They discuss aesthetics politics the place of art in a world racked by crisis-more specifically, the place of sexy, funny novels-of-manners of the kind Rooney herself produces the pressures of fame the unfairness of rewarding certain kinds of labour (literary) more than others (physical).
Rooney’s status anxiety is made explicit in the content of the two women’s letters. But though Alice’s character is more obviously autofictional, one also senses Eileen to represent a version of Rooney too an equal and opposite, a sometimes-mocking past self, who cannot quite believe Alice’s capacity for self-pity in the face of huge success. “I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing,” declares Alice, surely echoing the famously reticent and publicity-shy Rooney’s own sentiments. It is impossible not to read Beautiful World, Where Are You as an internal conversation Rooney has been holding with herself over these last few years.
Mayo, where Alice is living alone in a rambling, rented house after suffering a breakdown during the promotion of her own bestselling novels. It takes semi-epistolary form, as two female friends, Eileen and Alice, correspond between Dublin, where Eileen exists in a sort of stasis as a thirty-year-old editorial assistant, living in a grimy house-share, and a coastal village in Co. During the writing of Conversations with Friends and Normal People, she has said, “I wasn’t thinking, what is a voice? What is a protagonist? It was all so natural.” But now, with millions awaiting her next publication, “I sat down and thought, wait a minute, what is a novel?” The result, as might be guessed, is a more self-conscious book than her first two, but it is not, I think, a worse one.
Having written the first and most of the second with a liberating sense of anonymity, Rooney had to approach her third novel from a completely different perspective. Sally Rooney’s first two novels were smash hits-her debut, Conversations with Friends, earning her the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2017, and her second, Normal People, being an instant bestseller that was later adapted into a BBC/RTE television drama that infatuated the country, nay, the world, during the first, frantic days of the first Covid lockdown. Foreign Policy & International Relationsīeautiful World, Where Are You was written under considerable pressure.
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