The Search For Something More
In Sally Rooney’s latest novel,
Catholicism is romanticized as a remedy for the anxiety and existentialism of modern life.
By Gracie McBride
Faith needs ritual, embodiment. One must see in people how faith is lived. Today the visibility of faith has for all intents and purposes vanished,” Archbishop of Dublin Dermot Farrell stated in August of 2021. Looking at the lack of participation from young people in the church, the aging clergy, the sex scandals, and the bad press, Farrell is concerned, but not pessimistic, about the future of the church in Dublin.
In January of this year, there were just two students preparing for the priesthood and only 19% of Dublin’s 312 priests were both under the age of 70 and not on loan to the archdiocese. Of this, Farrell said that “there is a major decline in the number of people who actively practice and live their faith.”
In Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, Catholicism is romanticized as a remedy for the anxiety and existentialism of modern life, but not everyone can manage it. And, if someone can manage, what it even means to be Catholic isn’t clear. Does it just mean checking a box on a census, or is there something more?
Rooney structured the novel with chapters consisting of long emails between best friends, Alice and Eileen, juxtaposed against a distant third person narrative. The diary-like dialogues contain a mix of the mundane and profound, from reports on trips with new boyfriends to the philosophy of beauty, often coming back to Christianity, here synonymous with Catholicism.
Eileen, whose editorial job at a literary magazine barely covers her Dublin rent, thinks Catholicism is a good option for making sense of the world but can’t bring herself to it, unlike her on-and-off boyfriend and life-long friend Simon. Following one Saturday night’s rendezvous, Eileen decides to come along to Mass with him, something he continues to do long after his parents have stopped attending.
The sincerity and normality of what Eileen experiences at Mass surprises her. She finds the ritual ludicrous, especially when the congregation participates in a call-and-response liturgy of lifting their hearts to the Lord “without any hesitation or irony.” She feels that at least some of them really believe it, including Simon. She wonders if “to worship [Jesus] as God, while not quite reasonable, is somehow permissible” and concludes admiring the sincerity and ritual of Simon’s faith, if not the being behind it.
Alice is a successful young novelist. She’s fascinated by Jesus and says that “everything in his life moves me,” but insists she does not and cannot believe in him.
Alice is more comfortable with Christianity: she tells Eileen about crying in an empty church and discusses the woman who washed Jesus’ feet, but she’s held back from actually being a Christian by her pride. She says, “I have that resistance in me, that hard kernel of something, which I fear would not let me prostrate myself before God even if I believed in him.” She couldn’t be like Simon, going to Mass in a church and verbally lifting her heart up to the Lord, and yet she can cry in an empty one.
Rooney says she doesn’t want her readers to implicate her in her writing, yet she continues to write about herself and knows we will implicate her.
It’s difficult to read the letters Alice and Eileen exchange without viewing Alice as a stand-in for Rooney herself. Rooney is thirty and Alice is twenty-nine. They are both successful contemporary novelists and prefer to live in relative isolation in the countryside (or seaside in Alice’s case) than the city. They both loathe press tours, as Rooney told the New York Times: “this sounds terrible, but I’m trying not to have a meltdown about doing more publicity.” Meanwhile, Alice tells Eileen that “I can’t believe I have to tolerate these things—having articles written about me, and seeing my photograph on the internet, and reading comments about myself…It makes me miserable, and I don’t want to live this kind of life.” There’s little attempt to mask the similarity.
Rooney says she doesn’t want her readers to implicate her in her writing, and yet she continues to write about herself and knows we will implicate her. But who can blame readers when Rooney has Alice pose questions such as “what do the books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralising specificity? Nothing.” Reading Alice’s letters, we feel like we get to see into Rooney’s head, meanwhile Alice explains that she doesn’t like it when people read too much into her novels like today’s readers do with Rooney’s.
Sally Rooney is at an advantage to understand this because she’s no longer just an author, she’s a brand. I happened upon a truck emblazoned with her book cover serving coffee and doing literary trivia for branded tote bags outside Brooklyn bookstore Books Are Magic one warm Saturday this fall. But Rooney the brand feels at odds with Rooney the person: for example, Rooney the person is a self-proclaimed Marxist, and for Rooney the brand this latest book release included selling a bucket hat and opening a pop up shop. The juxtaposition of the author who writes these self-aware novels and the aesthetic millennial brand should tell us more about the way the publishing industry works than about Rooney’s ideals.
Perhaps that’s why Alice’s relationship with Felix, the atheist warehouse worker she meets on Tinder shortly after moving to her new town, works out despite making no sense on paper. Felix doesn’t know Alice the brand or even Alice the author. He only knows Alice the person. He has no intention of reading her books. He doesn’t value her for her work—which previously caused a mental health spiral that led to a psychiatric hospital—he values her for her.
Alice’s “conversion” entails inching slowly to the beautiful world that is always just out of reach in hope of one day, finally, having an answer.
In Beautiful World, Where Are You, the characters know that a beautiful world exists, somewhere out there. They want to find it, each with their own method of getting there. No method is perfect, and even Simon’s search within the bounds of Catholicism leaves him emotionally shut off from those around him, seeking a beautiful world beyond but unable to see the one that’s already standing right in front of him.
Eileen makes her way through the world by relying on Simon and would go so far as cutting off the romantic part of their relationship rather than risk losing his presence in her life altogether. But Simon isn’t God, and, no matter how many promises he makes to her, he won’t always be able to pull through.
But Alice has been screwed over too many times to try that, so she searches for higher meaning. In the final chapter of the novel, Alice writes another email to Eileen, which says “Felix saw I was writing you an email, [and] he said, ‘You should tell her you’re Catholic now.’ This is because he recently asked me if I believed in God, and I said I didn’t know.”
Alice sees the hypocrisy in Felix’s philosophy, that he still has a moral compass despite not believing in a greater power, and concludes that “in one way or another, [everyone does] believe in God—they believe in the God that is the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything.”
There is something to be said for Alice’s journey. Somewhere along the way she goes from “there’s no god” to “there’s something out there,” and this shift gives her hope. She tells Eileen that “of course it doesn’t mean heaven and angels and the resurrection of Christ—but maybe those things can help in some way to put us in touch with what it does mean.” And what does it mean, Alice? It’s not a conversion in the way that most Christians would define one, and it doesn’t mean the ritual and embodiment Archbishop Farrell wants for the church in Dublin, but it’s at least a start. It means inching slowly to the beautiful world that is always just out of reach in hope of one day, finally, having an answer.
Beautiful World, Where Are You was published by Macmillan on September 7, 2021. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
Gracie McBride is a Brooklyn-based culture writer and theater administrator. Her writing has appeared in Ekstasis, Brightest Young Things, and others. You can follow her musings and goings-on on Instagram @gracie.virginia.
