Beautiful World Where Are You (5*)

I liked Sally Rooney's previous novels but this one is a cut above:  millennial navel gazing meets Marxist dialectic with characters who, like Rooney herself, have finally grown into adults.  Alice, Eileen, Simon & Felix have been forced to confront who they really are and what it means to take a seat at the adult table.  E-mails between the women comprise the bulk of the narrative which enables Alice, a successful novelist, and Eileen, the college BFF she leaves behind, to debate the meaning of life.  

Alice:

The problem with  the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth.  To confront the poverty  and misery in which millions are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the  lives  of the 'main characters' of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful.  Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel's protagonists, when it's happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species?  Do the protagonists break up or stay together?  In this world, what does it matter?  So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world—packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together – if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything. 

Eileen:

And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person? So in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you do so derisively call ‘breaking up or staying together’(!), because at the end of our lives, when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about.  Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest region you can imagine?  Because when we should have been re-organizing the distribution of the worlds resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we love each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other. 

Felix and Simon, only one of whom would be able to "work remotely," stimulate the action in between these exchanges.  I particularly love the fact that Rooney fiercely defends the non-intellectual class in an Ireland, like America, that would prefer to overlook them.  She also cleverly inoculates Felix, who enjoys brutal pornography, against revulsion through his loving care of an abandoned animal who also happens to be a proxy for Alice.

And then there's this, Rooney's most profound insight about her generation in a book that confronts faith head-on:

It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasized to fill the emptiness left by religion.  Like a malignant growth where the sacred used to be. 

Girl, you just keep getting better.