![]() ![]() But the novel itself largely takes place in Ireland, alternating between Alice’s life in Ballina and Eileen’s in Dublin. Tide returning now with a faint repeating rush over the sand.” Rooney’s title, Beautiful World, Where Are You, is drawn from a Schiller poem and gestures longingly outward. Some of Rooney’s best phrases come from descriptions of the natural environment, as when the omniscient narrator lingers on “the sea to the west, a length of dark cloth,” or the “crescent moon hanging low over the dark water. With the exception of Felix, they are rarely depicted while actually working. Characters attend dinner parties, go shopping, and have mostly sweet, mostly straight sex. Most of the book unfolds with Rooney’s typical effervescent prose, whose extreme readability lies partly in its narrative economy. As with Marianne and Connell in Normal People, Eileen and Simon have known each other since childhood and are similarly “two people who … apparently could not leave one another alone.” ![]() And there’s Alice’s best friend, Eileen, who works at a literary magazine in Dublin, where she seemingly spends most of her time flirting with and then friend-zoning Simon, a left-wing government policy adviser several years her elder. There’s the successful novelist Alice, who, following a mental breakdown, rents a rural seaside house in the town where she meets Felix, a rugged warehouse worker. The story follows two pairs of lovers hovering around 30 over the course of a few short months. “Now that my life is different, I don’t know to what extent I can keep doing that or how much of my social world I can now accommodate in my writing.” Reading Rooney’s latest, you can feel her struggling to reconcile her own strange reality with the ideals that have become so much part of her image.īeautiful World, Where Are You builds on the conventions of Rooney’s prior work, exploring themes of millennial romance, female friendship, post-2008 economic precarity, class differences, and the existential malaise of how a (white middle-class) person should be. “Up till now, the books that I’ve written have been about people kind of like me,” reflected Rooney upon the massive popularity of her first two novels. Following that was the predictable backlash, especially around Rooney’s self-proclaimed Marxist politics (which she frequently cites in interviews) and the lack of Marxist praxis in her mostly orthodox romance novels. The 30-year-old Irish writer has published two novels before this - her 2017 debut, Conversations With Friends, quickly followed by Normal People - each to a tide of adulation. It’s a scene that one could easily read through the lens of Rooney’s reputation. “You probably wrote it yourself.” But Alice rejects this collapse between her internet persona and her personal life. “Anyone can have one of those,” he says to Alice. In front of Alice, they list the details of her Wikipedia page, from “Literary work” to “Adaptations” to “Personal life.” Felix, growing visibly uncomfortable, deflects by downplaying the fact that Alice has a Wikipedia page at all. ![]() Early on in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, a young man named Felix introduces the semi-famous writer he’s semi-seeing to a room full of his friends: “This is Alice … She’s a novelist.” His friends do what anyone confronted by a supposedly well-known person would do: They Google her. ![]()
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