{"id":5210,"date":"2022-04-06T17:02:02","date_gmt":"2022-04-06T17:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=5210"},"modified":"2022-04-07T18:24:55","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T18:24:55","slug":"beautiful-world-where-are-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2022\/04\/06\/beautiful-world-where-are-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Beautiful World, Where Are You"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Search For Something More<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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In Sally Rooney\u2019s latest novel,<\/span>\u00a0
Catholicism is romanticized as a remedy for the anxiety and existentialism of modern life.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Gracie McBride<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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,\u201d Archbishop of Dublin Dermot Farrell <\/span>stated<\/span><\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

In January of this year,<\/span><\/a> there were just two students preparing for the priesthood and only 19% of Dublin\u2019s 312 priests were both under the age of 70 and not on loan to the archdiocese. Of this, <\/span>Farrell said<\/span><\/a> that <\/span>\u201c<\/span>there is a major decline in the number of people who actively practice and live their faith.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

In Sally Rooney\u2019s latest novel, <\/span>Beautiful World, Where Are You,<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019t clear. Does it just mean checking a box on a census, or is there something more?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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\u2019t bring herself to it, unlike her on-and-off boyfriend and life-long friend Simon. Following one Saturday night\u2019s rendezvous, Eileen decides to come along to Mass with him, something he continues to do long after his parents have stopped attending.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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 \u201cwithout any hesitation or irony.\u201d She feels that at least some of them really believe it, including Simon. She wonders if \u201cto worship [Jesus] as God, while not quite reasonable, is somehow permissible\u201d and concludes admiring the sincerity and ritual of Simon\u2019s faith, if not the being behind it.<\/span><\/p>

Alice is a successful young novelist. She\u2019s fascinated by Jesus and says that \u201ceverything in his life moves me,\u201d but insists she does not and cannot believe in him.<\/span><\/p>

Alice is more comfortable with Christianity: she tells Eileen about crying in an empty church and discusses the woman who washed Jesus\u2019 feet, but she\u2019s held back from actually being a Christian by her pride. She says, \u201cI 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.\u201d She couldn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Rooney says she doesn\u2019t want her readers to implicate her in her writing, yet she continues to write about herself and knows we will implicate her.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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It\u2019s 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\u2019s case) than the city. They both loathe press tours, as Rooney <\/span>told<\/span><\/a> the <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i>: \u201cthis sounds terrible, but I\u2019m trying not to have a meltdown about doing more publicity.\u201d Meanwhile, Alice tells Eileen that \u201cI can\u2019t believe I have to tolerate these things\u2014having articles written about me, and seeing my photograph on the internet, and reading comments about myself\u2026It makes me miserable, and I don\u2019t want to live this kind of life.\u201d There\u2019s little attempt to mask the similarity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Rooney says she doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cwhat do the books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralising specificity? Nothing.\u201d Reading Alice\u2019s letters, we feel like we get to see into Rooney\u2019s head, meanwhile Alice explains that she doesn\u2019t like it when people read too much into her novels like today\u2019s readers do with Rooney\u2019s.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>

Sally Rooney is at an advantage to understand this because she\u2019s no longer just an author, she\u2019s 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\u2019s ideals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Perhaps that\u2019s why Alice\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t value her for her work\u2014which previously caused a mental health spiral that led to a psychiatric hospital\u2014he values her for her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Alice\u2019s \u201cconversion\u201d entails inching slowly to the beautiful world that is always just out of reach in hope of one day, finally, having an answer.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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In <\/span>Beautiful World, Where Are You, <\/span><\/i>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\u2019s 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\u2019s already standing right in front of him.<\/span><\/p>

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\u2019t God, and, no matter how many promises he makes to her, he won\u2019t always be able to pull through.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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 \u201cFelix saw I was writing you an email, [and] he said, \u2018You should tell her you\u2019re Catholic now.\u2019 This is because he recently asked me if I believed in God, and I said I didn\u2019t know.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

Alice sees the hypocrisy in Felix\u2019s philosophy, that he still has a moral compass despite not believing in a greater power, and concludes that \u201cin one way or another, [everyone does] believe in God\u2014they believe in the God that is the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

There is something to be said for Alice\u2019s journey. Somewhere along the way she goes from \u201cthere\u2019s no god\u201d to \u201cthere\u2019s something out there,\u201d and this shift gives her hope. She tells Eileen that \u201cof course it doesn\u2019t mean heaven and angels and the resurrection of Christ\u2014but maybe those things can help in some way to put us in touch with what it does mean.\u201d And what does it mean, Alice? It\u2019s not a conversion in the way that most Christians would define one, and it doesn\u2019t mean the ritual and embodiment Archbishop Farrell wants for the church in Dublin, but it\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Beautiful World, Where Are You <\/strong>was published by Macmillan on September 7, 2021. You can purchase a copy on their website here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Gracie McBride<\/strong> is a Brooklyn-based culture writer and theater administrator. Her writing has appeared in <\/em>Ekstasis, <\/em>Brightest Young Things, and others. You can follow her musings and goings-on on Instagram @gracie.virginia.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Sally Rooney\u2019s latest novel, Catholicism is romanticized as a remedy for the anxiety and existentialism of modern 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