Book Club Recap: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney is dubbed as a literary giant of our time: whatever comes from under her pen is immediately devoured by readers, and revered by critics. Hailed as ‘the voice of the Millennial generation,’ her success with Normal People was just dazzling, so it’s no wonder that our book club put her book on our reading list as soon as it came out.

Many of us loved Normal People even when we didn’t necessarily take to some aspects of it. And everyone LOVES Sally Rooney. Her idolization has almost come to a point where you cannot be a part of the bookish world and say you aren’t as crazy about her work as everyone else is. It would paint you as someone tasteless or ignorant—someone who simply doesn’t get it.

But before we even came together for our meeting this month, our Facebook group started sizzling with comments. Never has a book caused so much commotion before we even met to discuss it. 

And when we finally did meet, our discussion was lively, indeed. I will do my best to convey the (at times) conflicting sentiments below, but to summarize it all before we even get into details: we had no idea what’s the deal with this book!

• WHAT IS THE PLOT?

Beautiful World, Where Are You, plot-wise, is a story that follows two young couples, Alice and Felix, and Eileen and Simon. 

The book jacket copy reads as follows: 

“Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young―but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?” 

The whole plot is summarized in just the following sentence:  They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. This is, essentially, what this book is about. It is a series of events with these characters hooking up, and breaking up, obsessing over each other, and having sex. Lots of sex.

Not much of a coherent plot.

How about narrative drive, then? What is the reader reading forward to find out?

The following sentence of the book jacket copy that says, “Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?” will have you believe that this is where the narrative drive stems from—that there is curiosity and concern that’s created in regard to these characters finding beauty in this world. In other words, it suggests that there are stakes for them if they don’t find beauty in this world, and that there is a definitive outcome you are reading toward.

This wasn’t our impression. 

 Mostly, we felt we were reading just to see these characters vent some stuff out, but without a clear goal in mind. This is especially true for Alice and Felix’s story—it was a Woody-Allen-neurotic type of relationship that most of us couldn’t really connect with—something that can be attributed not only to the lack of narrative drive in this particular thread, but also in the way the characterization was done. Most of us didn’t feel like we could connect with Alice (or Felix) nor did we feel like we understood them. But more on characterization later on.

On the other hand, for most of us, Eileen and Simon’s story was the main engine of narrative drive—the thing we read the book for to find out. Will they end up together? Will they mess it all up? We loved their story, even though a/ their backstory was info-dumped in one of the opening chapters; b/ we felt that some of the obstacles these characters set out for themselves were stretching our believability (especially the part where it’s obvious that Simon and Eileen care deeply for each other, but still allow drama to stand in the way of their happiness) as the conflict started feeling forced and contrived, c/ the ending (them being in a loving relationship and Eileen getting pregnant) didn’t feel true to Eileen’s character, and felt like a red bow being tied ever so neatly.

It’s only toward the end of the novel (around the 75% mark) that these four people meet in the same place, and for some of our members this is where they first felt the narrative drive propelling them to read forward; the first time in this book when something concrete was happening.

In a nutshell, we felt the novel needed a slightly more substantial, coherent plot. It’s often said that Literary Fiction is character-driven and writers often interpret this as if I’m writing literary fiction, I don’t need a plot. But even in character-driven books, the plot is the vehicle that moves the character from point A to point B. We’ve read quite a few Literary novels where plot takes the back seat to character arc, but it’s still there (for instance, Writers&Lovers, or The Dutch House).

• STRUCTURE

In terms of structure, these two couples’ stories alternate—and in between them, the author introduces an epistolary form (through which Alice and Eileen exchange emails).

So, for instance, a chapter with Alice and Felix (for the sake of the argument, let’s call these the plot chapters) will be followed by an email from Eileen (let’s call these the email chapters), and then we’ll have Eileen and Simon’s (plot) chapter, followed by Alice’s email.

Most of us struggled with these email chapters. They weren’t exactly connected with what was going on in the rest of the narrative (except by maybe a sentence or two toward the end of the email, where the author of the email would briefly touch on what’s going on in her life at the moment). For the most part, these emails contained Alice or Eileen discussing their anxieties over the state of the world: climate change, consumerism, elections, fake news...

All topical issues for sure, but even though these characters talk about how they’re worried about, say, consumerism and ecology, we don’t see this struggle reflected in the plot chapters — the ones that show their actual lives (as we then see them buying stuff without much consideration for consumerism or ecology).

In all fairness, this is true to real life: we all obsess over climate change, but don’t hesitate to buy a bunch of stuff we don’t need. But in books, the reader expects all things to be connected. This isn’t a book about climate change or consumerism—it’s a story about about these two couples as they desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in, as the book jacket copy says. So what does ecology or climate change have to do with any of it?

There were a few members who found these emails to be interesting social commentary, and then there were some who found it to be pretentious preaching.

Strong emotions aside, here’s what most of us felt made these emails not work:

·       They didn’t move the story forward or affect it in any way.

·       They felt like author intrusion—the author sharing her life philosophy through her characters.

·       The voice was the same in both Eileen’s and Alice’s emails. These were the only parts of text written in first person POV, so we expected the author to differentiate how these two women sounded. But they sounded exactly the same. Halfway through the chapter, many of us had issues keeping straight whose POV we were in.

·       One of the things that added to this indistinctiveness was the fact that their worldview was exactly the same. It wasn’t a discussion between two different people. In fact, it wasn’t a discussion at all. Each of them just wrote down her thoughts (which on most subjects are identical to the other woman’s thoughts) and then the other woman wouldn’t really respond to the first woman’s thoughts. She would just write her own thoughts, or go off on a completely different tangent…

• POINT OF VIEW

In the plot chapters, the author used distant third person POV. We see what the characters are doing and saying, but we don’t get any of their interiority—no thoughts, no feelings, no internal musings. The author does offer clues as to what the interiority might be—by including tone of voice, movements, body language, and facial expressions. As the book goes on, and we get more context on who these characters are and what drives each of them, it becomes easier to infer the interiority.

Still, the distance was substantial, and it made it harder for us really connect with the characters.

We get some sort of first-person perspective from the epistolary chapters, but the effect of this is limited in two ways: first, because the bulk of these emails is not about anything that’s going on in their personal lives, but just thoughts on world today, and second, because we get the emotion apart from the plot that causes the emotion. For instance, we’ll see Alice and Felix meeting in the plot chapter, but we’ll get her feelings and thoughts about it later on, in the epistolary chapter.

By the time we’d get some sort of personal response to any given event, we’d already inferred it so it didn’t have much of an effect (at best); or it felt repetitive (at worst).

• CHARACTERIZATION

We struggled with these characters—especially with Alice and Felix. Not only did we not particularly like them or found them relatable; we did not understand them. We couldn’t figure out what they wanted and why, what they were all about. Something about both these characters was almost disturbing, especially Alice.

She is neurotic, anxious, submissive in a way that’s not really understandable, and yet, she’s also distant and unreachable. She is Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but not quite.

Rooney is often hailed as ‘the voice of the generation’ or ‘the voice of the Millennials.’ Most of us have read at least two of her books, if not all three, and we—especially the Millennials among us—firmly disagreed with this statement—and with the kind of representation Rooney’s women imply. In Rooney’s books, women are often very troubled, neurotic, deeply anxious, detached, submissive, wanting to be controlled and dominated. It is, actually, quite the opposite to what we think Millennial women represent—they’re generally more confident, feel more entitled than women from previous generations; they’re more feminist-oriented, less likely to be controlled or subdued by a man.

Millennials among us don’t feel reflected in women like Alice and Eileen at all. We actually struggled to connect or even root for them because we didn’t understand them.

But maybe that’s just us.

And yet, and yet, and yet…

So many things in Rooney’s book go against everything we know about writing. We felt frustrated reading this book, what with the info-dumps, philosophical discourse that doesn’t necessarily add to the story, by the lack of narrative drive, by the characters who left us frustrated with unnecessary dramas. Don’t even get me started on the chapter-long paragraph and sex scenes that seemed to be there for the sake of themselves (the only sex scene that actually moved the story forward was the phone-sex scene between Eileen and Simon)… and yet we read on.

When asked, most of our members would have finished this book despite all these issues, and even if it hadn’t been picked for our book club.

The author would break a rule, and just before we’d be ready to hurl the book across the room, she’d redeem herself just enough to entice you to read the next paragraph.

A thousand questions emerged. We came to our meeting puzzled.

Rooney is obviously a very, very talented writer.

Is it possible she made all these ‘mistakes’ unknowingly? Is it possible her editors missed them too?

Or was she toying with us? Pushing the boundaries to see how far she can go?

At times, this book was so flawed it felt like parody—a prank on the industry and the readers.

This theory was definitely supported by Alice’s story in the book. Like Rooney, Alice is an acclaimed novelist with one hugely successful book that’s being turned into a Netflix series. She is revered by the critics and adored by the audience. She even tells Eileen at some point that she could write anything and get away with it.

In fact, Alice is so turned off by her success that we wondered if she was an autobiographical character; and if this book was Sally Rooney’s pushing back on the industry and the readers to prove how ridiculously grand her success is?

Grand, in that, right now, it doesn’t even matter what she’ll write anymore; it doesn’t really matter if it’s any good either. It will be devoured by both critics and readers, and revered as if it had come from the gods.

Which brings us back to the beginning of this recap—it’s not possible to say you don’t like Sally Rooney. It’s blasphemous. If you don’t like her work—you simply don’t get it.

Well, maybe we didn’t quite get it. But at least we can say we read it!