Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Each new day has now become a new and unique informational unit interrupting and replacing the informational world of the day before […] The present has become discontinuous […] There is no longer a neutral setting. There is only the timeline.”

Here, the “timeline” refers to both historical temporality and also the instant news and advertising feeds that flood social media. The sheer scope of tragedies and exploitative capitalism is so overwhelming in an advanced society that every day feels identically inescapable. Without a continuous timeline and coherent historical narrative, people (and their moral quandaries) find themselves adrift with little direction and ability to improve society.

“The unbearable thing is that when first inscribed, those markings meant something, to the people who wrote and read them, and then for thousands of years they meant nothing, nothing, nothing—because the link was broken, history had stopped. And then the twentieth century shook the watch and made history happen again.”

Thinking about the erasure of Linear B from recorded history, Alice ponders impending civilizational collapse. She is struck by the tragedy of a generation cut off from its global history because human society rises and falls in cyclical patterns. This passage underscores Alice’s persistent existential anxiety, as she fears the latest crest of a contemporary cultural cycle is perhaps so intensely resource-heavy and commercially exploitative that societal collapse may come sooner rather than later.

“The wife is attuned to all these little subtleties, so she wouldn’t have to ask. If you’ve had a long day and you’re tired, I think you’d get in bed around eleven and the wife would give you head. Which she’s really good at. But not in a vulgar way, it’s all very intimate and marital and all that.”

The archetypical wife is the perfect companion for a heterosexual man in capitalist society because she handles all types of labor that cannot be commercially exploited, like emotional and manual labor in the home. More than a talented helper, she desires sexual subjugation. Eileen creates this archetype because Simon reveals little about his sexual desires beyond enjoying feeling masculine, so Eileen sticks with a conservative prototype to please him until he further explores emotional intimacy.

“People love to claim that they’re working class, Gary said. No one here is actually from a working-class background. Right, but everyone here works for a living and pays rent to a landlord, said Eileen.”

Gary insistently emphasizes identity categories in political discussion, which is both a useless and argumentative exercise. The friends disagree about what makes the bourgeois upper class, but they fail to verbally acknowledge the experiences of the working class for fear of faux pas. This renders their conversation indulgently purposeless as a product of contemporary culture.

“Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead.”

In this quote, Alice theorizes that the most human aspect of living in a collapsing civilization is the charming irrationality of human experience. In a dark sense, the human desire to feel strong emotion rather than materially pursue necessary corrective action is a satisfyingly sentimental aspect of the human condition. 

“Their conversation seemed to have had some effect on them both, but it was impossible to decipher the nature of the effect, its meaning, how it felt to them at that moment, whether it was something shared between them or something about which they felt differently. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves, and these were questions without fixed answers, and the work of making meaning was still going on.”

The omniscient narrative style that supplies important conversational subtext fades away here, and the audience can see the utter confusion and yearning left in two people’s thoughts as they try to connect in an intentional but guarded way. Their unasked questions linger as they both resist vulnerability.

“Was I really like that once? A person capable of dropping down into the most fleeting of impressions, and dilating them somehow, dwelling inside them, and finding riches and beauty there. Apparently I was—‘for a couple of hours, but I am not that person’. I wonder whether the book itself, the process of writing the book, caused me to live that way, or whether I wrote because I wanted to record that kind of experience as it was happening.”

In describing her writing in the ‘Life Book,’ Eileen alludes to a quote from Frank O’Hara’s collection Lunch Poems, which explores similar themes of mundane, personal connections in ordinary living. What Eileen thinks she created is actually a common outlook that inspired great poetry decades earlier, showing that the “contemporary” novel is a repeating trope throughout history and that humanity finds joy in its commonalities.

“Dublin was like an advent calendar concealing him behind one of its million windows.”

The Dublin cityscape may look ugly to Alice, but it’s Dublin’s latent possibilities that help romanticize Eileen’s perspective. She can imagine Simon tucked away in his apartment while she simultaneously exists elsewhere, and these hidden memories and potential moments glitter like gems in the world’s lasting ugliness.

“I have put between myself and my parents such a gulf of sophistication that it’s impossible for them to touch me now or to reach me at all. And I look back across that gulf, not with a sense of guilt or loss, but with relief and satisfaction.”

Alice protects herself from an indifferent, even cruel, family by deepening the class divide between them. She acknowledges here what Felix elsewhere accuses her of: acting superior as a means of social survival by pushing others away. To Alice, showing social and intellectual superiority is an instant marker of class, which is why Felix—the warehouse worker—doesn’t instantly like her upon their first date.

“After that they talked about the wedding, a dress Eileen had seen in a shop window, two different pairs of shoes Mary was deciding between, and finally they moved on to the subjects of Lola’s behaviour, Mary’s responses to Lola’s behaviour, and the underlying attitudes revealed by Mary’s responses to Lola’s behaviour.”

Eileen and her mother follow oblique paths of conversation in order to establish emotional neutrality before broaching tricky interpersonal conflicts. This echoes the theme of the main characters growing up in homes where emotional, intentional communication hides beneath banality in a habitual pattern of emotional suppression.

“Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition.”

Eileen does away with the historical importance of the “contemporary” because it has ceased to mean anything now that institutions have been politically hijacked and artwork corrupted through commodification. Her disgust with the modern world’s failings leads to her romanticization of the past.

“That morning, while Felix was at work, Alice had a phone call with her agent, discussing invitations she had received to literary festivals and universities. While this phone call took place, Felix was using a handheld scanner to identify and sort various packages into labelled stillage carts, which were then collected and wheeled away by other workers.”

While these two different kinds of work—intellectual labor and physical labor—have different material conditions, both are oppressive under capitalism. Still, by juxtaposing these types of labor, Rooney highlights the class disparities between Alice and Felix, illuminating some of their difficulty relating to one another but also underscoring the importance of their connection despite those differences.

“It’s still better to love something than nothing, better to love someone than no one, and I’m here, living in the world, not wishing for a moment that I wasn’t. Isn’t that in its own way a special gift, a blessing, something very important?”

Alice references a phrase in an earlier letter to Eileen when describing nonsensical love as a special gift and something very important. Earlier, she used those descriptors for her natural writing talent, but here she uses them to describe a common human capacity for deep nonrational love. The shifting of her life’s passion from labor to love represents a desire to emotionally connect as a means of survival in a strange world.

“Sleeping in a cousin’s bedroom that night, with different books on the shelf, the furniture casting different shadows in the light from an unfamiliar window.”

Under the motif of shifting light, Eileen identifies important childhood events by the shifting presence of light. Here, the patterned light moves unexpectedly and throws strange shadows, suggesting an unfamiliar setting and the character’s unease with living in different material conditions than they are used to.

“Too much strangeness for one life. As usual, as usual, he had been wrong.”

On the day of Lola’s wedding, her father, Pat, reminisces about aging and life’s big milestones in the same bewildered manner that Eileen looks at her own life. Despite the class and generational differences, the two end up sharing a moment that is emblematic of the human experience.

“Silently with his eyes on the wheel of his bicycle he prayed: Dear God, let her live a happy life. I’ll do anything, anything, please, please.”

The omniscient narration in this passage allows the audience a glimpse into young Simon’s ardent desires, which are usually hidden beneath many layers of subtext. Simon’s prayer combines his selfless love for Eileen with his religious seriousness, making for a strong dedication of love without outwardly verbalizing it.

“Were they aware, in the intensity of their embrace, of something slightly ridiculous about this tableau, something almost comical, as someone nearby sneezed violently into a crumpled tissue; as a dirty discarded plastic bottle scuttled along the platform under a breath of wind; as a mechanised billboard on the station wall rotated from an advertisement for hair products to an advertisement for car insurance; as life in its ordinariness and even ugly vulgarity imposed itself everywhere all around them?”

The lovely moment in the dirty train station represents a glimpse into the hidden “beautiful world” that persists amidst the crushing prevalence of vulgar capitalism and plastic waste. Alice’s and Eileen’s depressing predictions of civilizational decline may be accurate, but that doesn’t mean beauty can’t exist in brief moments underneath all the unnecessary mess of daily living.

“Will you spend some time with us tomorrow? [Alice] said. [Felix] made a kind of shrugging gesture. Yeah, why not, he said. Closing his eyes, he thought again, and then added: I’d like to.”

Felix challenges his habit of giving an ambivalent answer because Alice has been requesting he be more direct with her about his emotional needs. Instead of shrugging, his positive answer takes the burden of interpretive emotional work off of Alice, and the two can more effectively communicate.

“Felix asked Alice about New York, and she said she had found it stressful and confusing. She said everybody there lived in very strange buildings, with hallways and staircases that led nowhere, and none of the doors ever closed properly, even bathroom doors, even in expensive places.”

The motif of different cityscapes emerges here, and New York stands out by Alice’s description as an expensive but shoddily built and poorly maintained metropolis. What irks Alice is not the presence of a lower class, it is the inability to escape low-class inconveniences through monetary means. She feels stressed in New York because she feels threatened, not physically, but as a class.

“In a small childish voice she said: And am I the only one you love? He kissed the side of her face then, saying: Jesus, God, yes.”

Since Simon has not been emotionally vulnerable and open with Eileen regarding their relationship, Eileen has been obsessed with distinguishing herself from his past lovers. To reassure herself that Simon won’t leave her, she tries to be the “only” one he thinks of. She knows his religious devotion is strong, so his response to her question reassures her, but it does not feel like a private moment with his invocation of “Jesus, God.”

“Felix grinned. It didn’t hurt your feelings? he said. Simon smiled back at him. No, no, he replied. I’m very grown-up about these things.”

Simon mistakes his aloofness for masculine maturity here when he describes Alice letting him down as a friend. Unfortunately, this mindset prevents him from addressing the emotions and desires that Eileen wants him to be frank about. Maturity, ironically, has more to do with acknowledging hurt feelings than emotional invulnerability, Rooney suggests.

“In a low humorous voice, Simon said: No, I think at the time I’d just finished reading Anna Karenina. And I wanted to go and work on a farm so I could be like Levin. You know he has these profound experiences while he’s cutting grass with a sickle or something and it makes him believe in God.”

Simon jokes about this romantic misconception of hard labor, but as a wealthy upper-middle-class man from an established family, he actually has no experience of what it is like to have to physically labor for a daily wage. Because of this, it is easier for him to idealize a poor but pious life that aligns with his religious beliefs and lets him feel superior without having to reconcile his religious devotion with the sheer luck of his material wealth.

“But if you think there’s any chance that I could make you happy, I wish you would let me try. Because it’s the only thing I really want to do with my life. She put her arms around his neck then, turning toward him where they sat on the side of the bed, pressing her face to his throat, and she whispered something only he could hear.”

Considering this novel utilizes frequent omniscient narration, it stands out that Eileen’s whisper is obscured from the reader. The effect is heightened tension in a moment of tenderness that can only be shared between the two lovers and no one else, not even God this time. This moment is so private and full of love that not even the audience may share it.