If Beautiful World is a love story, it’s one about both sexual and platonic connections. That kind of emotional investment in the work, you feel it from the very first page.” And I know that she lives with these people day after day. She cares about her characters,” says Angel. It’s a credit to the intimacy Rooney shares with the people who make up her beautiful worlds. Our investment in stories like this leaves us changed. “We can’t seem to shake the conviction that nothing matters, life is random, our sincerest feelings are reducible to chemical reactions, and no objective moral law structures the universe,” Alice says, summing up her and Eileen’s cynicism.īut as readers, our deep involvement in the book renders the question of the purpose of novels asked and answered. ![]() How can we live in a world where beauty seems to be melting away with the rising temperatures? How can we live with the ugly, cruel parts of ourselves? At several points in the novel, Rooney, through her characters, questions whether novels-especially love stories-even matter. Sex, like friendship, is something Rooney takes seriously. (Who among us can claim to be immune to baby animal vids as foreplay?) Other times, the scenes are too unbearably intimate to be pulled from their original context. One seduction begins with one person moseying into the other person’s room at night under the pretext of sharing a viral video of a raccoon eating a cherry. This is not to suggest that the book contains less sex than Rooney’s previous novels-if anything, there’s more, and indeed, it is juicy. “I never know what to think until I talk to you,” Alice tells Eileen. ![]() Half the book is made up of correspondence between the two women-love letters, almost. Friends really matter, and she takes them seriously.” In Beautiful World, platonic friendship has the intensity of a great romance-“I continue to miss you passionately,” Alice writes to Eileen. “The identification you have with a friend of yours, but also the conflict that can sometimes come about through your closeness. “The female friendship was so compelling and recognizable to me as a woman,” says Angel. In fact, it’s a surprisingly universal experience. Crying over Sally Rooney’s characters feels like an intensely private catharsis. People speak of relating so deeply to the characters that reading takes on a kind of delicious agony. Not attending a party, not reuniting with friends, not going on a date. When you are reading a Sally Rooney novel, you don’t want to be doing anything else. ![]() She has an uncanny ability to make a story into a kind of shelter for a reader. Rooney’s books create a public commotion in which the same sentiments are echoed: That they herald a new era in literature, that her releases are anticipated like new iPhone models, that she has achieved major success so young it’s almost rude, that she is a Marxist, that her books have more sex in them, possibly, than you’ve had in your entire life.īut the inexpressible magic of Sally Rooney novels-very much including Beautiful World-is the way they make you feel. “But at the same time, that is what I do every day.” “It seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse,” Eileen writes to Alice. And they consider how to live when the world, evidence suggests, is ending. Alice, Eileen, Simon, and Felix deal with ghosting and house parties, wanting to die and wedding culture, Roman vacations and bad roommates.
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