Beautiful Word, Where Are You is the third novel from 30 year old Irish author, Sally Rooney,
that has seemingly placed an entire generation of readers in a chokehold. The hallmark of Rooney’s work
is her painstakingly careful attention to detail; she will often spend upwards of a page describing, for
example, the exact way in which two hands touch. She is calculating in her choice of language, allowing
the reader to feel as though they are sitting right next to the characters, bathing in every aspect of their
world. I fell victim to Rooney’s devastating detail over the summer when I finally got around to reading
Normal People, after everyone and their mother convinced me it would be life changing. I was told I
would come away from the experience a better person, but found instead that I came away as a bitter
person. I found the romantic plot points to be trite, and the language to be nothing more than a collection of cliches that made me––not to sound like a cartoon villain––root against the protagonists and their love story.
Beautiful World, Where Are You follows the four intertwined lives of Alice, a successful novelist,
her best friend Eileen, a literary magazine editor, Simon, the man Eileen has been hopelessly in love with
since childhood, and Felix, Alice’s Tinder date gone wrong, whom she impulsively invites to Rome on a
book tour. The structure of the novel exists within the framework of two romantic relationships, and it is
through this that Rooney explores deeper topics. Eileen and Simon, childhood friends, are trying to
navigate their on-again off-again feelings for each other, but their timing is almost comically poor; when
Eileen is pining for Simon, he is in a committed relationship, and when Simon is pursuing his own
unrequited love, Eileen is wrapped up in a romantic relationship of her own. Alice and Felix, on the other
hand, have just met and embark on an exploration of moments from awkward encounters to passionate
emotions. When the story opens, Alice has recently returned from being hospitalized due to a psychotic
break resulting from the many pressures of her life, and Eileen is grappling with where she is in her life,
as her older sister Lola is about to get married. The initial qualms of each woman existing outside of her
relationship with a man is promising, but this is soon disrupted by male-centered issues when Felix enters
Alice’s life, and Simon re-enters Eileen’s life. Sprinkled throughout the novel––arguably tying it
together––are emails exchanged back and forth between Alice and Eileen. They offer an inside look into
the deep and beautiful nature of female friendship, attempting to ground the novel in this relationship.
Each one is teeming with commentary on what I believe to be the question central to Rooney’s novel:
how do we go about living life to the fullest extent possible in our current political and social climate.
Eileen and Alice discuss crises of faith, familial dynamics, politics, female sexual desire, and searching
for beauty in the world around them.
Although I often found myself drowning in a pretentious and uninteresting conversation between
Eileen and Alice, the emails exist as a space for Rooney to develop her two female characters. This allows
for multi-dimensional conversations that remove Eileen and Alice from their respective romantic
relationships. This structure allows for a deeper reflection on the nuanced nature of female friendships; it
creates a depth around this relationship, which has historically been rendered surface level and
unimportant due to its lack of a male presence. One of the most important aspects of my social life is the
presence of my female friendships, filled with nuance and a complete lack of the male gaze. It becomes
frustrating to continuously read literature that obliterates this nuance, and solely regards the relationship
between two women as framed through a man. It was refreshing to see Rooney place a female friendship
at the center of her novel––a far cry from the devastating romantic relationship at the core of her other
critically acclaimed novel, Normal People.
However, outside of these email exchanges––each only a page or two long––Rooney seems
incapable of constructing a complex female character who can exist freely without strong ties to a man in
her life. Both the lives of Eileen and Alice strictly revolve around their respective romantic relationships.
This seems to be a problem that Rooney grapples with each time she puts pen to paper; I felt the same
longing for a deeper exploration into the female protagonist of Normal People, and was just as
disappointed when every point of nuance for this character revolved around her feelings for the male
protagonist, framed through the male gaze. Each woman has her own job, yet little is said about work life
for a woman. The novel takes place in 2019 and concludes directly following the onset of the COVID-19
pandemic; to eliminate any discussion of the work lives of Alice and Eileen––aside from often complaints
from the two––is a huge oversight on Rooney’s part. She had the chance to construct two driven working
women, and completely dropped the ball. This ultimately further prohibits the viewer from seeing these
women as anything other than the partners of the men in their lives. Once again, we are left with a female
character, or two, who is surface level at best. Rooney’s treatment of a modern day woman was hugely
disappointing and I closed the book feeling betrayed by the author as a fellow woman living in 2021.
Completely failing her female audience, Rooney perpetuates the hermetic trope of a damsel in
distress, ultimately framing every moment of Beautiful World, Where Are You around men. The
characters of Eileen and Alice are incredibly underwhelming and frustrating, even in their moments of
nuanced conversation. There is not much reflection on their own privilege and how this colors the lens of
their perspective on the world. The two are white, thin, financially stable, college educated women; yet
they seem to ignore this. Aside from the inclusion of a female friendship that exists outside of the grasp of the male gaze, many of the emails between Eileen and Alice fall flat for this reason. Once again, in an
attempt for Rooney’s female characters to read as nuanced, they end up translating into insufferable
pretentiousness and ignorance. Perhaps she needs to take a step outside of her restricted perspective and reframe her characters as conscious of their own privilege and stance in society. Until that happens, you won’t find me in line for the release of her next––undoubtedly disappointing––novel. Normal People’s simplistic structure around a romantic relationship––framing yet another female within the context of a male––gave readers a look into Rooney’s difficulty in crafting a complex female character. I decided to give her another shot in Beautiful World, Where Are You, perhaps because a small part of me enjoys the pretentious discussions of concepts the characters don’t seem to fully understand themselves, perhaps because I enjoy disappointment. But as the old adage goes...happens once, shame on Rooney, happens twice? Shame on me.
Comments