The empty staging today is, evidently, something that Rooney, after two hit novels and the rapid onset of an unwelcome fame, clearly wishes might extend further than a video call. It makes me laugh: in 18 months of Zoom meetings, I’ve encountered people in their bedrooms and home offices, in front of bookcases and windows – situations that, no matter how bland or contrived, still betray some minor, contextualising detail. A feeling that the characters’ e-mails are aimed directly at us overwhelms any demands we may have of the author.Sally Rooney appears before a stark, white background, stripped of even the most incidental feature. Still, Rooney forces us to reckon with her criticisms of the literary world in which she thrives and her commentary, deeply self-aware, pierces the fictional veil of her story. An example of someone who genuinely believes that because she has seen my photograph and read my novels, she knows me personally - and in fact knows better than I do what is best for my life.” The chapter may as well have been signed, “Love, Sally.” In an age of the hyper-commercialized publishing market and trendy authorial personas, to consume popular books like Rooney’s is to consume the beautiful headshots of the author gazing mysteriously into the camera, to watch the Hulu shows, and to click through media appearances.Īlice writes to Eileen about a journalist who interviews her: “What we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity. Alice is rich and famous for writing two critically and commercially successful books, and she resents the way her works are attached to her, her face, and her mannerisms “in all their demoralizing specificity.” And Alice is right. The two friends writing to each other don’t even reunite until the last fifth of the book.Īlice and her creator have much in common. In “Beautiful World,” Alice and Eileen’s e-mails leave no significant impressions. They revealed the innermost workings of how the characters felt about each other, how their love was growing, how their insecurities got in the way of their triumphs. The e-mails and texts in Rooney’s previous works pushed the novels forward. These chapters read like discursive essays and it becomes difficult to separate the characters’ thoughts from what feel like the author’s polemics. They discuss the merits of Christianity, abstract theories of beauty, the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, the climate crisis. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Rooney said, “I feel like you can really get away with putting a lot of your opinions - if you wanted to - in a novel.” “Beautiful World” intersperses Alice and Eileen’s e-mails between chapters of narration, and the topics of their virtual exchange often stray from the specifics of their lives. The deliberate tenderness in her previous novels, the soft exchanges of her characters, and the absolute banality of her plots remain with “Beautiful World.” She pulls the reader in with her famously unadorned sentences and creates an intimacy akin to peering over the characters’ shoulders. Her chapters begin with a time and a place: a hotel bar, a shared office in Dublin, the frozen food section of a convenience store. Rooney’s special skill is the ability to place readers at eye level with her characters and plot, to sneak them into the world of her story as a participant in the room.
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