I never expected myself to describe a Sally Rooney novel as “sprawling,” but here I am, describing Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, as sprawling. Clocking in at 353 pages in the hardback edition I got from the library, Rooney’s latest is much longer, and much more ambitious, than her last two. Rooney obviously set her heights high on this one, and did she get there? I think she might have, but only partially.
The story of the novel centers around two women, Eileen and Alice, who have been friends since childhood, as they figure out how to live their lives at the close of their twenties. For both women this centers on romantic and sexual encounters, and here we’re given Rooney’s standard fare; we’ve seen this before in both Normal People and Conversations With Friends, and I’m not convinced she made any significant advances in this area with her latest. In a recent tweet, LitHub referred to Rooney as “the bard of millennial intimacy,” and they’re not exactly wrong, but it’s a bit played by this point.
Rooney’s advancement from her previous work comes in at least two places. The first is in her character Alice. A not-so-alter ego for Rooney herself, Alice is a young, recently successful novelist for whom her newly acquired fame and fortune are more blessing than curse. Alice struggles with what she feels to be the meaningless of her craft alongside what she feels is an unnecessarily inflated celebrity status.
Writers writing about writers is hardly new. For me Rooney’s self-insertion conjures Philip Roth’s early Zuckerman novels, particularly Zuckerman Unbound, which chronicles a fictionalized account of Roth’s life surrounding the release of his watershed Portnoy’s Complaint and the anxieties that came with being thrust into the limelight. Rooney treads similar waters, all but telling the reader quite outright how much Sally Rooney hates being Sally Rooney.
But if Rooney’s latest places her among such luminaries, she ultimately lacks Roth’s range as a prosaist. Sally Rooney does not write sentences as beautiful as those of Philip Roth, nor, in a sense, can she, within the limitations of her style: her ultrarealism, very much still the dominant style today in mainstream Anglophone literature, perhaps structurally prevents her from waxing lyrical in the tradition of a Roth or a Bellow. I don’t think Rooney is trying to be Philip Roth, so perhaps she doesn’t deserve to lose points here, but the “He took a twenty-eight minute walk” type sentences don’t really do it for me. Of course what separates the novel from poetry is, among other things, that not every sentence has to be a homerun, but for me Rooney strikes out too often.
The metanarrative also, to take a more recent example, gestures towards the reclusive Italian novelist Elena Ferrante and her twice-removed persona (Ferrante herself is already a constructed persona of an aspirationally anonymous writer), Elena Greco, whose frustrated attempts to change the world, or just Naples, through her art leave the reader contemplating the significance of Ferrante’s own work. But Rooney doesn’t quite reach Ferrante’s worldbuilding; most of her characters come from similar backgrounds and share similar interests, nor are there many of them. Again, not quite a criticism, but I think others have done it better.
Rooney’s other innovation, not wholly lacking in her previous efforts, but not as developed as in the new one, is her compulsion to be relevant and topical. Through character dialogue, especially Alice and Eileen’s email exchanges, Rooney speedruns through the burning questions of our historical moment, at least those that weigh heavily on the minds of socially conscious millennials in the Anglosphere: climate change, fascism, the exploitation of the global South, sexuality, pornography, social media, religion, ethics, aesthetics, and the list goes on. The effort to cover anything and everything “millennial” is jarring, and at times a bit contrived, as if Rooney’s otherwise subtle characters have momentarily become stand-ins for the pundits, blue-checked or otherwise, involved in Twitter’s latest brouhaha.
I will say, I am not looking forward to “the covid lockdown” novel, from Rooney or otherwise. God help us. Unfortunately, and I believe to her detriment, Rooney does gesture in this direction in the implicit epilogue of the final pages of the novel. All that being said, I do think Rooney’s efforts to be relevant do say something about the world today, or at least her part of it, if one is able to momentarily set aside the contrived topicality and give room for the id of it all to speak on its own terms.
Speaking of staying current, Beautiful World, Where Are You is shot through with smartphone usage, Tinder, Twitter, and all the rest of it. Rooney’s previous novels certainly featured lots of text messaging, but she really kicks up the internet content here. I’m of the opinion that no prose fiction writer has yet figured out how to write well about the internet, at least not its current iteration dominated by things like TikTok and Bumble. Sure, there’s Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, but the internet of the Y2K era is all but unrecognizable to today’s youth.
Rooney is no exception; the passages about the internet feel, in the worst instances, forced and unnatural. “The caption read: same. The post had 127 likes.” But maybe that’s the point? At times I almost feel that something like Tinder or a shitpost and how many likes it got is unfitting for literary fiction, that it’s not Serious enough. Did people feel similarly about the telephone when it became a fixture in the novel? I’m not sure. But I believe this impulse should be resisted; nothing is too banal to be written about, on my view. So why’s it so hard?
For all my qualms, I do think in this novel we see Rooney maturing as a writer, and I will likely continue to read her novels, because I don’t think she’s peaked yet. And her insistence on being “current,” on saying everything, despite coming off as at times convoluted, I think hints in the direction of the ambition of the novel as a form. What else would one call Middlemarch or The Brothers Karamazov than “a novel about everything”? I find that this sort of ambition is often lacking in today’s mainstream fiction, and it’s at least exciting to see a young writer thinking and operating on such a grand scale.