Beautiful World, Etc.

I have been trying to get down 500 words about Sally Rooney’s latest novel all week. My elder child just began kindergarten, and while I thought that five hours every weekday of one child’s care would equal a bit more mental space for thinking about novels, I am instead spending five hours succoring a bereft toddler – taking him to the city, or a park, playing endless games of shop in which I am never able to order correctly. But why am I surprised? This is how it’s been since 2018, when my second child was born and I stopped working full-time. Tonight is the first time in a week I have not done the bedtime routine. This is half by choice and half by habit: the bath and bedtime stories is, on the face of it, the least onerous part of our nighttime work. Tonight, for example, I just went up and down the garage steps four times taking various bits of compost and tinfoil to their respective bins. “Please, don’t baby,” is a sentence I actually just said to a tearing bag full of dirty diapers (don’t worry, it didn’t). But the bedtime routine is tricky because it takes ages. Many people I know have successfully sleep-trained their children. And it’s true that now, when they’re tired, they do snuggle up and go to sleep: they’re just never tired! They always want one more story, and one more explanation of why something happened in a story. And, forgive me, I am always willing to read one more bit of myth or Ramona or Brambly Hedge. So, we sit there. Me: grimly reading, because it’s what I do; them: grimly listening, because that’s what they like. But then, I should remember that the pandemic has shattered most of our routines, and that they, unlike most people, have benefited from the greater share of parental attention, and the greater share of sibling-rhythm time. I, too, have benefited: if you’d told me five years ago I would spend eighteen months as the solitary care-giver for two, sometimes three, children for nine to ten hours a day, I would have laughed. I have learned a lot about care, and how much energy and time it really takes, since this all began.

This is neither here nor there with Rooney, though I will get to her. But, the other, more frustrating fly in the ointment is that while I don’t seem to have the energy to sit down and finish a solitary thought at the end of the day, I certainly have been having them! And I never seem to get around to writing them down, so they pop into my head, gel a little bit (semi-freddo? panacotta?) and then fizzle once I get a chunk of time, an hour or two to think about my own mind. My elder child has started giving “brain kisses,” which are little pecks on one’s forehead, and often, it feels like that’s what I really need: more brain kisses, less brain work.

The indignities of middle age have hit hard in the last year. I’ve been forgetting words when I speak, searching for them with a roving wrist action, like I can file through a rolodex to get to “coincidence,” or “concurrence,” or something else, what, exactly, is still opaque. My left foot always seems dirtier than the right, a product of hauling children around on my hip for half a decade – now, I just stand that way, even when I’m not carrying someone bodily, which in itself is a rarity. One breast remains two, maybe three, cup sizes larger than its fellow. My wrist cracks when I turn it. The line between my brows has gone from being a hint to a ridge. The one really significant research project I managed to work on in the pandemic – something I still turn to when I have a free minute – has gone from being an obsession to a friend: will I ever figure out what it is? Probably not.

But, to Rooney. This little bit has a huge spoiler, so sorry, Sally, I have to think about this part. The last – very last – turn in Beautiful World, Where Are You, pushes one of her main characters into pregnancy, the final turn in the bildungsroman of a modern woman’s life. A character must find herself, then find love, and then produce a child. It’s an interesting way for a Rooney novel to end: she is deeply, pleasurably committed to comic endings. If marriage is unlikely for her characters, deep and abiding companionship is not. But, ending on the note of reproductive charm – the blissful moment a baby is expected but not yet here – is a startling adjustment to her novelistic mode. I have been trying to figure out, all week, if it’s a sign of a deeper commitment to comic pleasure, or a sign of its dismantling. I sense that the pregnancy plot goes hand in hand – in some way – with Simon’s religious intensity in this novel, but I’m not precisely sure where that connection lies. Are the twinned conventions of family and church so egregiously wrong-headed for most of Rooney’s readership that the turn indicates a desire to irritate her legions of fans? There are enough passages in Alice’s letters to her friend Eileen that explain the novelist’s frustration with overly familiar fan-doms to produce this kind of account (sorry, Sally). But, perhaps there’s something else that pulls family and church together in an extension, not repudiation, of Rooney’s comic mode?

I thought, when I read Normal People, that Rooney was offering an intriguingly positive account of the pleasures of heterosexuality. This was (mis!) read as a critique of queer theory or even of queerness as such. Nothing could be further from the truth! But, because Rooney’s major intervention in the novel takes the form of quasi-romantic, heterosexual plotting, it’s hard not to think about what she is doing in representing fulfilling straight sex. And Rooney is careful to mark out many of her characters as bisexual. Both Alice and Felix in Beautiful World are bisexual, we even see Felix using a grindr-like app early in his romance with Alice. What do we make of a plotting system wherein queer characters end up finding fulfillment in heterosexual romance? And, does this have anything to do with this novel’s interest in pregnancy and religiosity?

One little breadcrumb might be Rooney’s use of the Song of Solomon as a vedic choral note in the second half of the book. I first noticed it in the scene of Eileen’s sister’s wedding (I admit I’ve only read the book once through, so I would have to go back to see if it appears earlier). “O my dove, in the clefts of the rock:” the passage intervenes in the moment Lola and Matthew exchange their vows. In the world of realism, we are overhearing a psalm sung at a wedding. But, given that the passage echoes again, later, in relation to Eileen and Simon, we might think, too, that the Song holds a special significance for the two: is Simon the rock? Is Eileen? What, if anything, does this reference have to do with Alice’s interest in “the Christian mindset,” which she argues imbues her daily life with a moral meaning that she has, heretofore, been missing. What to make of this? Is Rooney making a case for a deeply conservative world-shaping project? Do we all need to settle down and have families and go to Mass to make everything make sense again?

I don’t think so; not exactly. But perhaps a more positive vision of the communal and moral possibilities of “the Christian mindset” make more sense after the last eighteen months than they have for the rest of my adult life. I’m not sure what I, a person raised by religious people, and raised into a religion, think about this. I moved away from the church as a teenager, but I will admit, too, that the appeal of it strikes me now in ways it never has before. Not just because of a quietly awakening (maybe?) religious feeling, but because of the comfort in communal life that church, in an ideal world, offers.

What I thought about Rooney’s first two novels is that they offer a vision of a recuperative heterosexuality: one that is neither compulsory nor bought at the cost of one’s moral, mental, or physical health. One, also, it goes without saying, that is not bought at the cost of queer health. But I think what I enjoyed about this most recent novel is the way that it gestures to a weirdly recuperative conservatism. Part of the challenge of making the world a place of equality appears to be how we accommodate old ways of living. Do we throw family life out because it has, historically, been a site of misery and inequality? I don’t think so. And while I am very, very tired of spending my days caring for small children, I also, in the last eighteen months, have found resources within myself I did not know were there. And this is perhaps terrifying to claim: I am happier caring for my family now than I was when the pandemic began, in part because I know I can do it.

Once, when I was in the throes of dealing with the humiliating exit from my job, I had a long conversation with a senior colleague at another institution. I greatly admired this colleague. I still do. But, as I was walking around the Mission, pushing the stroller to get my resistant newborn to nap, she told me something that struck me as a huge mistake. I had, wearily, told her about my miscarriages and the work it had taken me to stay pregnant with my son. I told her how scary my mental health issues were right after the birth. I told her everything was delicate, and that I had not yet found childcare. She told me to get him a nanny and to spend every second of the day working. She told me to use the rest of my maternity leave to publish articles. To get a jump on the next book. To do everything I can to make my case look like a slam dunk. I faltered: “But, I had just had him. I wanted to spend time with him. It wouldn’t be good for him to be separated so early; I was still solely breastfeeding him.” It’s burned on my brain what she said to me. The shape of the moment is still crystal clear: I was walking past the house where the drummer from Santana hung out (true), my baby was asleep, I was very close to tears again. “But you will be better off in the long run; he will be better off if you keep your job.” She said this, and she believed it. I am pretty sure this was precisely wrong. It’s not the way family life has to be, but for me, it’s better that I’m here. It’s better for everyone.