Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021; 368 pp., $28

In her essay “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” Flannery O’Connor says: “The Church should make the novelist a better novelist.” Though Irish novelist Sally Rooney has made headlines by claiming the Catholic Church “irrelevant” in her native Ireland, her latest book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, demonstrates surprising interest in and sympathy for Catholic belief. Simultaneously, it is the work of a better, more mature novelist than her debut or sophomore efforts. Fortunately, O’Connor also clarifies that “The Catholic novelist doesn’t have to be a saint; he doesn’t even have to be a Catholic; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist.” By this definition, Beautiful World, Where Are You invites us to contemplate Rooney as a Catholic novelist.

The novel does not shy away from addressing religion. Rooney is also wrestling with her own celebrity and success as a novelist. The two main female characters, Alice and Eileen, closely resemble Rooney herself in key ways: Alice is a novelist who has published two books with earnings in the millions. She has lived in New York and travels around Europe giving book talks and interviews. Eileen is an editor at a literary journal who has had one essay published, but dreams of writing a book. Rooney herself has published two popular novels and is an editor of the Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly.

If it is true that Alice and Eileen are more mature versions of Frances and Marianne from Rooney’s first two novels, Rooney suggests that they have become disillusioned with their detached and jaded view of life and love. What is different about this third novel? Themes of love, friendship, class, and socioeconomics remain at the forefront, but Beautiful World unrolls a grander vision. The ideas are more serious; the language is rich and beautiful; the characters are human and complex and real.

For example, Simon, Eileen’s paramour, is a practicing Catholic and has even considered joining the priesthood. Although he is mocked and ridiculed for his beliefs, he maintains them throughout the novel. Quite refreshingly, Simon is not a perfect character. He has, as one character describes, a “martyr complex,” but he is multi-dimensional. He studied at Oxford, goes to Mass on Sunday, works with refugees at his job, but also deals with loneliness, temptation, and distance with his family.

As the title, which is taken from Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Die Götter Griechenlands,” suggests, the world we live in contains beauty, and a beautiful world beyond this one exists. Such a world becomes all the more keenly desirable in light of the ways modernity promises transformation but so often delivers only slick, sterile ugliness. Eileen says, “My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence.” In response, Alice writes to her in one of the letters that punctuates each chapter, and counters that

“the instinct for beauty lives on, at least in Rome [...] it’s possible to visit the Vatican Museum and see the Laocoon, or go to that little church and put a coin in the slot to see the Caravaggios [...] there are also dark fragrant orange trees, little white cups of coffee, blue afternoons, golden evenings.”

It is telling that Alice’s argument for beauty offers Rome and the Vatican as proof that beauty lives on.

Later, Eileen witnesses beauty when she attends Mass with Simon. Rooney illustrates the scene: “Inside, it was cool and mostly empty, smelling of damp and incense.” After they leave, “their smiles were mysterious. It was a cool bright Sunday morning, the white facades of buildings reflected in the sunlight, traffic was passing, people were out walking dogs, calling to each other across the street.” These ordinary moments are infused with beauty and mystery. When she relays this experience in her next letter to Alice, Eileen says, “When the service began, Simon didn’t suddenly start acting very intense and spiritual [...] he was just his usual self. [...] saying things like ‘I have greatly sinned’—actually saying such things out loud in his ordinary voice.” She seems perplexed by this, but also comforted. She also questions when “in a soft, collective whisper, everyone in the church replied: ‘We lift [our hearts] up to the Lord.’ Is it really possible I witnessed such a scene, right in the middle of Dublin, only a few hours ago? Is it possible such things literally go on, in the real world you and I both live in?”

Rooney has Alice point out, too, that “In Catholic doctrine [...] beauty, truth, and goodness are properties of being which are one with God. God kind of literally ‘is’ beauty [...] Humankind strives to possess and understand these properties as a way of turning toward God and understanding his nature, therefore whatever is beautiful leads us toward contemplation of the divine.”

In their letters, Alice and Eileen also grapple with sin and repentance. Alice’s romantic interest, Felix, fervently says he believes what he sees in front of him and does not “believe some big Jesus in the sky is looking down on us deciding are we good or bad.” But after Felix confesses some horrible things he did, Alice muses on forgiveness in a letter to Eileen. She wonders, “what should people who have done terrible things in the past actually do?” She goes on to question, “what if it’s not only a small number of evil people who are out there, waiting for their bad deeds to be exposed? What if it’s all of us?” She further connects this to a Gospel passage from Luke about the woman with a sinful past who anoints Jesus’ feet with oil and washes them with her hair. Alice finds it puzzling when Jesus forgives the woman; Alice asks, “Could it be that easy? We just have to weep and prostrate ourselves and God forgives everything? But maybe it’s not easy at all—maybe to weep and prostrate ourselves with genuine sincerity is the hardest thing we could ever learn how to do.” Eileen responds: “I think if I believed in God, I wouldn’t want to prostrate myself before him and ask for forgiveness. I would just want to thank him every day, for everything.” Reflections like these prove Alice and Eileen much more thoughtful and much richer interiorly than Rooney’s earlier characters.

Towards the end of the novel, Eileen muses to Alice in a letter that she wants her life “to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care.” This is a wholly different conclusion than any of Rooney’s previous protagonists would have articulated. We may find hope in the thought that the character most like Rooney herself, Alice, entertains a Catholic worldview at the end of the novel. She says in a letter to Eileen, “I am not going to join a convent, nor am I even Catholic, as far as I know. I only feel, rightly or wrongly, that there is something underneath everything.”

This novel contains explicit content, which may be troubling for some readers. Discretion is advised.