![]() ![]() The intellectual lives of women are still under-recognised in literature, and, by giving equal prominence to her central characters’ shifting ideas as to their evolving relationships, Rooney seems to assert a belief that, despite what her critics may imply, the line between the ‘sentimental’ and the ‘political’ is always blurry at best. In Beautiful World, Where Are You the reader is held at a remove. These emails are the closest the novel gets to interiority, for interspersed with them are chapters narrated from an omniscient third-person point of view – a new technique for Rooney, perhaps signalling a desire to swap the extreme, even claustrophobic intimacy her writing is known for, for distance. Scattered amongst these commentaries are reflections on – what else – their respective romantic encounters with the central male characters, Felix and Simon. Alice and Eileen’s lengthy emails form an extended Socratic dialogue, as they question each other’s outlooks on success, the climate crisis, the collapse of civilisations, rent, religion, the Late Bronze Age, and Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay ‘Uses of the Erotic’ (to name only a handful of topics covered). So, for half the book, we have an intellectual friendship between two women, unspooling across an email exchange in alternating chapters. This time, Rooney wants to make things more explicit. If you’re a Marxist, the argument goes, why does the leftism of your characters feel so shallow, gestural, or superficial? Does that also seem reductive? If so, that’s because Beautiful World, Where Are You often reads like Rooney’s clunky attempt to answer her critics – those accusing her of being overly sentimental and insufficiently political. Or, it is about sex, but as a consolation for living through global crisis love at the end of the world. It’s not about sex baby, it’s about capitalism. Of course, this is a somewhat reductive summary of a book that – as readers have also come to expect from Rooney – attempts to use intimate relationships as a prism through which to refract contemporary concerns. It features a complicated relationship with an older man, whose ‘fantasy is that you’re really helpless and I’m like, telling you what a good girl you are’, and a complicated relationship with a handsome, sociable, working-class lad, who asks ‘do you hate the word ‘fuck’?’ before asking to fuck, and says things like ‘you’re very small with your clothes off’ at the moment of penetration. It features a thin writer riddled with self-hatred and a beautiful, lonely copyeditor. Like Normal People (2018), it’s about power dynamics between ostensibly mismatched couples and miscommunication. Like her 2017 debut novel Conversations with Friends, it is about four people who ground their interlocking ‘it’s complicated’ relationships in discussions of sex, art, politics, gender, forgiveness and fantasy. To those familiar with Rooney’s work, much of Beautiful World, Where Are You will feel, well, familiar. It is – spoiler alert – about a millennial Irish novelist, who, having published two books to great acclaim, is struggling with the pressures of fame. The millennial Irish novelist often touted as the definitive ‘millennial Irish novelist’ has, to much fanfare, released her third book in four years, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably clocked that Sally Rooney has a new novel out. Or, what Beautiful World, Where Are You shares with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Tax the Rich’ Met Gala dress ![]()
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