Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, follows best friends Alice Kelleher and Eileen Lydon as they navigate careers and relationships in their early thirties. Alice, a novelist, has found unexpected success after the publication of her first two novels but is now recovering from a nervous breakdown in a seaside town. There, she starts dating warehouse worker Felix Brady. Back in Dublin, Eileen is an editor at a literary magazine; she earns barely twenty-thousand pounds a year and lives with a married couple she dislikes. She’s recovering from a breakup and often flirts with her childhood friend, Simon Costigan, who works for a liberal advocacy group. In chapters that alternate between emails to each other and narrative prose about their lives and relationships, Sally Rooney dives into these two smart women’s lives and minds.

 

“What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?”

– Sally Rooney in Beautiful World, Where Are You?

On the cusp of thirty, Alice and Eileen are struggling to figure out how they should live. They struggle to find meaning in a world that they perceive to be increasingly fragile and unstable. Having lived through an economic recession, they are anxious about everything from climate change to the refugee crisis. And yet, their day-to-day concerns are much more mundane. They fret mostly about their romantic relationships, their family, their careers, and their friendship with each other. They are keenly aware of this contradiction between what they want to care about and what they actually care about, and it bothers them. In one email, Alice writes to Eileen: “I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse.”

I’ll admit that at times these email exchanges made me roll my eyes. The characters’ existential angst is low-stakes when compared with the problems of less privileged people, and so, it can be exasperating. Sally Rooney seems to know this herself and reflects it in the women’s dialogues.  Still, their long philosophical musings can come across as pretentious for two ordinary twenty-nine-year-old women. The characters are so insecure at times, so unable to hold intimate connections, that they come across as childish at times. It could be argued that these characters take themselves too seriously, worrying about whether they will hook up with someone and seeming to forget how lucky and privileged they already are, that their concerns are so mundane. In their desperate yearning for connection, they seem to sabotage their most intimate relationships in a way that can test the reader’s patience.

In sum, these characters might not find sympathy among readers who like bashing millennials, accusing them of being lazy, coddled, and afraid of traditional adult responsibilities like marriage, children, and home ownership. And of course, this novel’s cast is not representative of the whole of society. It never claims to be. Rooney’s characters are ordinary, white, middle-class Irish women, with the particular privilege that comes with that.

Perhaps that is why I found myself quite enjoying this book. Whether one agrees or not that Sally Rooney is the “voice of millennials“, I have to admit that I did see parts of myself in both Alice and Eileen. And perhaps the reason is that mundane as they are, their concerns are often my concerns.

The novel is about how we choose to live, or rather, what we choose to pay attention to as we try to find meaning in our lives. And perhaps these questions resonated with me because they reflect the questions that I seem to be hearing more and more from many of my friends lately—what is important to us in life? Where do we find meaning? Is it at work? Is it in children? Is it in friendship? It seems to me that having gained some “success” in either work or relationships by the time they turn thirty, many of my friends are now asking themselves: what is it all for? What do we do now? And how can we contribute to an increasingly polarized and anxious society?

The truth is that many of us do worry about climate change, war, and refugee crises, and about how our choices affect these things. There seems to be general anxiety among millennials about the economic and ecological forces beyond their control. I know people who worry about how their dietary choices, their clothing choices, and even how the choice to have children will or will not impact these larger trends. I’ve also noticed feelings of overwhelm and borderline apathy among my peer; faced with so much information about the complexity of our current challenges, many of them tell me that we’re screwed, no matter what we do.

So, questions about how to live well are ones I tend to think about. They are also often central in literature. Sally Rooney’s answer seems to be contained in the friendship between these two women. Awkward as it might sometimes feel, Beautiful World, Where Are You is ultimately a very hopeful story. Here is a novel that wants to remind us about the centrality of friendship and love to the human experience.

Thinking about what she sees as the self-inflicted demise of the human species, Eileen asks whether it is not in some way beautiful that “when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting.”

It’s a provocative question and I wouldn’t agree that we can let ourselves off the hook (nor do I think that Rooney is saying that), but it speaks to the characters’ desire for permission to seek joy in the mundane, even when the world seems so troubled, so crises ridden. And I found myself celebrating the moments when the characters were able to feel joy. It reminded me of something Jack Kornfield said in an interview with Tim Ferris. Tim was concerned about how much apathy he sees among his followers and wanted to know what we can do about it. Part of Kornfield’s response is to seek out lives of joy. “Joy is a moral obligation,” he says. It reminded me of Beautiful World, Where Are You because I think that’s what Sally Rooney is saying to us. It is in seeking out joy, love, and connection that we can all contribute to making the world better.

In the acknowledgments, Rooney explains that the novel’s title comes from a line from a poem by Friedrich Schiller that Franz Schubert set music to in 1819. It is both the title Rooney chose and a challenge directed at us, the readers. Can you find the beauty in this world? Can you see it in the “ordinariness and even ugly vulgarity” of life? That question and the elegant, simple way in which Rooney explores it makes this book triumph.

So grab a copy of Beautiful World, Where Are You and tell me what you thought about it in the comments.