Beautiful World, Where Are You

By beginning the first chapter with a mismatched first date and giving the reader no contextual character hints, Rooney requires the reader to search for subtextual clues in diction or action in order to follow the plot. If a reader finds this indirection frustrating (as Rooney intends), this mimics the frustration her characters feel when faced with interpreting ambiguous yet suggestive communication, foreshadowing subtext as a central theme throughout the novel—more specifically, the role of subtext within communication. Felix appears to misinterpret Alice’s first date nerves as posturing with “self-mocking performance” (5), and Alice mistakes his easy demeanor with a “kind of challenge or even repudiation in his tone” (9). These subtextual miscommunications may even be accurate, but neither character is certain in their assumptions, so they awkwardly stretch the date into the evening until they have “no more energy to delay the inevitable,” as “they knew then, both of them, what was about to happen, though neither could have said exactly how they knew” (14). It is a bad first date, but they know the feeling is mutual, and this vulnerable if comical moment gives them a point of commonality upon which to build a relationship.

Simon communicates misleadingly to preserve a squeaky clean, responsible, and “good” life. When Eileen teases him about his uncouth preference for younger women, he responds physically, “gestur[ing] his hand from side to side in the air to indicate friction, uncertainty, sexual chemistry, indecisiveness, or perhaps mediocrity” (21). In refusing to say exactly what he means or is even referring to, he deftly sidesteps the question, knowingly avoiding honest conversation. He leaves his phrasing ambiguous so that Eileen must do the emotional labor of teasing out meaning from subtext; he exploits obscurity to create plausible deniability.

Eileen remembers college years as so idyllic because of the modern social living structure her friends created in a shared space, where “[i]n the evenings Alice sometimes read aloud the good jokes from her manuscript while Eileen was cooking dinner” (31). The friend group lived close together out of necessity, and they became like a family. Close living quarters amplify a sense of personal connection, and so the spread of Eileen’s friends post-college alarms her: It feels like losing another family as members are drawn away by careers or finances. As the material living conditions of capitalism scatter the friends, Eileen romanticizes those early days as a life spent discussing philosophies and theories that promised an infinity of imagined possibilities for their lives.

Alice briefly worries that she is being “undialectical” in her philosophizing to Eileen, meaning Marxist principles guide her questions about philosophy and the material conditions of reality. Dialectical materialism is a Marxist philosophy wherein history progresses through a struggle between economic forces, namely class conflict. The philosophy also holds that knowledge and truth are only graspable through “lived experience” within material reality; the truth is not something “out there” that can be apprehended through pure intellect, and the essence of historical existence arises from material circumstances rather than the realm of the intellect. This latter point is especially significant to an irony in Alice’s character, as she habitually intellectualizes her experiences in order to mitigate personal vulnerability and to hold painful emotions at bay. She may espouse lofty Marxist ideals, but she often prefers an unlived experience. Rooney shows a sense of humor, maybe even a subtle satiric edge, through characters whose actual humanity and heartfelt desires confound their intellectual pronouncements.

Eileen, meanwhile, blames her own interpersonal failings for her depression instead of considering a bloated capitalist society that reduces human life to a profitable resource. She is too emotionally overwhelmed with her depression to escape through intellectualizing.

Alice notes that the Dublin sky looms over the city like a “memento mori,” as if equalizing all of humanity through mortality and the impending doom of civilization. The cityscape here holds an impression of loneliness due to the sheer expanse of an empty sky that, in its unlimited scope, aids in creating a feeling of “discontinuous” temporality. Cityscapes, in other words, are a motif highlighting both the bustling of lived humanity and the isolation of urban capitalist living.