Beautiful World, Where Are You

Much of Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, will feel familiar to anyone who’s read the Irish writer’s 2017 debut Conversations with Friends or 2018’s Normal People. There’s the sharp, sparse prose that’s become a Rooney signature (and which has influenced a growing number of young female Irish writers following in her wake), as she explores class, female friendship, the aching pain of change and the tremendous fear of being left behind, alongside a tender will-they-won’t-they relationship. But in Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rooney also explores brand-new territory. Written in an observational, script-like style as though Rooney is watching her characters from afar, the novel centres on Alice—a feted author who’s released two wildly successful novels and achieved instant fame (sound familiar?)—and her best friend Eileen, an editorial assistant at a Dublin-based literary magazine. Then there are the men in their lives: Felix, who Alice meets on a Tinder date, and Simon, Eileen’s childhood friend. This novel is also part-told in epistolary style, as Eileen and Alice trade emails about their lives—intellectual ping-pong games that see the two women ponder everything from the overuse of plastic to beauty standards, capitalism, the end of civilisation as we know it and impending climate disaster. The result is a typically astute novel that, at its core, is about nothing less than how we find meaning in our chaotic, uncertain times. Rooney may poke fun at her own voice-of-a-generation status in Beautiful World, Where Are You (“A lot of press attention surrounded the publication, mostly positive at first, and then some negative pieces reacting to the fawning positivity of the first,” she writes of Alice’s first novel), but here, Rooney meets the moment head-on all over again.