Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You & Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Everyone loves a good romance novel, and seldom has the world observed such addictive gustation than for the effervescently candid paragons of Sally Rooney. Beautiful World Where Are You is an exploration of love lost in time and translation, across the digital world and amidst the self-created inner chaos of existential young adults. With evermore intimacy we weave through the lives and anxieties of four characters across email correspondence between unlikely best friends Eileen and Alice, both of whom see themselves as outcast and misfitting in their desired lives, despite succeeding perfectly at attaining what they desire.

Source: Goodreads

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is on the more epic end of the love story scale, but instead of intimate bedroom sneak peaks, the love we zoom in on is of the creations born from deep loyalty and childhood friendship. Gabrielle Zevin deftly observes the relationship between Sadie and Sam across their years of game creation, and a premature burgeoning of adulthood.

We are given access from the inside-out of where the love between the two characters lies; in video games. Donkey Kong, Oregon Trail, Tamagotchi - it has been said in almost every review out there that one does not need to be interested in or even enjoy video games to fall in love with this novel, and as someone who dropped my Nintendo DS like a hot potato the second I sprouted my first pubic hair, I concur.

Both books follow characters whom we are not particularly supposed to like, but the honest portrayal of mental health and the depthless pain experienced from all sides held a humanness that kept me coming back. Don’t we all, to some extent, judge and obstruct the very people who sustain us? Haven't so many of us been the helpless friend who wishes to relieve the pain of another?

Source: The Southern Bookseller Review

Rooney gives us a wink and a nudge as she rides the edge of the fourth wall. In Beautiful, Alice questions the integrity of her life as a novelist, as she experiences fame at a young age and blindly follows the path laid out before her with resentment. She is painfully self-conscious amongst her professional peers of contemporary novelists who ‘pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism - when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times’. It feels like a satirical exploration of Rooney’s own self-judgement. She takes it further with Eileen who ‘moves commas about all day’, and barely makes enough money to live on in her job at a literary journal.

Zevin maintains us in her cosy container of storytelling, although we are very much grounded in 30 years of historically researched and geographically accurate reality. However, both books explore utopian ideals through the existential lens of the young characters, all of whom display varying degrees of guilt and shame about their desire to escape and hide from the world and life ahead of them.

Sally Rooney. Source: Time

In one email correspondence, Rooney’s Alice conveys: ‘... it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse’. In Tomorrow, the 9-11 disaster closely precedes the launch of Sadie and Sam’s utopian simulation game: ‘Sam, Sadie and Marx had debated whether it was the right time for a game as “soft” as Mapleworld. As it turned out, in the late fall of 2001, Mapleword was exactly what people craved.’

I do not know if the name choice was supposed to be a nod to the escapist-utopian lust of the gaming world, but the third of Zevin’s main characters is even called Marx. Another parallel can be drawn between the two novels here, as Rooney’s characters frequently explore Marxism in their rambling concerns about how difficult life is, (but only because they make it so).

Not so coincidentally, both novels were published within a year of each other during the pandemic, when the real world was an unquestionably less desirable place to be than in the world of some other creation. At once self-aware and unapologetically generous in their explorations of modern love, fear, and friendship, both authors poke at the ache and uncertainty of youth-like utopian ideals in an unstable adult world.

And not to put too fine a point on my game of ‘Novel-Snap’, but both authors titled their books with quotes from poets passed. From Zevin, Shakespeare’s famous ‘Tomorrow’ monologue from Macbeth, and Rooney’s from Friedrich Schiller’s 25-stanza poem The Gods of Greece.

Perhaps it is no coincidence at all that our contemporary authors appealed to the same mysteries as both Schiller and Shakespeare; mysteries of love and meaning in a world whose suffering mocks the futile pursuits of those who earnestly strive to care.

Beautiful World Where Are You

Cosy factor: 8/10

Relatable saucy scenes: 10/10

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Cosy factor: 9/10

Nostalgia: 10/10

Tears shed: Thousands. Be warned.