Expectations

So I am a big fan of Sally Rooney. Her novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People both made laugh and cry and love in equal measure, so when I read that her new novel, Beautiful world, where are you? was published, I gnashed my teeth knowing I had to wait until it would be released as a paperback, which for most British novels takes at least half a year. But the publisher probably had a sharp idea of their target audience, as it was immediately published as paperback, upon which I immediately bought it.
Now my expectations for this novel were high. They were not the highest they could have been, because in the weeks prior to the publication I'd read several interviews and/or reviews of the novel, all of which stressed that Beautiful world... would be very different from its predecessors on one crucial point; we would be looking outside in on the main characters, much like the script of a film or series. This was caused by Rooney actually writing/adapting the scripts for the TV series of those first two novels, which led to her discovering that she really liked this style, that it helped her develop the new novel. But despite this slight warning on what to expect style-wise, my expectations were still high.
Sadly, as I found out after just a couple of chapters, I do not like this style. Or rather; when such a remote viewpoint is combined with in-depth relationships between people, who are living lives in which not that many spectacular events happen, so for whom their inner lives and struggles and ambitions and thoughts are the main 'event' of the novel, I do not like it. And that is basically what Beautiful world... is about; Alice and Eileen, two long-time friends, who do not meet for most of the novel, but at the end hang out together for a while, and their lovers, Felix and Simon. The friends have grown apart somewhat, due to various reasons, and communicate with each other via email. Even these emails are remote, as if the main characters cannot actually take themselves or their friendship seriously.

Okay, so this is not entirely true; the novel is also 'about' mental health struggles, families, class differences, aesthetics, 'millennial angst' in general, etc etc. But this is all somehow hidden, because we only have their conversations, emails, and the way they act. We can see these people trying to connect and to form an intimate, lasting relationship, but we can only see this from a distance. We never know what they are thinking, or feeling, or why they behave the way they do. We can only guess. That is of course the point of it all, that you can never really know. And it is very cleverly done, I just didn't like it all the time.

So after finishing Beautiful world..., I went back to Normal People. I loved this novel so much when I first read it; how would it hold up?
Well. Interestingly enough, I liked it less the second time around. Probably because all those little things that annoyed me in Beautiful world..., for example how much she focusses on sex as a means of an exchange of power, was also already present in Normal People. And the remoteness found in the new novel is also present here, only less clearly so.

What really struck me, was how Sally Rooney herself is in each novel. She actually mentioned this in an interview, that she can only write about things she has experienced herself. So her characters grow with her; in her first novel they are early twenties, then late twenties, now early thirties. They all live in or near County Mayo or Dublin, study at uni, etc. But it goes further than that. Connell, in Normal People, reads English at Trinity in Dublin. At the end of the novel, he gets an offer to follow a prestigious writing program in NYC (which Mariann heartbreakingly tells him to take, still the moment at which I sobbed for these poor characters). Then in Beautiful people... Alice is also a writer who has written two very successful novels, lived in NYC to follow a writing programme, but after a mental breakdown has retreated to a small town to focus on her writing. All of these things happened in Sally Rooney's life, including the mental breakdown following the two novels. Of course, these works are not autobiographical, but still it bugged me somehow, like it took something away from the novel.

So my high expectations weren't really met.

The opposite was true for Expectation: a novel (yes really), the novel by Anna Hope which I read after my Rooney reread. This deals with some of the same themes; female friendship, millennials, finding happiness. Here we have three female characters; Cate, Hannah and Lissa, who've known each other since school but now find themselves in very different lives; Cate has moved to Canterbury when her son was born, while Lissa still tries to make it in the acting world. It took some getting into, but after a while the writing style grew on me and I actually started to like these characters. As with Rooney, not everything is said explicitly, some feelings or motivations only come to light through actions or speech. But these characters were so much easier to get to know, to understand and to sympathise with, it compensated for the poorer quality in writing and sometimes somewhat forced themes or conflict. The ending is horrible, it doesn't fit in with the rest of the novel, but overall it was a better experience than Beautiful world... Maybe because my expectations were lower. Maybe because I really don't like that remote writing style. Or maybe because an author cannot always write a novel you love.