Double Double

Meg Cook

“Have I told you I can’t read contemporary novels anymore? I think it’s because I know too many of the people who write them.”

—Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where are You 

In early August 2021, about one month prior to the publication date of Irish novelist Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where are You, people were angry online. Rooney is popular, and publishing is dead, so what resulted is exactly what you’d think: merch for sale. Notably, publicists and publishers and booksellers and bloggers alike were receiving yellow Beautiful World-branded bucket hats, pencils, and—word had gotten out, with great panic—that there would soon be Rooney-centric coffee-and-merch carts traveling around coastal elite cities near you. 

Beautiful World, Where are You centers on Eileen (29, a perennial assistant at a Dublin-based literary magazine and somewhat of a black sheep in her family) and Alice (also 29, a novelist who has skyrocketed to fame with the publication of her first two books, and subsequently had to spend some time at an inpatient facility). Like all Rooney novels, the women’s friendship, and the arc of their on-again-off-again romances (between Simon, 35, Alice’s childhood friend and lifelong quasi-flame, and, almost frustratingly, an all-around stand up guy, and Felix, 29, a bisexual warehouse laborer who’s kind of an asshole, respectively), comprise the story. 

Inevitably, a lot of the conversation around Beautiful World lends itself to the Great Autofiction Discourse of the late aughts and 2010s—particularly Alice’s storyline. Both Rooney and Alice shot to fame after their first two novels, and retreated to the Irish seaside where they both now reside. The ease with which the reader is able to compare Alice and Rooney herself also underscores the frustration with the aforementioned merch. The dissonance between Alice’s existential crisis at the center of Beautiful World and the capitalist-realist selling of the book in which she resides made readers put on their literary critic hats and get...mad. Or, actually, rejoice that they had something with which to produce another hot take. Win-win and lose-lose, both. 

To say nothing of the less-than-zero power that authors generally have over how their books are marketed, or how publishing houses operate financially (that is to say, absolutely reliant on acquiring and securing big names like Rooney and willing to commit heinous acts of sartorial cringe in order to make money to publish, well...everyone else we want to read), the “discourse” surrounding Rooney’s third novel’s publication made me think about one of the things that is constantly on my mind when reading fiction (which is always): the function of the Author, and the power that either exists or doesn’t within that role.

In thinking once again of this topic, I returned to an interview that Elif Batuman gave to the Longform podcast in Summer 2018. Batuman, at the time of this interview, was promoting the paperback release of her own debut novel, The Idiot, which garnered similar attention to Rooney’s. Both Batuman and Rooney work in witty, acute, and approachable prose (Batuman is one of my favorite contemporary novelists and essaysits), and, like Rooney, Batuman, with The Idiot, pulled largely from her own lived experience as a nineties-era Turkish-American undergrad at Harvard. 

I return to this interview again and again because it occurred at a distinct and interesting moment in Batuman’s career as a novelist: not when she was promoting a book that just came out, but about a year after. At this point, she’d had time to think critically about her role as an author (of novels specifically) and the function of fiction-writing. Always the Comp Lit student (she received her PhD from Stanford), Batuman begins the interview in a flurry of critical theory and literary analysis, explaining all that she’s been thinking since The Idiot’s release the previous year. She expresses frustration on the state of autobiographical fiction in which she’s lumped, and the confines that those labels put novelists into.

Batuman explains: “If you’re calling something fiction, there’s an understanding in our culture, now, that it’s invented, but actually all I think it means is that I’m not making a truth claim.” Batuman’s definitions of fiction (making a truth claim) and nonfiction (not making a truth claim) aren’t belabored or existential or fraught. Why should they be? Instead, Batuman offers a simple clarity to the definitions that I find helpful and even intuitive. It’s not that complicated.

Batuman did not expect the readers of The Idiot to be as concerned with the concept of fiction vs. nonfiction, which she initially experienced, like a cold shock, while promoting the novel on tour. I myself remember these questions coming up even a year later, when I attended a paperback-release tour stop of The Idiot. There are obvious constraints within these colloquial definitions of what is or is not fiction. In the Longform interview, Batuman poses the question: “Why are novels fictional?” Foucault, she cites, says that fiction only exists as such because of, basically, libel laws: “The author is someone who can be prosecuted.” To put it plainly, it’s historically been far too slippery for novels not to be fictional. 

On Longform, Batuman continues: “There is a mode of fiction I can imagine participating in, where, once I’ve kind of freed myself of a certain amount of stuff that I feel like I have to write about...it would actually be fun to play around with things.” What she’s speaking to is in response to a friend whose writing process held little resemblance to Batuman’s own: a cathartic, even ecstatic exorcism based on pure aesthetics, joy in the act, and pleasurable expulsion. Batuman herself couldn’t imagine approaching the writing process in that way—there are too many details to hit, too much to get out of one’s system and down on paper—let alone starting in that place of “freedom.” However, when Batuman writes about the mode of fiction she can almost imagine, as quoted above, she knows the way to reach that is not outside of her own experience, but through. She envisions a novel-writing experience in which she can both achieve catharsis through mining her own lived experience, and also have the freedom to play, artistically, within her novel-writing—in a way that is distinctly fictional.

In thinking about the work of both Rooney and Batuman, we must ask: Is life a truth claim? Does it need to be? Thus, are details explicitly drawn from life inherently anti-novel? Rather, can personal subjectivity, regardless of if anchored in “real life,” ever be backed by “truth”—fully? This makes me think about other authors labeled as autofiction, including Tao Lin, who not only pioneered the genre to some extent, but also has a new novel out, called Leave Society. 

Unlike Batuman, Lin’s own relation to the truth of his work is unequivocal in its stance as being both nonfiction and a novel. Rather than Batuman’s (and, I think, Rooney’s) frustration about, or at least constraint within, those definitions, Lin embraces them fully. For example, in one of Lin’s recent Instagram posts promoting Leave Society, he writes: “The three characters that appear the most in Leave Society are Li, who is based on me, and Li’s parents, who are based on my parents…”

In another caption, under a photo series of the first few pages of Leave Society, Lin writes “Feel free to ask any questions in the comment section. I will answer them.” Lin is notably way more online, whereas Batuman and Rooney both have sporadic-at-best relationships with social media and online personal commentary generally. This is a function of not only his subject matter, but moreso Lin’s own notion of his work as both nonfiction and novel. Lin’s autofiction style emerged parallel to, and entangled within, a rhetorical shift toward one living on and adjacent to the Internet; Rooney, often cited as the most mainstream example of success in this regard, has stylistic roots deeply set in the mode that Lin helped create, like when she writes that her characters do things like “read the Internet” as if it’s a tangible, booklike thing (isn’t it?).

Lin purposefully makes thin the barrier between his life and his characters’ own, going so far as to admit to things (like the above quotation re: his novel’s main characters) that I don’t think Rooney or Batuman would ever want or care to do, even if neither of the latter authors would (or could, in good conscious, at least) dismiss claims of at least some major function of autobiography within their work. To say nothing of the function of Tao Lin adamantly labeling his novels as nonfiction, and Batuman imploring us to think of her even highly-autobiographical work as a work of fiction, period, is to say nothing of the novels themselves or even of the necessity of either label. But, critics equate these two forms, and their contemporaries, nonetheless. 

I digress. Back to Rooney. 

The frustrations—within both Rooney-as-novelist and her novels’ critics—are more similar than we may give them both credit for. It may seem that Rooney cannot really explore the author's function in a way that would be freeing, cathartic, or even effective because her own self, as the author, lies, inherently, at the nexus of her work. The guiding voice of her novels become mixed up with the subject matter through which she tries to experience catharsis from, or through, them.

Rooney is able to explore notions of the author, but in doing so (in the fictional novelistic form specifically) she is doing so from the vantage point of Author-Figure, which, I imagine for Rooney, becomes dizzying—especially when her work is also expected to be bestselling, romantic, and actually good (and pitch-able to television and film producers). And critics and readers can feel this pressure! I think, then, that turns into the resentment we have: for Rooney as an author exploring these ideas by working through them, not giving readers all the answers about their “realness” as freely as Lin does, for example.

On first thought, writers like Lin, who lean into the autofiction title unabashedly (or at least seem unbothered at the accusation), answer Batuman’s question of why novels are fictional. To Lin, they clearly don’t have to be! Novels are a form, not a claim (as fiction is, historically, according to Batuman’s definition). But I think both Batuman and Rooney want to write fiction. They don’t want their life to be accountable to truth-claims, to Instagram caption Q&As and photos of their loved ones that say “This is who the character in my novel is based on.” They love fiction, and don’t want to succumb to not needing it. 

Why shouldn’t she be able to both mine her experience (for catharsis, for characterization, for whatever she needs to) while also being part of the long tradition of fiction that she’s not only inspired by, but who also play an equally large hand in the creation of her (auto)fictional worlds. Just as we, the readers, are wont to dissect the things that Alice says through the lens of What is Rooney really saying about herself in this passage?, so too was I desperate to find parallels to the James and Dostoyevsky she inserts throughout her works: What is Rooney really saying about The Golden Bowl, or The Brothers Karamazov in this passage? These two lines of questioning are not necessarily foils, but two sides of the same coin; two questions that, together, force readers to confront their own conceptions about fiction’s job in both truth and storytelling—in the novel. Or, rather, to ask why stories cannot be “true” for what they are, as reflections of a world, instead of what they claim to be, as reflections of a single person’s very specific world. 

Batuman, in the Longform interview, cites Chekov’s story The Lady with the Little Dog when making her point about the ability to mine one’s own life for fictional content without creating a need for conversation around truths and untruths. The public vs. private life of Chekov’s characters represent a doubling that lies at the heart of Rooney’s work; the locus of the problem she writes novels to try and solve.

Doubles abound in Beautiful World, Where are You: the obvious, Alice and Rooney herself, are what readers are getting too distracted with; why we’ve been up in arms about branded bucket hats instead of, say, contemplating the Dublin of Rooney’s works to the same city, pored over in such detail, by Joyce. 

This brings me to the form of doubling I mentioned earlier: the doubling of Rooney’s work alongside a canon of novelists that she inserts herself into by force from within her novels, and through the characters that we dare to compare to her. This back-door methodology is quite slick of Rooney, who in a one-two punch forces us to both compare her to the person Alice is and to the authors that Eileen and Alice discuss. She forcefully asserts her novels, in this way, as both personal and fictional—proving Batuman’s point.

Third, and relatedly, is the doubling of Alice and Eileen. The two friends exist as almost parallel-universe versions of each other, meeting at first only in the virtual, liminal, common ground of the Internet, via their long email exchanges that make up about one-third of the novel. Therefore if the reader is eager to compare Rooney to Alice, they too must witness Rooney, through Eileen, envision the world she perhaps was headed for had we not all become obsessed with Conversations with Friends in 2017. The split happened, though, and Rooney is able to explore the consequences of these two lives in tandem. Like Chekhov. 

The reader feels this personally, as they (likely) have not or will not ever receive the same amount of notoriety for their work as Rooney/Alice have—an extreme privilege rife with its own complications and uncertainties; a life that definitely exchanges the private work of the novelist with the heinous public show of influence, social media, and stardom in the digital era. But the novel ends not with Alice, but with Eileen. 

To Eileen, Alice writes: “...In my deepest essence I am just an artifact of our culture, just a little bubble winking at the brim of our civilisation.” Alice is locked in stone as a cultural discard, whereas Eileen can move forward and make of her life what she wants, because she is free of the pressures inflicted by Alice (and Rooney’s) artistic fame. Especially in the final pages, when Eileen discovers she’s pregnant, happy and contented, living alongside Simon, the reader thinks: Will the filial duties and the simplistic fantasy on which the novel ends save Eileen from Alice’s demise at the hands of enduring cultural relevance? 

Ultimately, Rooney “saves” the doubled version of herself (and the doubled version of Alice) in order to create the work she really wants to: a traditional literary marriage plot; a novel’s novel. Rooney situates her novel’s form among those writers that came before her, despite the characterizations that beg us to pull her out as singular, as selfish, and as a claim of her own life’s truth. 

Rooney is saved by this act, as Eileen is saved as a character, not through the categorization of nonfiction or autofiction—which, on first thought, perhaps would allow Rooney the “freedom” to pursue her own lived experience in some act of novelistic catharsis—but rather within the confines of strict literary device and tradition. Rooney finds salvation through fiction specifically—and not a fictionalized version of herself, per se, but rather the bounds of literary tradition that guard her. As Batuman notes, in fiction there should be space to achieve both personal catharsis and space to play artistically, without truth-claim consequence. In Beautiful World, Where are You, Rooney finds perhaps her most successful attempt at meeting this challenge. 

Early in Beautiful World, Rooney, through Alice, writes:

And what do books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralising specificity? Nothing. So why, why, why is it done this way? Whose interests does it serve? It makes me miserable, keeps me away from the one thing in my life that has any meaning, contributes nothing to the public interest, satisfies only the basest and most prurient curiosities on the part of the readers, and serves to arrange literary discourse entirely around the domineering figure of ‘the author’, whose lifestyle and idiosyncrasies must be picked over in lurid detail for no reason. 

To someone with Rooney’s level of fame and consequence, I think she knows that this freedom I’ve described is probably the last true freedom allowed to her, one that exists from within her work, as the author, not from without, as the Author Figure. Good thing this is the only freedom that matters to the novelist.