Learning about life's complexities and religion through writing

• Author: RANDY ROSENTHAL
• Published date: 30 September 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Rooney applied the same formula in her new, much-anticipated novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, which is just as irresistible as her previous work, yet much more frustrating.

It's never a good idea to assume a novel is autobiographical, but it's difficult to not see Beautiful World's protagonist, Alice Kelleher, as a stand-in for Rooney. She's the same age, has written two very successful novels, and spent a year in New York City (where Rooney was a Fellow of the New York Public Library in 2019) before returning to Ireland to recover from the whirlwind of fame. Now, ensconced in a big seaside house she leaves only for literary events abroad, she's burned out, cynical, and lonely. Apparently, Alice was hospitalized for some sort of nervous breakdown.

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Structurally, the novel alternates from emails between Alice and her best friend, Eileen, whose voices sound the same, and scenes about them narrated in a flat third-person. In the emails, they critique the social and environmental havoc wreaked by our consumerist culture, naïvely lament the fall of the USSR, debate the merit of aesthetics, and talk about their love lives. While Alice has achieved literary stardom, Eileen is an editor at a literary journal in Dublin and has published a single essay. Alice is hyper-aware of her fortune and privilege, and yet she spends most of her emails complaining.

Ridiculously, she complains about the "current system of literary production," whatever that is, and about the authors she's met, concluding "they know nothing about real life," as if that's true. She complains about "the problem of the contemporary Euro-American novel," as if such a problem existed, claiming it "relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth." That is, billions of people exploited by rapacious capitalism live in desperate poverty, and "bougie" authors have the gall to write about sex and friendship.

Alice admits that her own work is "the worst culprit in this regard," finds it "morally and politically worthless," and feels guilty for not writing more political novels. But she seems unaware that, as Orhan Pamuk wrote in The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, "The art of the novel becomes political not when the author expresses political views, but when we make an effort to understand someone who is...