The Moon, Sixpence, and Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You

A generous reader wrote to me today about my Intermezzo review, “After having read your piece I have decided to put aside my cynicisms and appreciate the ‘many different ways of being normal.’” I am re-publishing this review of Beautiful World, Where Are You from two years ago because I think it highlights some of Rooney’s “normality” themes that remain important in Intermezzo.

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The message of Beautiful World, Where Are You is simple: live your life. Some critics thought the novel was thin on plot: but plot is often not about what happens so much as how characters’ opinions change. In Beautiful World, the characters gradually become less obsessed with internet opinion swapping and realise that the beautiful world they are mourning is right in front of them. It is instructive to compare the main characters Alice and Eileen’s emails with the Schiller poem the novel takes its title from. Schiller was lamenting the lost culture of the ancient world when:

Nobler prizes then the wrestler crowned,
Who the arduous path of virtue pressed;
Glorious workers then of deeds renowned
Clambered up to join the spirits blest.

This is what the characters lament. (See especially the email about nostalgia—very Schiller.) Rooney’s answer is that the beautiful world is right here, if we can only see it. The arduous path of virtue is available, if you want it. Alice writes an email about the way old school marriage was patriarchal and wrong and all that jazz. And yet she regrets that avoiding all the problems of the past has left her generation with no replacement system. Somehow or other, you do actually have to get on and live. And, by the way, maybe your Very Online opinions should take a backseat to living your life. Who are you, Frederick Schiller?

Like, yes, there are problems in the world, and Rooney is a professed Marxist, but when these Irish characters are interested in politics, it is often in click-bait US politics. They read outrageous US news in the same flat, emotionless way they scroll Facebook. Rooney makes a moral equivalence of the triviality of both activities. They follow the news blindly the way they follow the map on their phone. And as they mature, they become more detached from political outrage.

Reading Schiller is essential to understanding Beautiful World (the same is true of a Heine poem for Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald—Fitzgerald complained that no-one noticed the link to Heine: Rooney is sensible to point out her source in the acknowledgements.) The best review I could find that took Schiller into account was this one in the Irish Independent, written by novelist Niamh Campbell.

if Rooney is to be read as a “millennial novelist”, those aspects of her work that are austere and ruminative – rather than extroverted or cynical – act as a check to those who think this generation spends its time hysterically empathising on Twitter.

Many other critics were less impressed. In a rather grumpy review, Christian Lorentzen asked, “why make characters in a novel exchange Wikipedia pages before veering into discussion of their love lives?” Well, see above. Edward Heathman said, “The main disappointment is that the characters, who are meant to be thirtyish, have the emotional life of teenagers.” Yeah, that’s the whole point. Plenty of others agreed, many of them upset this wasn’t a re-run of Rooney’s previous novels. In a similar (but more thoughtful) vein, Helen Lewis said, “I find myself getting angry with her for using her undoubted gifts to such insubstantial ends.”

Hard disagree! Rooney writes about anxious young people in small social settings, for sure, but that’s what a novel is. Rooney recently said, in a lecture on Ulysses (self-recommending): “In Jane Austen’s work, and in the Anglophone novel since, character is staged purely in relationship to other characters. Her plots arise from the conjunction between particular personalities in what were then ordinary social circumstances.” Was Austen insubstantial? I didn’t find the characters boring. Yes, they are irritatingly myopic at times, and yes that can make a book hard to appreciate—look at Emma. But they are accurate. And good social realism has to deal with people as they are. Try sitting around shooting the breeze with these sorts of people in real life. Rooney gets it. And remember, the point of the novel is for those characters to realise they are wrong.

In her lecture, Rooney also referenced early women novelists, like Eliza Haywood. I read Fantomina to see what sort of influence Haywood might have had on Rooney. It’s about an upper class woman who pretends to be a prostitute, thinking it would be fun. She ends up obsessed with the man she seduces and meets him in various disguises—he never realises it’s the same woman. In the end she has a baby, the man has no idea who she is and disclaims paternity, and her mother ships her off to a French convent. At one point Haywood writes that her heroine, “did not doubt by the Beginning of her Conduct, but that in the End she would be in Reality, the Thing she so artfully had counterfeited.” The irony is that the heroine thinks this transformation will be temporary (and fun) but we can see it will not be. The world is what it is! Rooney is similarly concerned with the way that what we do shapes who we become. Be careful where you give your attention, she says, be careful of what you take seriously.

Rooney writes about her generation’s semi-ironic self-loathing, like when people roll their eyes at themselves for taking something serious and making it trivial and not even caring even though they know they ought to and sort of do care really. That’s why she writes about “normal” life. She wants to capture the moral ambiguity of ordinary, slightly immature people. Everyone is complicated! This is why, as Campbell points out, there is no question mark in the title: “Without a question mark at the end it suggests the ascetic deadpan of Rooney’s style… in using a Schiller line at all, however, the writer also indicates the earnest world view her protagonists…”.

It is strange, perhaps, to hear Rooney making the same points as the futuristic, aspirational, tech people—put your attention where it matters most, the people you spend time with shape who you are, agency is your most scarce resource, mood affiliation can distract you from the truth—but good novels are thought experiments, not polemics, and this meshing of ideas is a testament to Rooney’s analytic skill. Beautiful World reminds me a little of Louise Perry, too. Nor is Rooney so far away from Mason’s worldview here (albeit Rooney doesn’t write about EA). Rooney is orthogonal to this sort of common-sense, neither-right-nor-left thinking, starting from a Marxist, millennial, anti-natal, omg-the-world-is-burning position, and writing about it at the level of social life not abstract ideas. I mean, come on—that is brilliant. She is dramatising the way people change their minds about how to live as ideas clash with the real world. All novels are novels of ideas, as Penelope Fitzgerald once said. It is also a decent novel about the corrosive effects of fame, something we ought to be more interested in, perhaps.

If Beautiful World feels ersatz, that’s a sign of its success: Rooney is recreating the ersatz nature of modern culture and showing it up for what it is. Lorentzen wants more from his novelists. That’s fine. But in these retro, pseudo, post-postmodern times, the real escapism is sometimes highbrow complexity. The Lorentzen school misses what works in Beautiful World by looking for something that isn’t there. Sure, Rooney isn’t Helen deWitt. But like the hero of Of Human Bondage, this sort of criticism is so busy yearning for the moon it misses the sixpence at its feet. That’s a good description of Rooney’s characters. Maugham put the analogy the other way around. And that also is Rooney’s point—the glowing screen, the very important political news from overseas, persistent climate change anxiety, your childhood neuroses— these things are not really what matters. She wants us to see things in reverse, to realise we are in fact looking down all the time searching for sixpences, and missing the normal, boring, but really quite beautiful moon.