Beautiful World, Where Are You

It is the second Friday evening in May, and Felix has finished work. He drives to an empty lot by the sea and rolls a joint. He scrolls through texts from Damian that he has been ignoring for weeks. He opens a dating app and types out a flirty message but then reconsiders and calls Alice instead. The two act slightly awkward, and Alice asks why she hasn’t heard from him in a while. “He appeared to give this some thought, or perhaps made a show of doing so” (170). Felix mumbles that he’s not looking for big commitments and that she clearly doesn’t care about him anyway, but she says it’s obvious that she cares about him. He counters that she isn’t behaving that way. She invites him to stay for a drink and watch Netflix, but he falls asleep on her couch before she can choose a film. He wakes up two hours later, close to midnight, and finds Alice in the kitchen, “the light of the fridge formed a white rectangular frame around her body” (174). She is talking to a writer friend on the phone and says goodbye when she sees Felix. Felix apologizes for both not texting her back and for not thanking her for the Italy trip. He asks to stay the night, and she says he can if he wants. He asks her to clarify whether she actually wants him there or would merely find it tolerable. She says she wants him there, and they kiss. Felix avoids another call from Damian and asks Alice to give him head. They have more sex until she settles beside him, satisfied, and asks him to tell her everything about himself.

In her next letter, Alice writes from Paris as she travels to receive an award. She wanders the Musée d’Orsay and meditates on several portraits of Berthe Morisot, a favorite muse of Edouard Manet’s. Alice praises the art, in particular, that “her beauty is something I have to search for, requiring some interpretive work, some intellectual or abstract work” (183). The artistic collaboration ended when Morisot married Manet’s brother, and Manet painted her once more and then never again. Alice says this reminds her of Eileen and Simon. She writes:

The trouble with museums is that there’s far too much art, so that no matter how well you plan your route or how noble your intentions, you will always find yourself walking irritably past priceless works of profound genius looking for the bathrooms (184).

Alice describes the rest of her day as busy and then talks about her relationship to Christianity as “fascinated” but not necessarily devoted, saying that she feels as though God is a favored fictional character. In the same way that Alice recognizes the appeal of traditional religion, she recognizes the utility of heterosexual monogamy, but she feels these conventions are dissociated from and non-conducive to actual love. She disagrees with Eileen about persisting beyond the end of civilization because she feels like an “artefact” of culture, “Just a little bubble winking at the brim of our civilisation. And when it’s gone, I’ll be gone. Not that I think I mind” (187).

On Friday morning, Eileen’s workday progresses as usual: She works on essays about The Karamazov Brothers and The Golden Bowl and laughs with coworkers about a satirical news segment. Her sister, Lola, texts her and prods her about her romantic life. After work, Eileen talks to her parents on the phone and argues with her mother about Lola’s immature behavior. Eileen, feeling guarded against her mother’s emotional accusations, brings up Simon potentially and marrying him one day, but Mary laughs it off as an empty fantasy (though insisting she loves and respects Eileen, all the same). After the phone call, Eileen texts Simon, who is away on a work trip. Lola texts Eileen that she hopes the date Eileen is bringing to Lola’s wedding is not Simon, because he’s a religious “freak.” Lola further bullies her over text, and Eileen drops her phone:

Slowly the breath left her body and re-entered the room, the breath mingling now with the air of the room, moving through the air of the room and dispersing, droplets and microscopic aerosol particles diffusing through the air of the room and dropping slowly, slowly, toward the floor (195-196).

The next evening, Eileen attends a party at her friend Paula’s house, and several people gossip about one of Simon’s love interests, Caroline. Simon arrives from his work trip and gives several hugs but only gives Eileen a handshake. Eileen spots a girl at the party feeling up his collar later and decides to leave: “Behind her the living room window of Paula’s house was lit up, a deep warm golden colour, and from within came the muted noise of music and voices” (200). Simon rushes out to catch her, not realizing he upset her, and starts walking her home.

Seeing her mood, he accuses her of being unfair about their situation because he doesn’t understand what she wants, and he can’t put his romantic life on hold for her. Unsatisfied, she answers, “How Christian of you. What does that mean? he asked. With a laugh that sounded almost frightened she said: I can’t believe I’ve been such a fool” (203). She reaches home and sobs on her bed. She drafts an angry text and then an apologetic one, but she erases them both before going to sleep. 

Eileen opens her letter again by asking Alice why she’s on yet another work trip so soon. Eileen believes that civilization is at its end, stating that quality of both life and “aesthetic experience” are diminished. In contrast, she writes that pre-industrialization ways of life were more humanizing. Moreover, she feels disconnected and that the world has become an “uglier place” where she feels intellectually unmoored and disoriented. She considers that she feels this way because she has lost the naïve idealism of her youth wherein she imagined she was significant.

Eileen then makes a distinction between aesthetic experiences and contrived, capitalist conceptions of beauty, saying that intertwining them is “an extremely serious mistake for anyone who cares about culture. Have the two things ever been more widely or deeply confused at any period in history before?” (210). She thinks back to a time where she wrote a successful essay about Natalia Ginzburg; a publisher reached out to her, but she avoided the message because she was afraid she would fail at such a big project. She compares this to her previous relationship with Aidan, which wasn’t really working anyway but still made her feel depressed in the aftermath. She closes her letter by imagining her ideal existence, which is a “house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all” (212).