BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU

SALLY ROONEY

Faber, 337pp, £16.99 Sally Rooney’s anticipated third novel is ‘a puzzle’, said Susannah Goldsbrough in the Telegraph; it is ‘brilliant and flawed’. Following closely on the success of Normal

People Rooney explores the complexities of relationships, class, gender and sexuality. Rooney breaks up the storyline by interpolating political discussion of zeitgeist-y issues in an exchange of emails between the two female protagonists. But for Goldsbrough, the debates do ‘nothing to advance the plot and weirdly little to flesh out the characters’. Rather, this structure is ‘frustrating, because jammed between the emails is some of Rooney’s most beautiful writing’.

‘It centres on a will-they-won’tthey romance plot involving two couples,’ said Johanna Thomas-corr in the Sunday Times, ‘but it does so in a way that feels a little uncanny and a little mechanical, lacking the breath of human inspiration.’ She admitted that ‘though there are many beautiful passages’, she found it was ‘the book’s overriding tone of narcissism and despair that stayed with me, weighing me down for days’.

‘ Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney’s best novel,’ enthused James Marriott in the Times. ‘Her prose is now free of moments of clumsiness … Her ideas are more fully, poetically developed. The emotional control and technical mastery of the book’s final pages reveal her as a novelist who will soon be able to do more or less as she likes.’ He went further: ‘The book moved me to tears more than once.’ Brandon Taylor in the New York Times defined Rooney’s genre of writing as a ‘kind of plotless un-novel’. For him the sense of isolation between the characters conjured ‘the arid, intense melancholy of a Hopper painting’.