Love During the End Times: Sally Rooney's "Beautiful World, Where Are You"
When you're "standing in the last lighted room before the darkness," what do you reach for?
“Blah blah blah.” That’s how 18-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg described the rhetoric of world leaders demanding action on climate change at the recently concluded Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. Despite the consequences, humans continue to overheat the planet by treating the atmosphere as a sewer for carbon dioxide. Thunberg is sick of the bromides; she wants less talk and way more action.
Cop26 did not result in a major breakthrough in the fight against climate change. It probably wasn’t ever going to. The conference produced a document signed by around 200 nations indicating what they aim to do without anything binding them to that agreement, and even if they did do what they say they will, it probably still wouldn’t be enough. Ice caps will continue to melt, weather patterns will continue to shift, politicians will continue to blah blah blah, Greta Thunberg will continue her campaign, and we’ll continue to watch helplessly as a slow-motion catastrophe everyone saw coming unfolds before our very eyes.
Every generation feels the forces of history are sweeping them along against their will, but it seems millennials perhaps feel this more acutely than past generations. Baby Boomers may have found themselves caught up in the great power game of the Cold War, but at least that was a civilizational struggle that had a chance to resolve itself favorably (unless, of course, it all ended in a nuclear holocaust.) Gen Xers looked at the world and concluded their elders were obsessing over the wrong things and just didn’t understand what really mattered, hence their/my inclination to react to events with irony, detachment, and cynicism. Millennials don’t seem to have the luxury of distance, however. They live in an era of global information systems, global terrorist networks, global banking systems, global migrations, and global warming. They can’t help but feel morally implicated in world affairs but also at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control. They are reminded everyday of just how big and connected the world is and how small and insignificant they are as individuals in the face of the economic, political, and environmental forces arrayed against them. Even more dispiriting, millennials look at where the world is heading and despair: The problems they see are enormous, too many people don’t care enough to fix them, and the consequences of not addressing them will be catastrophic.
Alice Kelleher and Eileen Lydon, the two main characters in Sally Rooney’s latest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, are both millennials searching for how to live a meaningful life in light of this predicament. In one of the many thoughtful emails the two exchange over the course of the book, Alice writes
I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.
Alice and Eileen’s world is a source of perpetual disappointment. Where will they find hope? What will that look like?
Rooney is a thirty-year-old Irish author sometimes described as the first great millennial novelist. Her previous two works, Conversations with Friends and Normal People (long-listed for the Booker Prize and adapted as a miniseries by Hulu) earned her the sort of literary fame more commonly bestowed on writers half a century ago. I wouldn’t consider myself a judge of literary excellence, but having read Beautiful World, Where Are You (its title is drawn from a poem by Friedrich Schiller) it seems this is the sort of book that will become a touchstone for a generation of readers.
Of the book’s two main characters, Alice most closely resembles Rooney herself, at least in her professional life. Like Rooney, Alice is a best-selling author whose success has brought her a fair amount of fame and fortune. Having recently recovered from a nervous breakdown, she is now living alone in a rectory in a small town on the coast of Ireland. Her closest friend Eileen remains in Dublin where she works at a literary magazine. She rents a married couple’s spare bedroom and keeps tabs on an ex’s social media page.
Both Alice and Eileen (like Rooney) are Marxists who feel stranded in a world beyond the end of history where capitalism has prevailed and class consciousness has melted into a sense of political malaise. Each is drawn to a career in publishing, but capitalism has poisoned their work: Eileen scrapes by on low wages, while Alice, who doesn’t have much use for the wealth that has come her way, worries her commercial success will compromise her art. In emails to one another, they reflect on how rotten (“All the various brands of soft drinks in plastic bottles and all the pre-packaged lunch deals and confectionery in sealed bags and store-baked pastries—this is it, the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations”) and dispiriting (“I don’t need all these cheap clothes and imported foods and plastic containers, I don’t even think they improve my life. They just create waste and make me unhappy anyway”) consumer culture is. In another message, Eileen tells Alice about an ancient Mediterranean civilization that had flourished for centuries before collapsing, leaving behind abandoned cities and lost languages:
No one is sure why any of this happened, by the way. Wikipedia suggests a theory called ‘general systems collapse’, whereby ‘centralisation, specialisaion, complexity, and top-heavy political structure’ made Late Bronze Age civilisation particularly vulnerable to breakdown. Another of the theories is headlined simply: ‘Climate change’. I think this puts our present civilisation in a kind of ominous light, don’t you? General systems collapse is not something I had ever really thought about as a possibility before. Of course I know in my brain that everything we tell ourselves about human civilisation is a lie. But imagine having to find out in real life.
Like other millennials, not only do Alice and Eileen find the world they were born into absurd, but also downright apocalyptic.
Nearly every other chapter of the novel is devoted to Alice and Eileen’s email correspondence. The other chapters focus on their personal and romantic lives. In the town she has just moved to, Alice uses a dating app to connect with Felix, a local who works in something like an Amazon warehouse. They don’t exactly hit it off during their first date at a hotel bar: He wants to know why she would ever move to his town and if she actually makes money as a writer, while she wonders why he’s on such good terms with the waitress and if he’s met other women at the bar before. Still, they make it back to her place and upstairs to her bedroom before it all gets a bit too edgy:
Very nice, he concluded. Very nice room. Are you going to write a book while you’re here?
I suppose I’ll try.
And what are your books about?
Oh, I don’t know, she said. People.
That’s a bit vague. What kind of people do you write about, people like you?
She looked at him calmly as if to tell him something: that she understood his game, perhaps, and that she would even let him win it, as long as he played nicely.
What kind of person do you think I am? she said.
Something in the calm coolness of her look seemed to unsettle him, and he gave a quick, yelping laugh. Well, well, he said. I only met you a few hours ago, I haven’t made up my mind on you yet.
You’ll let me know when you do, I hope.
I might.
Alice and Felix make for an unlikely couple: She would seem at home in cosmopolitan literary circles while he’s a working class bloke who’s rarely traveled beyond the borders of his town. One can’t help but suspect Alice is simply trying to hook-up with a proletarian to authenticate her solidarity with the working class. There’s a passive-aggressive quality to their conversations as well, as if each expects the other will eventually blow their cover and reveal themselves as a snob or a slob. Felix, however, while direct, is more sensitive and honest than Alice initially assumed. That sincerity builds mutual respect that brings them closer together as a couple even if their relationship doesn’t follow the patterns of a conventional romance.
Meanwhile, in Dublin, Eileen has kept in touch with Simon, a childhood pal who really should be more than a friend. Simon works for a left-wing political party, regularly attends mass, and, as we’re constantly reminded, is exceedingly handsome. One night Eileen calls him up and soon enough she’s pretending to be his wife, asking him if he’s in bed yet and what he’s wearing, and instructing him to take his clothes off. Days later, after sleeping together, the atheistic Eileen joins Simon for mass, where she finds herself surprisingly moved by the humility he shows among his fellow parishioners and the sincerity of his belief.
We are only offered a few glimpses into the lives of Felix and Simon. With Felix we get a sense for the drudgery of his work and the camaraderie he feels among his co-workers and friends. Simon comes across as a saintly fellow trying to swim upstream through the halls of government. Through their characters, though, we begin to learn about the emptiness and sadness that haunt Alice and Eileen. Alice seems in search of disappointment and keeps setting Felix up to let her down. And for all their history and compatibility and the obvious way in which they have always cared for each other, Eileen always seems to keep a certain emotional distance from Simon, as though she is afraid she will set herself up for a crushing disappointment if she lets him get too close. Meanwhile, we are left to wonder why Alice and Eileen only communicate by email and never travel to see one another.
Rooney’s language is direct and unadorned, reminiscent in some ways of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Some might consider it bland, maybe even artificially intelligent. There’s a certain Ikea quality to it: Plain but stylish, distinct without being showy, efficient but very obviously designed. I can understand why some might consider her writing soulless, but the more I read, the more I admired her control of tone, the cleanliness of her dialogue, and the discipline it takes to achieve this effect. This quality extends to the book’s numerous sex scenes, which Rooney has become notorious for.
Some who read this book will find that it reeks of privilege, its two main characters armchair Marxists who lament the triumph of capitalism, express sympathy for the downtrodden, and foresee a not-too-distant apocalypse yet who take no direct action themselves, live in relative comfort, and agonize over their love lives. Their mental anguish can hardly compare with the struggles of the coffee and sugar farmers they thought about for a moment when they stopped by the convenience store to pick up something for lunch.
But unlike Greta Thunberg, Rooney isn’t consciousness-raising with this book, and I think it would be unfair to demand that of her. It’s also somewhat unfair to characterize Alice and Eileen as bougie socialists, as they both seem to lead conscientious lives in accordance with their values. (For example, neither are materialistic; they have cellphones, but beyond some items of clothing that earn a few words of description, they own little else.) Instead, what Rooney is exploring in this novel is if it is possible for a conscientious person to find beauty and meaning in the end times without succumbing to melancholy and pessimism. If the world is out of control and heading for a crash and you’re along for the ride, what do you cling to? What do you affirm?
Early in the novel, Eileen wonders in an email message to Alice if “serious political action is still possible.” Given the stubbornness of our politics and the dearth of new philosophical ideas that might reconfigure the way we think about the world, it’s a valid question. Eileen pushes her line of questioning further, asking
But what if the conditions don’t generate the solution? What if we’re waiting for nothing, and all these people are suffering without the tools to end their own suffering? And we who have the tools refuse to do anything about it, because people who take action are criticised?
In her next message, though, written shortly after her relationship with Simon has grown more serious, Eileen seems to have pushed through her dread to assert the importance of love and friendship:
After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person? So in that sense, there is nothing better than what you so derisively call ‘breaking up or staying together’ (!), because at the end of our lives, when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about….I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive—because we are so stupid about each other.
We are living through an age of “general systems collapse.” The world is bound to disappoint us. We may even be there when the world ends. But that sort of world, maybe more than any other world, still demands beauty, love, and companionship. If the world won’t give that to us, if we can’t find those things, then maybe it’s our duty to bring them into the world.
Thanks for reading.
Exit music: “Hold Me Now” 12” maxi-single by Thompson Twins (1983; 1984 [maxi-single version])