How Sally Rooney’s rare talent will ensure novel cuts through the hype

Tanya Sweeney

Shades of ‘Normal People’ in absorbing new book

Sally Rooney’s new book, ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’, is an entertaining slow-burn. Photo: David Conachy

September 03 2021 02:30 AM

How do you solve a problem like Marianne? Not that Marianne and her Normal People co-protagonist Connell have been a problem, per se. Far from it: their love story propelled the author Sally Rooney towards unimaginable success and acclaim, resulting in being longlisted for the Booker, a Costa award win, and a TV adaptation that had fans foaming at the gills.

Even the most assured and seasoned of writers would find following up on all of this a considerable task.

Beautiful World, Where Are You shows that Rooney intends to remain on-brand. Like its predecessors, Rooney turns her acumen to the younger end of Dublin’s intellectual classes as they fret about fertility (or having kids in an uncertain world), career success, sibling rivalries, various social ills and lofty philosophical ideas... and, of course, shedding their vulnerabilities and revealing themselves to a love interest, layer by layer.

Whether Rooney is playfully returning to some of Normal People’s preoccupations, or is simply sticking to what she knows (and knows will work), is anyone’s guess. But it’s almost impossible not to compare the recurring motifs in both books.

In it, Alice and Eileen meet at college (where else?). Eileen was ostensibly the popular, pretty one during their college years, while Alice was brittle and awkward, known for saying ‘annoying’ things to people. Eileen comes from a rural background, where Simon, five years her senior and a source of febrile infatuation when she was 15, occasionally helps out on her father’s farm.

Fast forward a decade or so later, and Alice has blossomed; almost ‘leapfrogged’ Eileen, in much the way Marianne did Connell. She is a wunderkind author of considerable success. Alice, Rooney writes, has enjoyed lots of positive reviews for her book, before a wave of negative press began to follow and reflect upon the positive ones (knowing smile). All that glitters isn’t gold, however, and Alice has just spent a length of time in a psychiatric ward.

Eileen, meanwhile, has flatmates in a crappy Dublin flat and works as an editor for a Dublin literary magazine, much like Rooney herself did, editing The Stinging Fly in 2017. Before the characters collide in person later in the book, the women exchange lengthy, thinky-thinky emails about themselves and the state of the world, occasionally mentioning things like Marxism, consumption and the Bronze Age collapse. Amid their affection and loyalty for one another, the friendship is still occasionally rough around the edges, as many female friendships are.

Alice has moved out West to a town 20 minutes from Castlebar, where she meets local warehouse worker Felix on Tinder. He may not be as verbose or intellectually rigorous as Alice is, but there’s an emotional frankness about him, which presumably prompts Alice to invite him to a press engagement in Rome.

Their relationship is strange, happening in fits and starts, with each of them flip-flopping between brittleness and vulnerability in a curious tango. Slowly, they reveal themselves to each other, including the shames they carry around from the past.

Video of the Day

Eileen, meanwhile, has fallen into a friends-with-benefits scenario with the newly single Simon who, now in his mid-thirties, is unfeasibly handsome and fond of seeing girls in their early 20s (but not necessarily having them as ‘girlfriends’). Though Eileen may seem comfortable with him, there’s an emotional uncertainty and vulnerability there that will almost certainly chime with fans of Rooney’s other works.

Amid it all, Rooney is asking some pretty big questions. Is bisexuality the same as being attracted to people of both genders, or being attracted to someone irrespective of their gender? How are we supposed to be thinking of the future, now that the world is burning up? What does getting a 14-year-old girl pregnant when you are 15 yourself mean for the rest of your life? Is your happiness more important than those of the people who raised you? How does being religious chime with the rest of one’s life in latter-day Dublin?

Many female authors are unfairly criticised for relying too much on their personal lives for fiction writing. Rooney is doubtless aware of this criticism, which somehow gives her decision to write about the travails of Alice’s literary success all the more ballsy. Let’s be fair, to turn award-winning literary success inside out, examine it and conclude that it can be a millstone… well, it’s quite the energy.

But the writing. Oh, the writing, which always seems firm and rigorous and brilliantly assured. Rooney can occasionally call to mind Raymond Carver when she writes, using an unshowy, minimalist approach (never to be confused, by the way, with an ‘easy read’).

There is no lyrical showboating; there is little in the way of hyperbole. The emails between the characters eventually give way to real-life conversations, and though the exchanges come late in the novel, this is pure Rooney catnip.

Rooney occasionally writes like a film writer, setting the stage for each scene in granular detail.

The omniscient narrator charts the lives of the four with a sort of curious, solemn detachment; to some, it might occasionally read as flat, but Beautiful World, Where Are You turns out to be a delicious slow burn of a novel.

So far, reviews for Beautiful World, Where Are You have been a mixed bag. Some critics have applauded Rooney’s literary aplomb. Another, reviewing the book, has described Rooney as ‘newly self-conscious’. It could also be argued that the will-they-won’t-they magic that endeared Connell and Marianne to millions of readers remains at large here.

But there is no arguing Rooney’s bounty of talent, just as there is no arguing that this book is going to cut through the hype and sell like hotcakes. And, as sure as night follows day, a screen adaptation of Beautiful World, Where Are You is inevitable. Whoever is eventually cast as Felix had better choose their version of ‘trademark’ GAA shorts wisely.