Sally Ruin-y would be a decent rollerderby name

Cosmic point of view vs. a literature of millennial self-pity

Nov 19, 2021

Chill out, the title has Nothing To Do with the substance of this … review? Recitation?

Tra la, I finished Beautiful World, Where Are You?, the long-ly titled third from the Irish Marxist everybody loves to thinkpiece about.

Two people on a boardwalk at night, seen from above// photo by Yura Forrat // pexels

Thinkpiecing is probably a lot better than the alternative, though, which I guess would be snide GoodReads reviewing, or saying less than nothing on Instagram just so you can sneak the book of the moment into your latté b-roll. It must be exhausting to have your book take over The Discourse, because the rules of The Discourse are 1) pick a side as quickly as possible 2) brook no nuance.

But what I want for Sally Rooney’s books (and my books, and all books) is ambiguity. Which is why I kind of hate it when somebody asks if I liked X or Y or Dune. Like? What does that even mean? I either love it, or I have questions, or I have both. (I love Dune.) Criticism has always felt so final and binary to me, but even an essay has to have an argument of some kind. And especially when something is part of The Discourse, it seems like anything less than breathless praise is reduced to the realm of takedown or insult.

Sorry for all the throat-clearing. Can you feel how hard I’m trying not to say that I didn’t like this book?

(Before I say more, if you want to read an actual review which is way more intelligent and organized than this … utterance? Jeremiad? you should read my friend Tony’s review for the Nation, because it’s the best one I’ve read, and it includes actual textual analysis of the sentence-level style. I am, after my fashion, flâneusing around within the topics of this novel, and I invite you to imagine that we’re taking a long, slow walk around a city with digressions and stops at pretzel stalls.)

Anyway, re: Rooney. We’ve talked about the bucket hats (although not enough, imo), the secondary ARC market, character thinness, and self-aware narrators within late capitalism, but we haven’t yet talked about god, point of view, and self-pity.

In case you haven’t read the book, BW,WAY? contains the parallel love-ish stories of best friends Alice and Eileen, interspersed with epistolary exchanges in which the two of them are unmistakably—but smartly!—wracked with self-pity about every last fucking thing about life on this particular planet. Beauty is gone. Politics a sham. Everything light and lovely has been obliterated by plastic and self-conscious awareness of one’s own proximity to and needful enjoyment of plastic things. We are all implicated, and yet our individual actions feel meaningless. So, what now?

Both characters are engaged in love stories of a fashion. Alice has gone on a handful of extremely puzzling dates with Felix, who works in what seems like an Amazon fulfillment center. They have a kind of negative chemistry which keeps them in the room together, even to their own surprise. And Eileen is taking another turn at her longstanding affair with a childhood friend, who seems to adore her so much that they could have a real relationship if she would just express the desire for one.

Conversations With Friends and Normal People are great on the topics of love, sex, and triangulated relationships. They both bolster my theory that fiction is pleasurable (at least partially) because it gives us a socially sanctioned way to gossip. BW,WAY? seems like it should be a more nuanced exploration of the same. And maybe it’s largely a matter of taste, but I found these two couples entirely too polite to be as compelling as previous characters.

There are interesting propositions in this book. Eileen is yearning toward religion, to her own surprise. There is a sense that in this book, the marriage plot is almost like a trap door that the characters fall through at the end, although not unhappily, and that seems like a really fascinating analogue for what it feels like to realize that you’ve grown up into your socially coached role, even without meaning to, even while remaining yourself, which gives you a little bit more of a humble interest in the humans who have grown up before you.

But we spend so much time on our way to those interesting turns in these emails, which are a total drag, even though they’re intelligent and well-written. Why? Because their substance is, almost entirely, self-pity, and that self-pity has collapsed the entire novel’s point of view into a singular, limited voice. (A voice that is technically omniscient but can’t seem to imagine omniscience.)

Self-pity is, if you boil it down, nothing more than a criticism of the world. “It shouldn’t be this way” is self-pity, and self-pity is totally useless. Which isn’t to say, by the way, that we should judge ourselves for feeling that way from time to time. It’s probably an unavoidable feature of life in a human mind. But self-pity, in the form of pointing out what’s wrong with the world, is ideally just a prelude to a meaningful action of some kind. Or something! Anything! Anything except more pointing and frowning please.

People like to characterize millennials with the participation trophy and the student debt and the anodyne pink girlboss aesthetic, but I’m afraid that our truest quality is simply complaint. Here we are on Twitter, articulating the ways our economic system has left us colossally disadvantaged w/r/t student debt and home-buying. Here we are making the case for why being welcomed into adulthood by a default loan crisis was horrible. Yes, yes. True, true. But what now? What good is all of that articulation if, in the next moment, we just articulate yet another painful condition?

The tendency for Rooney’s characters to paint themselves via complaint was a seasoning in her previous books, but here, it’s hard to taste anything else. Is that the pressure of a pandemic, changing what was a sort of jokey pantomime of criticism into a truer panic? Maybe. Maybe it’s one thing to blithely point toward fractures in world systems when life is sailing along and getting worse at a manageable (or at least historically congruent) rate, and something else entirely to point toward those fractures as they’re actually breaking apart visibly, on a scale that disrupted life more than the norm.

And on top of that, Alice in particular seems preoccupied with: whither fiction? Whence fiction? In this cold world, why tell a story? etc. etc. It seems so logical to posit literature as an opposition to whatever might solve the problems of the anthropocene. Clearly we should all stop reading books and watching movies and … well, I don’t know what, because self-pity doesn’t actually venture any guesses at what to do about the condition. These characters have taken the notion of rational superiority to the end of the line, and they are in desperate need of faith and magic.

The book does not feel very aware of this need, even though Eileen expresses some interest in Catholicism via her childhood paramour and Alice (tacitly) desires it when she acknowledges that some past simpler life was probably a better time to be human. For Alice—well, for both of them, because they kind of read like one mind talking to itself—the present is characterized by the ugliness of technocratic materialism. The opposite of which, I would argue, is animist mysticism, although the two of them are too conservative to call it anything but God. And even that, only within the attenuation of irony and scare quotes.

But I would argue that the book’s choice of omniscient point of view is an attempt, maybe an underwater one, at reaching toward something sublime and yeah, god-esque, because omniscience is, after all, the cosmic eye view.

Almost every review I’ve read has noted that this book marks a departure from the first-person narrator for Rooney, which is true. But it’s weird, because the reviews seem to praise her for this decision, even though the use of third person is scattershot and frequently forgotten entirely. There are a few dollhouse-like moments where we get to see around corners and into the characters’ unwittingly juxtaposed moments. But the point of view doesn’t really inhabit the characters equally or evenly, and it reads as a proxy first person which fails to convincingly imagine, for example, Felix’s life. The warehouse where he works is sort of like an imaginal deadzone: No scenes take place there, no physical reality is rendered there. (Curious choice for a Marxist writer, to look away so completely from the physical reality of labor.) It seems like the book itself isn’t very interested in Felix, as if it has access to his consciousness but just decides … nah, let’s see what Alice and Eileen think about the Bronze Age.

And if we’re talking about this book as a kind of love and relationship story, which has been the default description of Rooney’s work so far, that disinterest in imagining the consciousness of the beloved is kind of a problem. Loving someone is difficult because, after the first flush of newness, it has to continue to adjust in relation to the separate selfhood of this other person. If you begin to make the mistake that people who love you should understand you or provide your deepest needs, you begin to be very unhappy. Staying in love is a commitment to seeing your beloved as a mysterious planet with a storm-covered surface, and loving them for their continued opacity. I would actually argue that first-person is a better vehicle for writing about this relational mode because it doesn’t pretend to know what’s going on under the surface.

One of the possibilities of an omniscient point of view, though, is to look through the eyes of god and see (or pretend to see) what such a wide lens would show us about ourselves. Which isn’t the right POV for every single story, of course, and third-person often enacts certain limits which essentially make it a proxy first-person, but I think it’s interesting nevertheless that this stylistic departure pops up alongside the exhausting questions one finds at the end of self-pity.

The plot neatly evades all of the above by zooming forward into pandemic life, which finds the quartet coupled, engaged in retrograde domesticity, and loving it. Which is fine, and understandable. I actually really love plot movement where an event from outside the characters’ bubbles swiftly rearranges their landscape another feature of narrative omniscience, I would argue. How did we get there? Because the will of a force majeure said so. (An idea I’ve been meandering around for the last year: What if we thought of third-person POV as god-person POV?) This is why the stilted use of POV feels like such a shame to me.

Self-pity is only available in first-person POV (or first-person-mimicking third) because it is inherently limited. It is only for one person to say “X shouldn’t be this way.” I say it shouldn’t rain today because I was supposed to go for a walk; you say it should rain today because you’re a lichen on a tree and you love more water. Omniscience is too big for self-pity. And that’s why it felt to me as if BW,WAY? was trying to find a way out of its own dour conclusions.

I genuinely don’t think we read fiction because it presents solutions to our problems, even though some books essentially do this anyway. I don’t find literature particularly humanitarian or implicitly ethical in that way. I think we love story because our entire consciousness is story, and we magically forget this over and over. We live in a puzzle box we mistake for a planet, and we happen to just love playing with puzzle boxes because the experience of navigating them has some uncanny echo we just love … not because we get a little truth nugget when we solve the puzzles. (The puzzles aren’t solvable, for starters.) So I’m not asking this or any book to do some kind of moral calculus for me/us/whatever. I’m asking it to be its own kind of puzzle, to present its particular tricks, challenges, and landscapes on its own terms. To be a world, continuous and vivid. And this is why a wobbly POV is such a critical issue.

All of which is to say (lol) that I think this book needed more time to develop, and I wish I could read the book it might have turned into. Sometimes I wonder if books by extremely successful writers get rushed along because the book’s value as a commercial asset is complete before the story has finished happening inside the writer. No matter what, I think books are the husks of an inward-dwelling process, which is yet another reason that reviewing them feels bizarre to me. Like reviewing fingernails.

But writers are always producing more books, and each book is the continuation of a question, so I’ll probably get my wish. And at the very least, I’m hopeful that we can finally talk about something other than sex and relationships in Rooney’s work, or talk about sex and relationships as something cosmic in their own right.

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