Sally Rooney’s search for a beautiful world

Despite dazzling dialogue and familiar delights, Sally Rooney’s story of a young prize-winning writer is her most earnest book to date

Even in these accelerated times it seems bewildering: was it really only four years ago that Sally Rooney made her debut? The ecstatic welcome given to Conversations With Friends, a deadpan comedy of arty Dublin millennials, was a mere curtain-raiser to the escape velocity achieved a year later by her cross-class teen love story, Normal People. Amid the strenuously cerebral to-and-fro of the online Sallyology industry, arguing over how far the books reflected or betrayed the author’s avowed Marxism, it could be forgotten how purely and straightforwardly enjoyable Rooney is to read, which isn’t to say, as Will Self has, that Normal People represents “very simple stuff with no literary ambition”.

Rooney’s publisher recently announced the opening of a pop-up shop to sell copies of her latest novel. She’s still just 30 and while I can’t begin to imagine the oddity of her existence over the past few years, Beautiful World, Where Are You gives us a fair idea. Her third book, it’s her first to be written in the glare of expectation and, boy, can you tell. A sort of Being Sally Rooney, it threatens – I suspect – to befuddle fans and leave naysayers cold, even if the point of all its agonised introspection is that the darkest judgments issuing from the bowels of the internet have nothing on Rooney’s own guilty self-scrutiny.

The book centres on the sexual entanglements of a prize-winning writer, Alice, and her old university pal, Eileen, both turning 30. Burnt out after an ill-fated spell in New York, Alice feels she “only had two good ideas” (actual lol, as one of the characters might say) and won’t write another book, not just because she detests hype-cycle whims and media intrusion, but because writing fiction feels “vulgar, decadent and even epistemically violent” at a time when we ought to be redistributing global resources “and transitioning … to a sustainable economic model”.

Such thoughts, presented unsatirically, provide an uneasy context for the novel’s main action, a love-quadrangle storyline à la Conversations With Friends. Eileen, employed by a Dublin literary magazine, beds her girlhood crush, Simon, a political adviser; Alice, now living by the sea in Mayo, falls for her Tinder hookup, Felix, a warehouse worker.

But this is far from Normal People 2: witness the first in a series of high-minded emails between Eileen and Alice, who has “been thinking lately about rightwing politics (haven’t we all), and how it is that conservatism (the social force) came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism”. It’s earnest stuff – “I wish there was a good theory of sexuality out there for me to read,” Alice says – and anyone who binge-watched Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones might hanker for less theory and a bit more will-they-won’t-they. Only after Alice invites Felix to Rome for her book launch (“I can pay for everything. I’m rich and famous, remember?”) does the story spring to life; he’s at the heart of all the novel’s best moments.

The engine of Rooney’s fiction is essentially epistolary, with texts, not letters, generating dramatic irony in the form of unsent drafts and contradictory replies to different recipients. But technology isn’t only played for laughs: there’s a strangely poignant moment in which Eileen searches herself online at work and swiftly closes the tab, as if seeking assurance she exists. Where Conversations With Friends was told in the first person and Normal People in the close third, here the narrator stays on the outside, guessing with the rest of us: “Was he thinking about her, or about something else, someone else? And… was Alice thinking about him? Did he exist for her in that moment, and if so, in what way?”

Is this Rooney’s way of shrugging off the “voice of a generation” tag? Certainly, this is her most self-consciously awkward book to date. When Alice worries that fiction depends on making us forget the “brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species”, it grinds against Rooney’s gift for eliciting the emotional investment of which the novel seems so wary.

Hectoringly ambivalent about her own pleasures, Rooney seems to be saying that what she has to offer as a writer isn’t enough, but that it’s also all there is. Will the readers who love her care about any of this? Ultimately, it’s hard not to feel her greatest artistic challenge isn’t retooling the romcom for an era of political crisis, but the simpler, if no less tricky, task of just getting on with her work.