What is Beautiful World, Where Are You about?

Beautiful World, Where Are You follows two women in their late twenties — Alice, a novelist recovering from a breakdown in a rented house in rural Ireland, and Eileen, her best friend working at a literary magazine in Dublin. Both are in the orbit of men: Alice begins an unlikely relationship with Felix, a warehouse worker she meets on a dating app; Eileen falls back toward Simon, a longtime friend she has always loved and kept at a careful distance. The novel moves through the four characters' lives in alternating chapters, punctuated by long, essayistic emails that Alice and Eileen exchange about civilization, meaning, and what they want from their lives.

The emails are the novel's most distinctive formal element and the source of most of its ideas. They contain Rooney's thinking about late capitalism, celebrity, the Bronze Age, religious feeling, and the question implied by the title: whether the beautiful world — a world capable of sustaining beauty, intimacy, and meaning — still exists or has been foreclosed by something. These passages will divide readers sharply. Some will find them the novel's most alive section; others will find them lectures delivered through character proxies.

Rooney's style is as recognizable here as in Normal People and Conversations with Friends — close third-person narration, long sentences, emotional restraint, a precision about social dynamics that approaches sociology. The romantic relationships are rendered with her usual double attention to desire and to the power dynamics operating beneath desire. Felix is a more unusual creation than Rooney's earlier male leads: deliberately unpolished, working class, unwilling to perform sensitivity, and treated with real affection rather than condescension.

This is the most explicit novel Rooney has written about what it costs to be a writer and a public figure. Alice's breakdown and her hostility to her own celebrity are clearly autobiographical in texture even if not in fact. Readers who loved her earlier work will find this familiar and more considered; readers new to Rooney will find the essayistic passages an acquired taste. As a novel about what friendship means when you're running out of frameworks for larger meaning, it is sharply felt.