Sally Rooney, _Beautiful World, Where Are You_

 THE TITLE LOOKS as though it should end with a question mark, but neither on the cover nor on the title page is it so rendered...so we'll call it good without one.

The main characters of Rooney's third novel are Alice, a young Irish female novelist who (like Rooney herself) has experienced early and brilliant success, and Eileen, Alice's best friend of long standing, who writes and does editorial work for a literary journal in Dublin. As the novel goes along, we also meet Felix, who works at a warehouse in the town on the west coast of Ireland where Alice has moved to get away from the stress of her career and who becomes Alice's lover, and Simon, a somewhat older man Eileen has known since her teens, who becomes Eileen's lover.

The chapters alternate between Alice and Eileen's email correspondence and narrative chapters in which we watch them going about their lives and keeping their relationships with Felix and Simon afloat, despite some storms.

I was not sure what to make of the novel, actually, until  I read a review of it in NYRB by Merve Emre, who noted that the email correspondence chapters bring us very close to Alice and Eileen while the narrative chapters feel oddly distant, externalized, confined to surface appearances.

I thought (1) that is absolutely true and (2) that is just how I felt watching the television adaptation of Rooney's previous novel, Normal People. 

In that novel, chapters alternate between free indirect discourse (if you prefer, close first person) from the perspective of Connell and free indirect discourse from the perspective of Marianne. The poignancy of the novel lies in our knowing exactly what Connell feels about Marianne and exactly Marianne feels about Connell, while they themselves have to rely of guesses and inferences based on the person's behavior, just as in life, with the inevitable and often heartbreaking fallibility we all are prey to.

The television adaptation, however, offers none of the interiority of the novel. We see what the camera and editing can show us, hear what microphones can record, but we can only guess what the characters are thinking, based on what they do and say. We have to work with the same limitations that Connell and Marianne labor under--and that feels very, very different from the novel, almost a completely different story.

Beautiful World, Where Are You is structured around this very same dichotomy--so much so that I wondered whether its genesis lay in Rooney's experience working on the screenplay for the television series. 

The correspondence of Alice and Eileen gives us interiority aplenty; they are frank, funny, and open with each other (up to a point, we learn by novel's end), and they have the rich presence of actual people, just as characters in a novel should. The narrative chapters, however, scrupulously avoid offering interiority at all. We see what they do, we hear what they and others characters say, and occasionally a smell or a tactile sensation is described, but we have no idea what anyone is thinking, save what we can infer from their behavior. 

It's like the narrative chapters of Beautiful World, Where Are You are already a film. The narration confines itself to what a camera or microphone can record. In the correspondence chapters, we get the internal landscape of Alice and Eileen. Once I tumbled to that, I found the book fascinating.

In the latter part of the book, all four characters get together for a holiday, and things go both incredibly well and incredibly rockily. We do end up with a happy ending, I'd say, a four-handed happy ending that rivals that of the Dashwood sisters, Edward Ferrars, and Col. Brandon Sense and Sensibility.

What I will mainly remember from this novel, though, is its neat demonstration of how different films are from novels.