The obvious risk here is that of a “poor me” solipsism. She is filled with self-contempt: “I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy.” This disgust seeps into her sense of her own novels: “I find my own work morally and politically worthless.”

What form can the experience – economic, sexual, historical, political – of her generation take? But Rooney counters it with a passionate and searching inquiry into the connection between the problem of writing and the problem of living. The obvious risk is that of a 'poor me' solipsism. People who meet her for the first time Google her name for all the gossip. She jets off to Rome for interviews and readings. She “signed an American book deal for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars” when she was 24. Rooney takes the very considerable risk of allowing Alice’s experiences to mirror, in career terms, her own. She is deeply unhappy about her own Byronic experience of waking one morning to find herself an international literary star. In one of the long discursive emails between them that shape the book’s intellectual architecture, Eileen, who works as a badly paid editor for a Dublin literary magazine, suggests to her friend Alice, a hypersuccessful novelist, that “our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish”.īut Alice seems to suspect that this may be true not just of political vocabulary but of the novel itself. But what makes it so intriguing here is that Rooney’s characters are emphatically not Isabel Archer or Elizabeth Bennett. Alice is a young writer deeply unhappy about waking one morning to find herself an international literary starįor another writer, all of this might amount to an exercise in literary nostalgia or insupportable hubris. Sally Rooney takes the very considerable risk of allowing the experiences of her character Alice to mirror, in career terms, her own. Rooney, hailed as the voice of the young, is very deliberately placing herself in venerable company. One strand of it could be plucked from Jane Austen in the way the characters struggle to interpret each other’s desires and in its shape as a good old-fashioned marriage plot. The novel itself refers back to Leo Tolstoy in the way it combines the small world of love and intimacy with the large one of politics and ideas, putting the extremely private side by side with the very public.

Her title comes from a Friedrich Schiller poem set to music by Franz Schubert in 1819.

But she has written, in Beautiful World, Where Are You, a 19th-century novel. Sally Rooney is regarded, not without reason, as the novelist who best expresses the lives of those born into the western middle class in the 1990s.

Beautiful world where are you book