It’s hard to think of a literary phenomenon in my lifetime like Sally Rooney. When considering the biggest sensations that I can think of, I’m not sure any of them fit into quite the same category as Rooney. J.K. Rowling, for instance, is obviously far more famous and, by most categorisations, more successful than Sally Rooney. But she is a children’s author who hasn’t ever had to live up to the hype and success that was Harry Potter. In the age of Intellectual Property being king, she could keep churning out more and more variations on the Harry Potter story forever and not have anybody question whether she could be doing something more or something better. She’s written other things outside of Harry Potter, but done so under a pseudonym. And she’s never been a critical darling.
Similarly, an author like Richard Osman, who has written the other big-selling, highly-marketed book of autumn 2021, doesn’t have to put any stock in whether his works are critically acclaimed or not. His work is very successful, it has an ardent fan base and is, by all accounts, very enjoyable. With the greatest of respect to Rowling and Osman (and lord knows that neither of them need ever care about little old me writing this little old piece) their place in the culture doesn’t revolve even slightly around whether her work is considered “good” or not by critics. Having to please a huge public audience is its own form of massively pressure, no doubt, but critical appraisal simply isn’t a relevant factor in what is deemed a success for their work.
The major sellers and cultural movers of the past 20 or so years have been, by-and-large, Young Adult series, such as The Hunger Games, and fantasy epics such as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Whilst the need to finish these epic stories in a satisfactory way must be a massive source of pressure for the authors of these works, it is still “only” writing one story overall. Each time a new edition in the series comes out, there is pressure, but there is also a massive in-built audience who already know and love that exact story. They know the characters and they want to see more of their journey. The beginning, middle and end of a new story doesn’t have to be quite considered in the same way when you’re writing a book that you know is part of a bigger series.
Rooney is different. I’m not sure there has been a work in my adult life that has achieved joint critical and commercial success in quite the way her work has done, especially Normal People. Rooney’s second novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, sold hundreds of thousands of copies (which may not sound like a lot. Trust me, it is), made her a household name (at least as far as any fiction author of purely “grown-up” work can be considered a household name in 2021) and, of course, received a television adaptation that became one of the biggest stars of pandemic entertainment in mid-2020.
It’s hard to know whether the adaptation of Normal People would have garnered such a high audience and had quite the impact on viewers and across social media had the pandemic not forced us all indoors for months (and months, and months, and months, and months…) on end, and kept us apart from family, friends, and potential lovers. I’m far from the first to point this out, but it’s not hard to imagine that part of the appeal of seeing such an intimate connection portrayed on screen by two beautiful people was heightened by just how little personal connection we all were able to partake in ourselves at that point in time.
But, the circumstances of having a more captive audience than expected takes nothing away from the success of the programme. Normal People became one of the TV events of the year, breaking streaming records for both BBC iPlayer and RTÉ, and making waves across the pond. Both its main stars were nominated for BAFTAS (which Paul Mescal won), with Daisy Edgar Jones also nominated for a Golden Globe, and Paul Mescal nominated for an Emmy. Rooney herself was nominated for multiple TV awards for her work on the series, and almost overnight, the fervour for more of her work grew exponentially. Readers in the U.K. and Ireland sent Normal People back to the top of the charts two years after it was released, and with only one other novel in Rooney’s catalogue (2017’s similarly brilliant Conversations with Friends, which is, of course, now also receiving its own TV adaptation from the makers of Normal People), the anticipation for what this prodigy would do next went into overdrive.
The success of Rooney’s work took on a life of its own. Crucially, the audience that devoured Normal People skews far younger than most adult fiction typically would. The crossover success of the series that led to Instagram fan accounts for Connell’s chain is built up of the 16-34 year olds that networks and advertisers are desperate to capture the attention of. Such success amongst young readers in adult contemporary fiction is almost unheard of. And, presumably, the pressure for Rooney to release another phenomenon as closely as possible to the success of Normal People was massive.
And this is another key area where Rooney has essentially no peers. Normal People 2 isn’t an option for Rooney, at least not right now. Maybe she will revisit Connell and Marianne one day, à la Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy of films, looking at how these two troubled lovers’ lives intertwine in their 30s, 40s, 50s. But Rooney’s work is such a clear mirror of her own experiences that she couldn’t just imagine up a future 10 years down the line for those two characters. Not enough time has passed. The authenticity that made the novel and the series such a hit simply wouldn’t be there.
It may end up being seen as a weakness of Rooney as a writer that she only writes about experiences that are very clearly based largely in her own reality. But it is no easy skill to write engagingly about one’s own experiences, especially in a fictional piece that has to consider how events must be moved in time, edited to not be exact reality but close enough that it feels real to anybody who reads it. Rooney may have a specific niche that she writes in, but she does it better than anybody else. To a casual observer, every song Bruce Springsteen has ever written is about down on their luck working class people trying to make it through life – but who cares when they’re as good as the songs that Springsteen writes? For the younger(ish) readers out there: every single song that Pusha T has ever written seems to be about selling cocaine. And you can inject every one of those songs directly into my veins because they’re all great.
There’s a huge level of skill to what Rooney does, especially when considering that what she does so well is get human intimacy to feel so real on the page. If it were so easy to simply write conversations that feel so raw and so real, Rooney wouldn’t be the sensation that she is. We would have seen it a million times before. But we haven’t. Her work feels singularly perceptive, her characters feel uniquely relatable, especially to her own generation.
So, does Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You live up to the hype that has been set up for her in the past few years? Well, unsurprisingly, it’s complicated…
The novel mainly follows four characters: best friends Alice and Eileen, and their relationships with two men, Felix and Simon. The structure of the novel is split between a style of somewhat omniscient narration in alternate chapters, and then emails between Alice and Eileen taking up the other chapters.
Throughout Rooney’s works there is always a character that it is easy to assume as a reader is the stand-in for Rooney herself. As with all work, the truth is more complicated than this, and all the characters of Beautiful World, Where Are You seem to share certain elements of the opinions and personality that Rooney has showed to the world, and further aspects that seem to be outside of that. However, it’s hard to not see the character of Alice as being the closest that Rooney has ever written to being her own avatar. Alice is an Irish writer around the age of 30 who has achieved enough fame and success from her first two novels that she is rich and well known, but can meet people who have no idea who she is and who don’t care that she is an author. Alice is trying to write her third novel and is struggling with the idea of what it means to be a writer of romantic relationships in the 21st Century in a capitalist society that she feels is morally unfit and collapsing around her. Oh, and a pandemic occurs towards the end of the novel. Anything sound familiar?
The thing that is equally fascinating and frustrating about this novel is how hard it is to read it without wishing that Rooney had been able to split these alternating chapters into two entirely separate works. The emails between Eileen and Alice mostly read as Rooney’s own frustrations with the literary scene and her personal struggles with whether it is moral to take up people’s attention with stories about love and relationships when the world burns around us, and, to make money from it whilst you do so. Alice’s emails muse upon historical events and societal collapses and she comes to the conclusion that it’s okay to write about love and relationships because throughout time that is what people have cared about reading, no matter what else is going on around them. You can change technology, political structures and countries, but ultimately people care about each other; and audiences consuming entertainment care about stories that are about people, Alice (and, presumably, Rooney) ultimately decides.
There is so much about this ethical struggle that is fascinating and I wish I could read a series of essays from Rooney that are about this exact struggle and that don’t have to fit within a novelistic structure. Lots of these email chapters feel hamfisted into the story. And, unfortunately, the chapters outside of the emails don’t feel well formed enough to be a satisfying narrative on their own. It feels like hearing Rooney describe her process of writing this novel would be more satisfying than the story itself.
Towards the end of the novel, Alice writes in an email that when she sees a fan comment on her life, she thinks, “what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity”. Taken out of context, that comment may make it seem like Rooney is somewhat bitter towards her own fanbase. I don’t think that is the case. Her disdain is for celebrity culture, and the ownership of people that necessarily comes with social media.
At the risk of assuming things about Rooney’s life and being the person deranged by the concept of celebrity, I think this novel has been hampered by the pressure upon Rooney to release something within roughly a year of Normal People’s adaptation becoming such a phenomenon. At times, the book almost seems like an angry reaction to that external pressure to produce. If Rooney could have had the space to write about these struggles in essay form, they no doubt would not sell anywhere near as well as this novel will do. But they may have been more satisfying. And Rooney could have then had more time to focus on developing the characters of this novel to a point where they feel unforgettable. Connell and Marianne have stayed in my mind ever since reading Normal People. When I experience events in my own life, they remind me of the novel, and the novel reminds me of events I have experienced, in the best way that art can imitate life. I don’t think I’ll feel this way about Alice, Eileen, Felix and Simon. Their relationships don’t feel as well drawn, their motivations aren’t as fleshed out as the best that Rooney has had to offer in the past.
But, of course, this is the Catch-22 of Rooney being the anointed saviour of adult fiction (a title which it seems very clear that she does not relish having): she couldn’t be given the space to flesh ideas out for a few years and come back with a potential masterpiece because her publishers, and the industry at large, is so desperate for her to release another hit that pumps money back into the literary market. This is fine for the Richard Osmans and the J.K. Rowlings of the world because they need not worry about their latest work also being deemed a masterpiece, as well as a financial success. Again, with the greatest of respect to them, that is a burden has never been thrust upon them. Rooney exists in a league of her own, and, if Alice’s frustrations with the literary world in Beautiful World, Where Are You are anything to go by, heavy is the head that wears the crown.
