I wanted to review the new Gossip Girl, but I got so frustrated I worried it would give me an ulcer, so instead I’ll be reviewing Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney’s third novel, because … mental health.
It’s important to start this review the way I believe most reviews (besides ones of the new Gossip Girl) should start, which is with the disclaimer that Sally Rooney is a better writer than I could ever be. More importantly, she inspires people everywhere to not give up on their crush that ghosted them nine years ago, because they could just be shy.
While reading, I decided that, because I’m not qualified whatsoever to critique Sally Rooney’s work, I will do no such thing. Fortunately, what I can do, and what I consider myself to be an expert in, is critique characters, due to my 20-plus years’ experience in observing and hating people.
It’s Not You, It’s Me
Rooney has a gift for creating gut-wrenching stories out of the mundane. Even more impressive, she manages to make absolutely everything she writes about sound both sexy and cute. Take the line “She had put powder on her face, which made her skin look dry.” Nothing about this sentiment should be sexy or cute, and yet it’s both, while also making me want to have a dry face.
The characters only eat things that are sexy-cute: toast, a pasta sauce, a “glistening salad.” At one point in the novel I was convinced she was just flexing the fact that she can make even descriptions about a curtain seem tantalizing.
In Rooney’s previous books, her intoxicating language always had me rooting for the protagonists, despite their heavily romanticized flaws. Yet, even with the enchanting Wes Anderson–esque character introductions in Beautiful World, Where Are You, I concluded that I would rather be forced to take a course on ethics taught by Jake Paul than sit through a single dinner with a character from this novel.
What I consider myself to be an expert in is critiquing characters, due to my 20-plus years’ experience in observing and hating people.
Rooney’s latest characters weren’t even unlikable for the reasons I believe she intended. It wasn’t that they were too human, complex, fragile, or fucked up for their own good. I disliked them for the small things—the things you find a friend doing that annoy you to such a degree you have no choice but to talk shit about them to your mom.
The protagonists in Beautiful World, Where Are You, millennial best friends Alice (a successful novelist living in the Irish countryside based on Rooney herself) and Eileen (who works at a literary magazine in Dublin), e-mail each other throughout the novel to stay in touch.
Let’s just start with the idea of two best friends in their late 20s e-mailing. In the modern era it’s more likely to lose complete contact with your bestie than to resort to e-mail.
But the content of the e-mails was the real problem. No matter how erudite my friend is, if she sent me a message with the intention of casually catching up and dedicated two pages to the lost writing systems of the late Bronze Age and used words like “undialectical,” the way Alice does with Eileen, I too would never go visit her.
Let’s just start with the idea of two best friends in their late 20s e-mailing. In the modern era it’s more likely to lose complete contact with your bestie than to resort to e-mail.
Full transparency: it’s possible I only found Alice and Eileen so pretentious for e-mailing each other long-winded fundamental opinions about political extremism and Christianity because all my friends and I talk about with each other is Deuxmoi.
Separately, I found the girls unbearable in their own right. Alice is meant to be self-aware, particularly about how self-involved she is, but this is hard to accept considering the lack of self-awareness it takes for any person of privilege over the age of 17 to complain about the harsh reality of life. The way in which Alice discusses global warming and the impending societal collapse felt less universal and more like she thought it somehow made her special for feeling this way.
It’s possible I only found Alice and Eileen so pretentious because all my friends and I talk about with each other is Deuxmoi.
Eileen, on the other hand, I feel is the type of person who calls her friend crying just to say, “This really hot and perfect man is in love with me and I don’t know what to do!” She cannot keep herself from bragging about how her crush, Simon, basically imprinted on her when she was born, à la Jacob and Renesmee. I was truly shocked when she described him crushing on her since then for the third time with zero humility.
Eileen’s admittedly scared of commitment, at least when it comes to Simon, but I never found myself screaming, “Just let him love you!,” because it was transparent, I guess only to me, that she just never wanted to stop getting the specific kind of attention that comes with dragging him through hell.
I have to say something about the male characters in the book or it will seem like I just have a lot of internalized misogyny, but neither of them had consistent enough personalities to pick apart. Alice’s boyfriend, Felix, is so all over the place, I wondered if in the end he would turn out to be a con artist. And Simon has so little judgment he would be the perfect victim for a con artist.
Because I hated these people so much, I didn’t really care if any of them achieved love or happiness. In many ways it was like Normal People, except you don’t root for anyone to get together—and don’t worry, they’re aware of the horrors of the world.
I did find myself rooting for Simon and Felix to dump Alice and Eileen and have sex with each other, but instead it ended with them wiping the tears off their girlfriends’ faces during their respective romanticized breakdowns and living happily ever after. Fortunately, Sally Rooney can make even people who really annoy me still be sexy and cute.
Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You is out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Cazzie David is a columnist for Air Mail and the author of No One Asked for This
