Beautiful World, Where Are You?
by Sally Rooney
(Faber, $33)
When Sally Rooney's debut novel Conversations with Friends was published in 2017, it wasn't met with much buzz in New Zealand. I was a bookseller at the time and my rep tried to give me a copy of the book twice but, at a glance, I dismissed it as looking lightweight.
Then in April 2018 I interviewed one of my favourite writers and cultural critics, Olivia Laing. I asked her what books she'd been loving lately and she said, "It's not out until September but there's a book called Normal People by Sally Rooney." Laing was right. Rooney struck me with her remarkably seasoned take on relationship and friendship dynamics, class and privilege. I then became quite evangelical about her novels.
Rooney is a literary phenomenon who catapulted to extraordinary fame and critical acclaim with ardent fans across a wide readership from tweens to 94-year-olds. The question on everyone's lips is, can Rooney's hugely anticipated third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? be as good as her previous two?
In it, a semi-reclusive 29-year-old writer named Alice has just recovered from a psychiatric breakdown after skyrocketing to literary stardom at 24. Alice is working on her third novel in isolation while renting a seaside rectory in a remote part of Ireland. She worries that she has only two books in her. "I'm burned out. I only had two good ideas," she anxiously tells a friend. In Rooney's case, this is untrue. Charged with layers of complexity, philosophical enquiry and the same look at class, politics, power, friendship, sex, relationships and family tensions as Conversations with Friends and Normal People, this may be her best book yet.