Or were they in this moment unaware, or something more than unaware – were they somehow invulnerable to, untouched by, vulgarity and ugliness, glancing for a moment into something deeper, something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world?
In a spirit of honesty, I’ve put off reading this for quite a while due to my disappointment after Conversations with Friends, unsure that Sally Rooney could once again grip me like she did with Normal People. Having finished, I would say Beautiful World, Where Are You occupies a nice middle ground in between the other novels.
Like Rooney’s other books, BWWAY explores friendships and relationships in all of their authentic, broken, and beautiful capacities. Alice and Eileen have been best friends since university; Alice is a successful author buckling under the strain of work and Eileen ‘moves commas around’ at a literary magazine, struggling to understand what she wants out of relationships and life. As the girls navigate their worlds, their friendship with each other, and the space that Felix and Simon respectively hold, Rooney once again paints a picture of human frailty and beauty.
Every other chapter is an email sent between Eileen and Alice, interrupting the narration of their lives with a bit (or a lot) of personal insight. These are long, rambling emails in the style particular to Rooney with very little punctuation and almost no paragraph breaks. While I found it hard to stay engaged in these sections, I understand their function as a way to develop the characterization of the women. Even with that, however, I attribute my inability to get truly sucked into the book to these email-interludes.
Life in a Rooney book is tough, and I often felt frustrated by the amount of miscommunication and misunderstanding between the characters. It had a somewhat happy ending with more of a conclusion than I would’ve expected from Rooney, which I was pleasantly surprised by.
Personal rating: 7/10
Recommend? Maybe, but only if you’ve already been sucked into Rooney-land
Re-read? Not likely
Time: 2:00
I kept the original rating of Conversations with Friends (7/10) when I re-sent it last week, but I was surprised it was so high. In hindsight, I would’ve given it a 6 (6.5 at the most).