Sally Rooney and the Possibility of Beauty

'It's the thought that you had, in a taxi cab' (Odyssey, 'Native New Yorker') 

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It isn’t quite the full-on backlash but it has started. Sally Rooney’s latest novel is being sniped at. As someone who adored Normal People - I’ve still got Conversations with Friends towards the top of my reading pile - that sniping meant that I embarked upon Beautiful World, Where are You rather nervously. I needn’t have worried. It’s a wonderful novel that is quietly ambitious and gently moving. As with Normal People, relationships lie at the core. This time there are two of them: Alice, a very successful novelist, and Felix, an aimless warehouse-operative, and, childhood friends and occasional lovers Alice and Simon. To delineate the dynamics of this quartet would give too much away. Although I should say at this point that you should not take Alice to be a stand-in for Rooney, and that you will also fail miserably in your attempts to do that. Let’s instead dwell on some of that sniping and attempt to refute it.

An element of the novel that seems to have rankled are the email exchanges between best friends Alice and Eileen. Christian Lorentzen in The LondonReview of Books describes these exchanges as both ‘enjoyable’ and ‘vapid’ and goes on to say:

It’s true that people send one another articles and other trivia over email all the time, but why make characters in a novel exchange Wikipedia pages before veering into a discussion of their love lives? I took this as a sign of laziness on Rooney’s part but perhaps it’s a mark of her genius for the broad stroke.
 
Leaving aside Lorentzen’s curious covering of his arse in that remark, I found that the messages between Alice and Eileen gave the novel a real heft and an emotional locus. For me, they were amongst the most moving exchanges that I’ve read in contemporary literature. Maybe I’m alone. ‘Don't send those long paragraph texts’ drawls Rebecca Lucy Taylor on Self Esteem’s wonderful ‘I Do This All The Time’, and, despite loving the ‘fuck you’ attitude of last year’s best song, I can only think ‘why shouldn’t we?’ If we’re not going to write dazzling, meaningful letters anymore, à la the Brownings or Van Gogh or Rainer Maria Rilke, let’s make sure that there is something substantial in our digital missives. Just because most folk aren’t doing that over What's App, it doesn’t mean that Alice and Eileen can’t put the world to rights and then ‘veer’ towards addressing their complex love-lives, all whilst drawing upon their own literary and artistic cultural touchstones. In particular, I love it when this pair's bookishness is added into the mix. It’s both gloriously pretentious - and therefore it rings true - and provocatively erudite. Proust, Dostoevsky, Marxism, Consumerism, Syria, Jesus – is he sexy, handsome, interesting? Here I'm reminded of Ursula's sacred crush in Lawrence's The Rainbow - all of this fizzes past you, and you agree and disagree and in doing that are sent scampering through wonderful and numerous wormholes. The emails are deeply pessimistic and despairing, both about their selves and the future of humanity, and yet through all of this learning and the ground that is covered, a faint crack of optimism gets in. ‘Humans lost the instinct for beauty in 1976 with the advent of plastic’, posits Eileen, and whilst sensing - as I did - the ridiculousness of this theory, you feel a lovely sense that somewhere in the world the ‘instinct for beauty’ remains.    

 
Indeed, it’s one of these messages that gives us the novel’s lodestar moment. Eileen, a poorly paid and emotionally adrift deputy editor for a literary magazine tells Alice about an experience in the back of a taxi cab that she had had the previous evening:      

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A couple of nights ago, I was getting a taxi home on my own after a book launch. The streets were quiet and dark, and the air was oddly warm and still, and on the quays the office buildings were all lit up inside, and empty, and underneath everything, beneath the surface of everything, I began to feel it all over again - the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything. As soon as I realised what I was feeling, I tried to move toward it in my thoughts, to reach out and handle it, but it only cooled a little or shrank away from me, or slipped off further ahead. The lights in the empty offices had reminded me of something, and I had been thinking about you, trying to imagine your house, I think, and I remembered I'd had an email from you, and at the same time I was thinking of Simon, the mystery of him, and somehow as I looked out the taxi window I started to think about his physical presence in the city, that somewhere inside the city's structure, standing or sitting, holding his arms one way or another, dressed or undressed, he was present, and Dublin was like an advent calendar concealing him behind one of its million windows, and the quality of the air was instilled, the temperature was instilled, with his presence, and with your email, and with this message I was writing back to you in my head even then. The world seemed capable of including these things, and my eyes were capable, my brain was capable, of receiving and understanding them. I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live, the world will be beautiful to me.

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Leaving aside the fact that I’m a sucker for anything that employs an advent calendar as a metaphor for life - I only have to think of the pop-up, snow-bound nativity calendar that adorned my childhood Christmases - the Joycean epiphany, inescapable and all-pervading in Irish letters, has never been done better. In a novel full of characters who are guarded, damaged, emotionally vulnerable - cynical about the wider world, cynical about their own individual place in it - it is through fleeting moments such as this that we realise that the world can be and is often an incredible place. The 'possibility of beauty' is ever-present.  

Of the snipers, Will Self can write of Rooney’s work that ‘it’s very simple stuff with no literary ambition’. Yet he has never written anything that comes close to being as affirming or as moving as the above passage. Its lightness of touch, its precision, its simplicity - the advent calendar, the empty windows of office blocks lit up at night - and yet also, the intensity, the way that the meaning of life is distilled from that single quotidian moment. The feeling is fugitive, Proustian in the way that it almost, but not quite, eludes Eileen. She is faintly aware of it. The message to her friend gives it gravity and through that she clings on to its essence.   

 

Indeed, that these words are essentially delivered digitally makes them all the more powerful. It is the device that is quotidian; the message itself is extraordinary. It has always been that way. Be it a message on What’s App, or the images on a functional vase from antiquity, it is what they convey that counts. Here, I'm thinking of Keats and his ‘Ode On a Grecian Urn’. The device, a mundane object in the kitchen of some Athenian upper-class household; it's message, transformed by the passage of time, those figures racing around the vase's surface, always on the cusp of realisation and consummation. And - notwithstanding the chances of future generations appreciating the sleek aesthetics of an iPhone in the way that we regard and value classical pottery - that is what we can get back from looking at a message: a snap-shot of an exact moment. ‘Truth is beauty, beauty is truth,’ says Keats at the end of that poem. And look how that resonates with the title of the novel too, translated lines from a gently rambling Schiller poem that laments the loss of paganism.  

Perhaps too, we don't quite appreciate the uses and the power of the quotidian. Again, you think of James Joyce, who through the character of Leopold Bloom raises workaday details to the level of a dazzling and unparalleled poetry. And then Rooney herself, who deploys the quotidian without that embellishment. Her characters cook and prepare food at the end of a long day, flop down exhausted on the sofa, wash up, and then open up their apps and doom-scroll. Life so often can be a real drag. But then - and more often than not in the messages between Alice and Eileen - that banality recedes, and moments of beauty, always possible, steal in. And just occasionally, we get a 'stop you dead in your tracks' moment like Eileen's epiphany. They go off like a bomb in your head, and remind you of just why it is that you read. Indeed, just why it is that you live.