People don’t go online, they “tap the icon of a social media app” and their screens take several sentences to load.
Actions are described in microscopic detail, expressions are hard to read. We start the novel knowing nothing – even the writer seems to know nothing – about these human beings. It takes some time to get these people in the same room, however, and that movement towards intimacy is purposely delayed by Rooney’s descriptive prose, which heats up slowly. The dialogue never falters, and the prose burns up the page. The last third of Beautiful World, Where Are You, when the four characters meet and connect, is a tour de force. “In fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other.” Alice will be stupid about Felix, a possibly dodgy guy she meets on Tinder, and Eileen will be incredibly stupid about Simon, the friend of her youth, who is gorgeous, unapproachably moral and, of all things, a Catholic.įans of Rooney’s previous work will relish the ache and uncertainty of her characters’ coming of age, her way with emotional difficulty and her brilliance in showing the barriers we put between ourselves and the love of others. “Maybe we are just born to love and worry about the people we know,” she replies. “We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness,” says Alice, given that “there is no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.” And though Eileen agrees, she finds solace in the ordinary. The book interleaves their separate love stories with the long emails they send each other, in which they have much to discuss and share. Alice is an unfeasibly successful young writer and Eileen works for a literary magazine, earning 20 grand a year. These smart Irish Marxists are best friends from college, and they have lives that are, in very different ways, a bit like Rooney’s own. “Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?” In Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, Alice and Eileen are best friends, about to turn 30, who are agreed that human civilisation is facing collapse, beauty is dead, art is commodified and the novel irrelevant as a form.
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