# books / Beautiful World, Where Are You - Sally Rooney

The book divides itself into two concurrent forms, the interleaved details of the two central characters’ daily lives, and emails sent between them. The general order of the chapters is: chapter on character A, email from A to B, then vice versa and repeat. The emails are so distinct from the “action” chapters that it is worth discussing them independently. This distinction is in style, purpose, and as I will argue, even personality, considerations and concerns of the characters involved.

This is my first Rooney read, but it is I believe her signature style to represent daily life in its detailed nude. This book’s attempt felt effortful, rigid. Mundane it was, but revealing little, it appeared empty and essentially pointless. We learn little about the characters in these scenes, often consumed by slow, repetitive, grinding conversations. If its aim is to show that typical communication is void of connection then it succeeds, but the point is made again and again, adding little to our understanding of the particular characters we meet. The topics of these conversations are often rent, and social politics at a very general level. Sometimes the conversations turn starkly frank, discussing suddenly vulnerable topics and with blasé, that drive towards bickering in the repetitive style, and then unexplainably end in a sex scene. These themselves maintain a strange level of conversation during, leaving the reader unsure whether the only real action of the book has ended, or continues.

We pivot into the email chapter now, where the character we’ve been following now speaks directly to the other, rarely referencing anything that has happened in their life as depicted in the preceding chapter. While it’s an interesting device for highlighting the inner mental workings of the character we’ve been observing, it is extremely difficult to reconcile the writer with the person we’ve been watching. Having had relationship trouble in stunted grunting argument, they now speak with verbose, almost obnoxious eloquence about abstract global observations: the ugliness of plastic materials, the beauty that died with the Soviet Union. It feels as if Rooney is trying to squeeze a wider political point into the book with these asides, that contribute little to the themes of the book or the characters’ development. An argument could be made that these emails do explain some of the underlying concerns of the senders, but that link is so tenuous to the lives and troubles we witness that it feels like an incomplete attempt at best. Removing these chapters would cost little to the ark of the narrative.

The emails and conversations do reference the sources and struggles of the central characters, but these are problems we are told and never shown: a painful fault for any work of fiction in my opinion.

The central characters lack a consistent personality, their behaviour and decisions forming no coherent or comprehensible whole. Rooney’s point may be that humans are changeable and inconsistent and I would agree, but this extreme has no verisimilitude: their chain of decisions can barely be reconciled as those of a single human. Almost as if they have forgotten what they said and did on the day before. This is no more true than in their dealings with respective love interests.

I don’t feel it important to like characters, but it is important to at least come to understand their situation. We neither truly understand the characters, or experience or feel any of what happens to them. If this is Rooney’s comment on how connection is rare today, the point might be better made by letting we the reader see and understand the characters as others don’t or can’t. Instead we’re locked out the same as everyone else, and are left without care for the characters, therefore unconcerned whether connection generally is lacking.

This core theme of mis-communication unfortunately bleeds into the book itself: as characters talk past one another, Rooney talks past us. The often pretentiously abstract emails full of higher thought make way for stunted and hollow nothings in person, and through none of it do we really establish a picture of their current struggles. The reader is left sure that these issues are there, but unable to place their finger on them, unable to organically empathise with them.

And then at length it ends, much like this review, without further remark, other than that having a baby might fill some void. Perhaps the void is the first experience to which the reader can relate.