Alice states, in the middle of an email meditation on the suffering of others, that she doesn’t know what action to take and that’s okay because, as she says, “In my defense I’m very tired and I don’t have any good ideas.” I much prefer Frances and Bobbi’s ignorant attempts at problem solving seen in “Conversations with Friends” to the political defeatism of “Beautiful World.” And, beyond personal preference for effort over acquiescence, Rooney’s blasé and straightforward prose dangerously posits stasis as intellectually superior. “Beautiful World” is populated with “good white liberals,” who are essentially college educated people armed with both a tongue-in-cheek awareness of their privilege and a resistance to taking action. However, her earlier books acknowledge their lives are inherently ironic without delegitimizing their experience.Īlice and Eileen are more self-aware than Rooney’s college-aged characters, but rather than letting their knowledge of privilege motivate them to achieve a more just world, they give up. Yes, there is irony to Rooney’s nearly homogenous character set of well-off European white women debating about socialism while using their parents’ credit cards to buy coffee with maddeningly opaque romantic partners. The Rooney characters I fell in love with - earnest and radical young women - talk about revolution while enmeshing themselves in unhealthy relationship patterns, honestly portraying what it is to be well-educated and sincere about structural geopolitical issues and simultaneously (incongruently, perhaps, to anyone not in Gen Z) stuck in sophomoric debates on whether or not one should text first. Rooney writes sentences like“Alice seemed to fall asleep instantly” and “She seemed to have become slightly nervous.” The only time a reader is allowed to enter the characters’ minds is through their emails - which, besides being mediated by the distance of the imagined digital world, are overly verbose and philosophical several pages are used to describe the collapse of Mesopotamia in order to arrive at the point that, according to Eileen, “human civilization is a lie.” The structure is awkward and cold, describing each character from a significant distance, hinting at, but not revealing, truth. The book uses a combination of voyeuristic third-person narration and interspersed emails to take readers through the romantic lives of former college roommates Alice and Eileen, who are now approaching 30. While her other protagonists sincerely attempt love and politics, Rooney’s new characters trivialize both. “Beautiful World, Where Are You?”, which was published early this month, failed to live up to the lucidity of Rooney’s earlier novels. Rooney is the novelist I go to when I want to be seen and validated, so waiting for her highly anticipated third novel was like waiting for an old friend to return home. She takes seriously the kind of stories that are often deemed frivolous merely because their subject matter (girls) is not seen as a viable cultural subset for which to make art, manifested in the phrase “chick lit.” Art which portrays female perspectives - especially young, contemporary female perspectives - is often viewed as separate and illegitimate. Her first two novels, “Conversations with Friends” and “Normal People,” catalog the romantic and intellectual obsessions of her college-aged subjects with rare tenderness and precision. Reading Sally Rooney is like finally being compensated for being a young woman.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |