Confessions of a Beautiful Soul

“Despite the book’s homage to Friedrich Schiller via its title, we get nothing even remotely reminiscent of the profound intellectual mind meld between him and his great friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.”

As evinced by its title, Irish author Sally Rooney’s latest novel asks a question that is anything but straightforward. When it was released in 2021, Beautiful World, Where Are You promised to be a mature, thoughtful meditation on the disappearance of beauty from our contemporary, hyper-political world. While it certainly falls short of this promise, the novel does reveal various points of entry for a more genuine discussion. For one, there is Rooney’s preferred choice of style, which is oddly out of step with her story’s central thematic arc. Rife with protracted, mechanical descriptions of the most painfully quotidian mannerisms and interactions, much of the book has all the flair and vivacity of a dishwasher manual. Already in the opening scene we get the following dry fare:

“A woman sat in a hotel bar, watching the door. Her appearance was neat and tidy: white blouse, fair hair tucked behind her ears. She glanced at the screen of her phone, on which was displayed a messaging interface, and then looked back at the door again. It was late March, the bar was quiet, and outside the window to her right the sun was beginning to set over the Atlantic. It was four minutes past seven, and then five, six minutes past. Briefly and with no perceptible interest she examined her fingernails. At eight minutes past seven, a man entered through the door.”

There are many more passages like this, and they all have an unmistakably stoic texture to them—that is, they deliberately seem to lack taste or sensitivity of any kind. Everything is kept at a careful distance; at no point does the reader get the sense of mimetic evocation that is so typical of great works of literature, of some face-to-face confrontation with an extraneous presence. The voyeurism that is on display here lacks any danger of involvement on the part of the voyeur and, thereby, obviates the necessary preconditions for a cathartic experience. As readers, we are offered the comfort and safety of total insulation. There is nothing pleasing to behold (nothing, as such, to tempt us), nothing to grab onto, only the immaculate gloss of a stainless prose, “so clean, it reflects the readers’ prejudices right back at them” (as one reviewer artlessly put it).