![]() ![]() ![]() From the grandeur of the title to the obtrusiveness of its technique and the more or less equal attention accorded to a pair of couples instead of just one, Beautiful World, Where Are You, though recognisably the work of the same author, marks a self-conscious advance on Conversations with Friends and Normal People. The subject is raised by various means, in dialogue, narrated backstory and the email correspondence between Alice and her friend Eileen, but emerges most resonantly in the ambition of the book as a whole. It’s at once another instalment in her serial portrait of the bookish, fidgety, sexually avid Irishwoman born circa 1990 and a reckoning of sorts with doubts about Rooney-mania – her own as well as those expressed in what the narrator, describing the reception handed out to the not un-Rooney-like heroine, a superstar novelist named Alice, calls the ‘negative pieces’ produced in reaction to ‘the fawning positivity of the initial coverage’. Sally Rooney’s new novel, her third in four years, is a passionate, earnest, vulnerable, often affecting and above all dysfunctional piece of work. ![]()
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