“Beautiful world, where are you”, Sally Rooney’s new novel. Review. – Culture

The secret of good books, writes Michael Maar in his style history of German-language literature, lies in their healthy proportions, in the balance of content and form. If the trivial is told pathetically, it is kitsch. It is well known that rules have their exceptions. One such is the young Irish writer Sally Rooney. In their books, unusually clever women debate existential issues in a very self-indulgent way as well as high-pitched everyday issues. But that is far from being adolescent kitsch.

Sally Rooney’s path to becoming a bestselling author was as glamorous as it was rapid. As a student, she was discovered by an agent in 2015 and signed a contract with the publishing ship Faber & Faber after no fewer than seven houses had bid for her manuscript at a legendary auction. Both of the novels that followed became bestsellers. Barack Obama tops Rooney on his “must read” list, and the film adaptation of her second novel “Ordinary People” is one of the BBC’s most watched series ever. “Two under three” is said in English when mothers have had their children in quick succession. You could say about Rooney that she has “two under 31”, two bestsellers before the age of 31. In all likelihood there will soon be three with “Schöne Welt, where are you”.

At what age did we stop writing such language-loving e-mails?

She has remained true to her thematic mixture, as well as her linguistically inconspicuous style, rich in dialogues. Again the focus is on the intellectually strained conversation between two young Irish women, Eileen and Alice, from the post-crash generation. Accordingly, they look to their future with resignation. “In fact, the only idea seems to be that we watch the immense human misery unfold before our eyes,” Eileen once wrote to Alice, who in turn characterized herself as permanently disoriented and tired.

Large parts of the novel consist in the two friends parlating about this human misery. They have to do this by email because the writer Alice has just moved from Dublin to a provincial village to recover from a depression. Eileen remains in the capital as an editorial assistant for a moderately successful literary magazine. However, since the two of them write e-mails to each other like letters were written a hundred and fifty years ago, deliberately, carefully and with solid philosophical concerns, this does not irritate the flow of reading, but at most the reader’s ego. At what age did we stop writing such language-loving e-mails?

Rooney’s protagonists have grown up a little. In their early thirties, they are reasonably financially secure and kindly disinterested in their parents. “The process of our becoming is complete, we have become more or less the way we are,” says the proverb knocker Eileen once, and the fact that the sentence is so tautologically empty is because of course the two of them don’t even know how they are are even, but instead juxtapose life plans for 352 pages in order to find out.

In this quartet, capital and sex appeal are nicely arranged in a cross shape

The strongest parts of the novel are those in which Alice and Eileen mix their somewhat petty no-future stance in their emails with witty political analyzes and aesthetic debates, shaking everything up in such a way that in the end sentences arise that are both in the magazine Mercury as well as in the Bravo would be ready for printing. Breathlessly, they dive into the following topics in an ever-changing order: the idea of ​​conservatism, identity politics, who belongs to the working class, Christianity, environmental protection, the influence of antidepressants on the libido. Her considerations are ideally framed by a kind of intuitive, argument-free basic conviction that socialism is the ideal way of life.

Eileen only smiles at the fact that this lifestyle Marxism is increasingly taking hold of the Dublin intelligentsia: “When I used to talk about Marxism, I was laughed at. Now everyone says it’s their thing. I call on all these new people who want to make communism cool to: Welcome on board, comrades “. This is an ironic wink from the author. Rooney likes to tell in interviews that she was raised in a Marxist way and that she was interested in the subtle dynamics of class differences from an early age.

The way social origin manifests itself in everyday life may be subtle, but Rooney’s descriptions of it are anything but subtle. Anyone wondering what happens between the e-mails in this novel will be answered: sex. And when it comes to sex, it’s always about power. Alice, who has amassed a substantial fortune from her bestsellers, meets loosely with Felix, an indebted warehouse worker whom she met on a stiff Tinder date. Eileen, rather precarious because literary magazines are seldom lucrative in fiction as in reality, dates Simon, an older and wealthy political advisor with a passion for Catholicism. At the personnel level, everything is nicely organized in this quartet: the symbolic and economic capital on the one hand, the sex appeal in the other camp, politically correct once with women and once with men.

Her interest in timeless questions quickly leads back to her own cosmos

Sex is decidedly politically incorrect. Rooney’s descriptions of this are strikingly explicit, the role-plays of the couples are reproduced in great detail. Alice and Eileen almost always go into a submissive part, sometimes they are humiliated, verbally or physically. They play cheated wives, “good girls”, nannies and thus roles that they despise as reactionary in their e-mails during the day. Rooney once said in an interview that she would like to write Marxist novels. If “Schöne Welt, where are you” were one, his thesis is that gender inequality is not a secondary, but a main contradiction of capitalism, because the symbolic entanglement of masculinity and power does not dissolve with economic redistribution. Short: class does not hit gender.

It is fortunate that Rooney only briefly pokes into these conflict nests and then lets her protagonists strut on to the next topic. There is, for example, the aesthetic dispute between Alice and Eileen. When did mankind cease to be able to perceive beauty, the two ask themselves. Alice’s absurd answer: When plastic, “the ugliest substance on earth”, became the most popular material in the world in 1976, belief in beauty was also lost. Eileen, just as arbitrarily, on the other hand: When the Berlin Wall fell, the great stories died away from mankind – and with them the sense of the beautiful. Her steep theses prove one thing above all else: Alice and Eileen’s interest in timeless questions leads, via detours, always hastily back into their own cosmos.

The motif of the nostalgic search for the lost beauty, including the title “Beautiful world, where are you”, Rooney picked up from none other than Friedrich Schiller. In his poem “The Gods of Greece” in 1788, he dreams of antiquity and imagines it as a counter-epoch to the emptiness and coldness of his present. Schiller believes that what is really beautiful shows itself, if not in life, at least in art.

The reason why Rooney’s novels maneuver close to the kitsch line without exceeding it is that in them, perhaps as with Schiller, despite all discourse and theory, there is room for existential ambiguity and practical inconsistency. While their constantly reflective protagonists lament the loss of beauty, they fall in love, live intense friendships, whisper confessions in their ears and type love letters. “I sat in the back seat of a taxi, half asleep, reminding myself in a peculiar way that you are always with me wherever I go, and so is he, and as long as you are both alive the world will be beautiful to me” , writes Eileen to her friend.

Taken alone, the motifs of this novel are unbearable: Lifestyle Marxists with the desire to be sexually dominated. Adolescent pessimism about the future and late modern glorification of the past. Language doesn’t help either. Sally Rooney’s books are Easy reads, literarily unsuspicious, usage metaphors and everyday verbs carry the plot.

But all the extravagant things are condensed in a typically Rooney-like way into the popular-realistic story of two vividly drawn women who repeatedly dig into the existential with their discussions and lose their high-pitched tone and ideological kitsch, arrive at average worries and contradictions. Sally Rooney’s novels strike a balance that is rather improbable in literature: pathetically produced banalities can result in an excellent story.