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My Love Letter to Rooney?
Rooney. Where do I start?
I want to write a love letter to Rooney novels. I want to curl up in a large knit sweater with a large glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and while holding all the Rooney novels and bawling my eyes out until there are no more tears to cry. I want to tell every human being who has ever felt sad or misunderstood or that life isn’t all they once dreamt it to be (which is all of us, isn’t it?) to read every Rooney novel.
There are two camps of Rooney readers: the ones who complain of the monotony and the lack of quotation marks, and the ones who want to live in the sad and poetic words she’s gifted the world. Clearly, I’m in the latter camp.
I can’t help but love every page of Rooney writing I’ve read because it’s real, honest, raw. Truthfully her writing is what I always hope my fiction writing to be. She has an uncanny ability to take the most simple moments and turn them into this magnificent image and commentary on human life.
Some hail her as the voice of the millennial generation, and I have to agree. She often tackles the reality of college loans, astronomical rent, and why generally everyone in the twenties has experienced at least one depressive episode. Life is hard and the world is seemingly dying around us. How do we deal? Like all humans, not well. And with lots of feelings and sometimes messy relationships. Not all characters are likeable, but they also aren’t totally hateable. And what’s more human than that, really? I certainly am not always likeable, and at the same time I’d like to think I’m not totally hateable. But what are my interactions and relationships like due to my likeability and hateability? What makes me tick? Can beauty still exist among the awful state of the world? These seem to be the underlying questions beneath the mundanity of Rooney’s novels.
The Synopsis
Beautiful World Where Are You follows Alice, Eileen, Simon, and Felix as they ponder their sadness, fall in love and fall out of love. Four adults nearing or in their thirties who don’t know where or when they took a wrong turn in life, but they’re having sex and at the very least don’t wish they were dead. Along the way they wonder where is beauty, what is beauty?
What I Liked
I really need to stop saying well, I liked everything. It feels like a copout or like I’m not as articulate with words as I tell myself. But it’s true. I liked everything. I’ll also be truthful and say that you may not like everything in this novel. Because it’s true that Sally Rooney’s novels are not for everyone. They make me feel a little sad, but they also make me feel understood. I like that in a novel. Rooney achieves this by talking about the mundanity of everyday life and that may not be entertaining to you, and that’s ok. Beautiful World, Where Are You is purely character driven, one might say there really is no plot, but that’s part of what makes Rooney’s writing so real and raw. There is no discernible plot to life.
She also makes the bold choice to not use dialogue markings or quotation marks. It’s an odd experience at first, but one that I found I enjoyed once I got used to the style. It demands a closer read, but I also feel it allows the dialogue to read more naturally.
The tension between characters and the doubts that each has in this novel is something I felt to be supremely relatable. All four characters deal with sadness and loneliness, but all experience it in a different manner. It’s fascinating to observe how each character speaks and acts with the others. It’s also fascinating to pick apart why each character makes the decisions they do. It’s the same guessing game that we play in our everyday interactions.
Overall I like the novel’s philosophical dealings, mostly with religion and beauty. Beauty is something to be perceived but is it meant to be understood? What is the difference between physical beauty and aesthetic beauty? Rooney asks whether it’s right to want to bring children into a dying world. Is it better to believe in God or to not believe in God? Can a person like Jesus be real, and can people actually believe in him? At the end of the novel the reader is not necessarily given a clear answer, but rather guided to do their own thinking on things like religion, beauty, climate change. Questions we should be thinking about but most of the time do not.
What I Didn’t Like
Personally, there is nothing I didn’t like about this novel. Some typical Rooney complaints involve the lack of a prominent prompt and the neglect of quotation marks. Rooney is someone you don’t know if you like until you read, so I recommend picking up a novel and giving it a go. Of her three, I’d recommend trying this novel first as Rooney seems to write with a crispness and clarity that isn’t as refined in her earlier novels.
Overall
Readers are divided when it comes to Rooney. Some people find her lack of quotation marks and refusal to write a plot driven novel annoying and mundane. Others find her observations on human life and ability to bring the mundane to life a refreshing portrait of the millennial generation. I personally wish most nights that I could live in a Rooney novel with an oversized knit sweater, a large glass of red wine, and a few cigarettes on a cold, urban patio. Beautiful World, Where Are You follows four adults in or nearing their thirties who wonder where life went wrong, why they’re so lonely, and if there is beauty in the world. It is an observation into human life and tackles philosophical and political topics of beauty, religion, and climate change. Of all Rooney’s novels, this one seems to have a crispness and clarity that is more refined than her earlier works. I would recommend this to Rooney fans, and I’d recommend those new to Rooney begin with this novel. Prepare to be sad and ponder life — best read with a glass of red wine. Grab your copy from Bookshop!
Kelliemarie Mash 