Beautiful World, Where Are You

On Thursday evening, Eileen attends a work event poetry reading, where an elderly man awkwardly flirts with her. Eileen and her friend Paula go for drinks at a nearby bar and chat about bad breakups. Eileen says that she bored Aidan and that this must somehow reflect on her, but Paula is confused how boredom can end a relationship unilaterally. Close to midnight, Eileen sits in bed and calls Simon, who is currently in bed in London.

Eileen teases out the fact that he’s dating non-exclusively. She tells him he works too much, adding that he needs a “little wife” for himself who would urge him to rest and who would provide for him sexually and emotionally. She tells him Alice wrote in a letter that Aidan’s breakup wasn’t that bad anyway (she is trying, unsuccessfully, to get a reaction out of him). They flirt a little more, Simon calling her “princess” and Eileen instructing him to undress.

The two of them keep talking about the unnamed “perfect wife” as they masturbate. Eileen describes the theoretical wife to Simon as someone looking not at all like herself, but she dances around the idea of being his wife, saying, “Remember how much you love her, that makes a difference. I know a lot about you, but that’s the side of you I don’t know. How you act with a woman you love. I’m digressing now, I’m sorry” (70). She also tells him that, in the fantasy, he’s having sex with his wife but starts thinking about Eileen—but she also notes that, in this fantasy, he thinks of Eileen as she was when she was younger.

After he finishes, she teases him, and they hang up. She masturbates for a couple of minutes before finishing “noiselessly” and falling asleep.

Eileen’s next letter asks Alice if she is working too much, considering the Rome trip. Eileen admits she is in a bad mood while writing. She feels depressed and compares her situation—making 20k a year with two thirds going into rent—with Alice’s income of about 200 thousand euro a year and living in a rent-free palatial quarters. She digresses, saying, “I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed” (74). She suggests people are obsessed with categorizing others’ identities as a means of doling out a “proper moral reckoning” (74) through social organization of labor and resources.

She writes, “Our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish” (74), referring to the futility of trying to understand irrationality. Eileen admits to not wanting to live in such a bleak society, but she also doesn’t know what ideas are even worth dying for. The idea she keeps returning to is that “we should watch the immense human misery unfolding before us” and then the “conditions of exploitation will by themselves generate a solution to exploitation” (75). She adds a theory of her own: that the human aesthetic impulse was lost in 1976 with the prevalence of “ugly” plastic. Finally, Eileen accuses Alice of being coy about Felix, but her attention predictably turns to Simon’s love life before she directs the topic back to Felix. Eileen makes one more request that Alice see her soon.

On Wednesday, Alice and Felix arrive in Rome and settle into an apartment, both spending time on their phones. Alice describes how in her college years she was disliked for being argumentatively presumptuous. Felix and Alice bicker flirtatiously. Alice meets his refusal to read any of her books with a mischievous “I might grow on you” (81). When she tells Felix about Simon being religious, he mocks the affiliation and worries that Simon would be heterosexist, seeing as Felix is bisexual.

The next morning, Felix wanders the city taking pictures while Alice records a segment for an Italian television show. They meet up later at a literary festival, where she reads onstage and answers audience questions about feminism, sexuality, James Joyce, and the Catholic Church. The narration juxtaposes the two characters’ thoughts:

Did Felix find her answers interesting, or was he bored? Was he thinking about her, or about something else, someone else? And onstage, speaking about her books, was Alice thinking about him? Did he exist for her in that moment, and if so, in what way? (88).

Their relationship remains mysteriously undefined, but the sexual tension between them increases as the two attempt to argue past their mutual attraction. Felix jokingly accuses Alice of being in love with him while she drafts an email to Eileen about what a terrible idea it was to bring a stranger to Rome. Eileen makes pleasant conversation with her assistant on the ride home, and Felix watches as “the streets of Rome revealed themselves one by one and vanished, pulled backward into the darkness” (90).

Alice’s letter immediately explains to Eileen that despite not yet having slept with Felix, she thinks that their relationship has a sexual tenor. This sparks a philosophical conversation about how far sexuality extends beyond the act of sex. Alice remarks that people don’t talk about sexuality outside of “coming to terms” with one’s sexual orientation, saying, “Our ways of thinking and speaking about sexuality seem so limited, compared to the exhausting and debilitating power of sexuality itself as we experience it in our real lives” (92). Alice muses about metaphysical representations of relationships—visualizing fluids poured into vessels in different shapes depending on the nature of the relation. She brings the topic back to Felix, saying she is intrigued by him and pursuing that relationship because it is an experiment where they are “in certain senses closer, because there are no boundaries or conventions by which our relationship is constrained” (93). In other words, she wants to “pour the water out and let it fall […] That’s a little like myself and Felix, I think” (93).

Alice notes Eileen’s theory of beauty and postures that instead, the instinct for beauty was lost when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. She points out that they both named fairly recent global events, adding, “Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?” with darkly ironic humor (94). Her tone is sadly contemplative when she writes, “We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something” (94). As to what humanity bears witness to, she has yet to see.

She then complains that the contemporary Euro-American novel is an irrelevant endeavor, their authors obsessed with reviews rather than representations of “ordinary” life. She questions the very purpose of a novel, critiquing the artistic act of juxtaposing main characters’ lives with the “lived reality” of poverty and misery for millions (95). She ends by theorizing that that novel “works by suppressing the truth of the world—packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text” (96). In closing, Alice notes Eileen’s prior depressed mood and encourages her to live rather than die for any potential revolution.