apolitical? Maybe, probably. This is a common charge against the Irish novelist, who is often found at the center of the current discourse on the obsession with (performing) goodness in contemporary literature. Critics such as Becca Rothfeld and Madeleine Schwartz have pointed out that the protagonists who populate Rooney’s first two novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), proclaim leftist values but fail to act on them in any way. To borrow from theological language, these characters might be described as confessional. As the theologian Linn Tonstad summarizes, “confession self-implicates, yet at the same time exonerates at least in part, so avoids the consequences that confession might have been expected to have . . .” Rooney’s earlier protagonists are quick to name the various ways in which they are complicit in an effort to preempt the ways they might be cancelled.
Sally Rooney
In my reading, the protagonists of Beautiful World are no longer confessional, but resigned. Their attitudes towards politics and religion alike are structured by ambivalence. They have more or less given up on exoneration. This resignation is no doubt a product of privilege. Alice and Eileen can afford to be resigned because their survival is not predicated upon persistent political agitation. But there is nonetheless something to be said for the way the novel deftly captures the absurdity of millennial life. The world is collapsing around us, and yet we sit around waiting for texts and pondering what happened (or didn’t happen) last night. The role of the novelist, Rooney seems to suggest, is not to serve as a moral guide but to offer pleasure by bearing witness to beauty in the midst of modernity’s apocalyptic decline. These moments of beauty flicker into existence when people come into relation: when Eileen and Simon share a moment at Mass, for example, or even—as Alice suggests at one point—when a reader becomes invested in a fictional character. To be sure, the pleasure offered by the novelist is saturated with the guilt of complicity. But damn, Beautiful World, Where Are You sure is pleasurable.
Kathy Chow is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Yale University. She is currently based in Cambridge, MA. You can find more of her musings on contemporary literature here.