{"id":150602,"date":"2021-09-07T10:36:52","date_gmt":"2021-09-06T23:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/?p=150602"},"modified":"2021-10-05T15:35:16","modified_gmt":"2021-10-05T04:35:16","slug":"review-beautiful-world-where-are-you-by-sally-rooney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2021\/09\/07\/review-beautiful-world-where-are-you-by-sally-rooney\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Beautiful<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In a message I sent to a friend while halfway through Beautiful World, Where Are You<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, I wrote, \u2018Sally Rooney would like everyone to know that she has read all of the thinkpieces we wrote about her and she thinks that they are very silly.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Sally<\/a>

Sally Rooney<\/p><\/div>\n

At the time I was trying to be funny, but something about the sentiment rings true. No other millennial writer in recent memory has generated quite<\/em> so much literary consternation; her worth is debated in the culture sections of various magazines while her publishers erect \u2018Sally Rooney pop-up shops’ for her eager fans. It\u2019s the kind of hype that starts to eat itself, and it\u2019s clear from her latest book that the author could do without it. In Beautiful World, Where Are You<\/em>, Sally Rooney grapples with what it means to be a very famous novelist, but also what it means to make art when culture and civilisation seem to be defined by crisis. It\u2019s the latter question that proves to be the most compelling.<\/p>\n\n\n

Beautiful World, Where Are You<\/em> unspools the lives of four young people: there\u2019s Alice, the famous novelist, and her best friend Eileen, the not-so-famous literary magazine assistant, and then there\u2019s the men they\u2019re seeing. Felix is a warehouse worker with whom Alice shares a prickly yet undeniably erotic relationship, and Simon is Eileen\u2019s friend from childhood who is slowly becoming something more. The novel is partly epistolary in nature, with chapters of action interrupted by long, lovingly tempestuous emails sent back-and-forth between Alice and Eileen. In them, they debate life, art, history, and politics, bemoaning the fate of the world while offering updates about their romantic lives with studied nonchalance. When the women reunite towards the novel\u2019s end, they find themselves reckoning with the gap between the perception they created with their correspondence and the actual reality of their lives and relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is so much to love about this new novel. It\u2019s smart and thoughtful, poking at the tender underbellies of our feelings to see if they can withstand modern cruelty and indifference. In a sense, it\u2019s much more like Rooney\u2019s debut, Conversations With Friends<\/em>, with its four central characters tripping over each other\u2019s needs, beliefs, and desires. I came to love each of them dearly; for all the hand-wringing about her sparseness of style, I have always found her prose to be interesting and her characters richly drawn. Rooney is the master of implication, in that her characters never have to say very much for the canny reader to follow them to some compelling emotional conclusion. Their anxieties about the world \u2014 and their relation to each other within it \u2014 aren\u2019t necessarily new, but still feel fresh. In a time where you might be questioning whether it\u2019s worth it to pursue love or beauty (or even to read a novel at all), Beautiful World, Where Are You<\/em> emerges with an answer you weren\u2019t expecting, but which is all the more welcome for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s no overstatement to say that this is a novel with enormous shoes to fill. The wake left by Normal People<\/em> brewed excitement for whatever Rooney wrote next to a feverish boil, and I sheepishly admit to being a contributor to the hype machine. But what I won\u2019t apologise for is enjoying the works of an author this good, and Beautiful World, Where Are You<\/em> is a novel that successfully tempers the frenzy. It\u2019s self-assured, more hopeful and \u2014 dare I say it? \u2014 beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Beautiful World, Where Are You<\/a><\/em> by Sally Rooney (Allen & Unwin) is out now.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Booktoberfest<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘There is so much to love about this new novel.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":150610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[6678],"tags":[486,12344,13682,1974,7163,4484,8595],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/BeautifulWorld-Social.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150602"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150602"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152972,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150602\/revisions\/152972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}