That blaze of judgement has burned out Alice Kelleher, one of Rooney’s new heroines, a self-proclaimed ‘widely despised celebrity novelist’ – two bestsellers to her name, and not yet thirty – who’s recovering from a psychiatric breakdown in a drowsy seaside town on the west coast of Ireland. ‘I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing,’ Alice confides to her closest friend, Eileen Lydon. In lending Alice her career – a literary stardom of unforeseen and intrusive ferocity – Rooney’s third novel grapples with fame by staring the beast square in the eye.

Alone at the coast, Alice is bereft of inspiration for her next book; Eileen, a poorly paid copy editor at a Dublin literary magazine, is grieving for a time when life felt sprung with possibility. United in their existential questing the pair write each other old-fashioned emails of the kind that first filled our inboxes when the intimacy of letter-writing collided with the digital sugar-rush – heady with ideas, that whiff of manifesto.

Around this epistolary core, Rooney twists two love stories; a double helix of fraught romance. Having written about messy affairs in Conversations with Friends (2017), and the gravitational pull of first love in Normal People (2018), the Irish author turns her poised and canny attention to early-thirties nestbuilding – with all its incipient regret and self-reproach. (‘I’m sorry to say that I think it is too late to change the way we have turned out,’ Eileen laments to Alice. ‘The turning-out process has come to an end, and we are to a very great extent what we are’.)

On a surly Tinder date, Alice meets Felix, a warehouse shelf-stocker who has never read her books and boasts that he never will. The two share a prickly chemistry – like two agitated hedgehogs – but there’s heat under the barbed banter, and perhaps something more tender. ‘Our lives have been different in basically every respect,’ Alice explains to Eileen, ‘but there’s a lot we recognize in one another.’ Meanwhile, Eileen is nursing a crush on Simon: once the bookish boy-next-door, now a left-wing political operative. He’s a sleek-suited, high-principled dreamboat, and he worships Eileen, but also, unashamedly, the Holy Trinity. ‘How is it possible for me to admire someone for believing something I don’t believe, and don’t want to believe,’ Eileen wonders, ‘and which I think is manifestly incorrect and absurd?’ As the couple move from flirtation to phone sex to between-the-sheets squelching (a word that dispassionate Rooney would never use), destabilising their decades-old friendship seems an enormous risk.

Friends since university, Alice and Eileen are prototypical Rooney women: fluent in post-structuralist theory, Marxist economics, and the textures of heartbreak – self-deprecating as they are self-pitying, earnest as they are droll. Élite education has wedged a gap between them and their white working-class families, and if the women are honest – and they usually are – that ‘gulf of sophistication’ is a source of grief but also titillative pride. Inhabiting such characters is a literary highwire act; Alice and Eileen teeter on the edge of trope, but Rooney is sure-footed. ‘I think it’s one of those friendships where one person cares a lot more than the other,’ Alice explains, yet we’re never truly sure which of the pair is the more invested.

The women keep each other at a distance until the novel’s final act – their friendship is more intimate on paper, spared the heat of eyes and scrutiny – and Rooney approaches that reckoning slowly. In the interval, they write of fallen civilisations and lost languages, the hypocrisies of free-market conservatism, and the death of historical continuity (‘each day has now become a new and unique informational unit’). They write of the guilt of abundance in a world of want and misery; of God and goodness, belief and forgiveness (‘we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good’). They write of ugliness and beauty and the ethics of porn, and, inescapably, of looming climatic doom (‘Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?’). Some readers will find it all insufferably pretentious – and it is – but it’s also generous and searching; the kind of conversation that can only spark between people of equal curiosities and equal comfort with uncertainty, and equal capacity for wonder.

In the novel’s riskiest and most riveting move, Alice and Eileen place the literary industrial complex in their intellectual crosshairs, with its hermetic cycle of production and promotion (‘it takes writers away from normal life,’ Alice tells Eileen, ‘shuts the door behind them, and tells them again and again how special they are and how important their opinions must be’). Yet Alice spends the novel entirely embedded in its machinery: jetting to festivals in Rome, panels in London, signings, and award ceremonies. Rooney’s avatar is scathing, too, of the wilful forgetting that a novel demands. We can only care about the love affairs of imaginary protagonists because every other horrible, brutalising, systemic clusterfuck – every exigent, dehumanising crisis – is glossily ignored (‘My own work is, it goes without saying, the worst culprit in this regard,’ Alice readily admits). But that’s how we all live, Eileen counters. ‘Do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?’

And so the women go back and forth, dissecting and defending the novel: vulgar or humane? Trite or necessary? Empathetic or myopic? Of course, fiction can be each and all of these things, and that is its slippery power. Like Alice, Rooney is grappling with the ethics and reach of that power – reconciling its pleasures, privileges, and discomforts – and she’s placed her doubts in the fretful heart of the book: a debate about the worth of the love story, inside a love story. Rooney’s penchant for literary romance is often wielded like some kind of ‘gotcha’, proof that she’s not worth taking seriously (it’s a thinly veiled and tiresome misogyny, the dismissible realm of the girly). This novel is her rejoinder. ‘In the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship,’ Eileen writes. ‘What else is there to live for?’

Much praise has been heaped – and rightly so – on this novel’s execution: Rooney’s laser-cut dialogue and ever-watchful eye; her crisp, unjudgemental eroticism. Her granular attention to the rhythms and ticks of pre-pandemic life: supermarket ready-meals and office drudgery; all the indolent swiping and texting and lurking of the digital world, all those lidless bluescreen eyes. In her pages, dishes in an apartment sink become a quiet metaphor, a shared look at a wedding becomes a tacit declaration. It’s all very Edith Wharton, a decorous cool. A liquid-nitrogen burn.

But the gender dynamics of Rooney’s love stories are unsettling: one erosive, the other infantilising. Felix is a miserable bully, searching for people’s bruises and pressing on them – whistling to himself when he lands on a particularly tender spot. He speaks of Alice with the same disdain he reserves for the spaniel his landlord abandoned (‘You have a lot in common with her, you know,’ he tells the skittish dog of Alice. ‘You’re both in love with me’). Every exchange between Alice and Felix feels like combat, offcuts from some sour-hearted Edward Albee play (‘You’re only letting me act badly because it puts you above me,’ he snipes at her, ‘and that’s where you like to be. Above, above’). Felix’s indifference to Alice’s writing career is so loud, so tenacious, we begin to wonder if she has chosen him as the embodiment of her own unease, as a reminder of how unspecial she is, or as some kind of penance for her success. The match fizzes with cruelty.  

Eileen and Simon, on the other hand, have built their friendship around his ever-steady competence and her need for rescue. ‘Whenever a girl asks me to open a jam jar, I kind of fall in love with her,’ Simon admits. ‘I do find his paternalistic beliefs about women charming,’ Eileen confides in Alice. And what first seems like erotic play – daddies and princesses, dutiful wives and capable husbands – soon emerges as a cover for other desires. ‘I just have this sense that if Simon had taken me under his wing earlier in life,’ Eileen explains, ‘I might of turned out a lot better.’ There are echoes here of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and her character’s transgressive confession – ‘I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life!’ – and also of Rooney’s previous novels, which dabble in the power dynamics of subjugation. But it’s troubling, dispiriting, to find a message of surrender on cultural repeat, and trussed up as a love song.

But what are we meant to want for these clever, adrift women? Is pairing-off the gentle triumph it seems, or is it a failure of imagination, or perhaps of nerve? As Alice and Eileen ponder in their emails, the marriage plot is a tired punchline to a bad joke. ‘Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another,’ Eileen writes. ‘But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it?’ And this is the question that gnaws in this novel: what’s next? Not just for sex or love or marriage, but for the mighty human mess. There’s a palpable bereftness in this novel, and it’s hard to untangle whether Rooney is capturing or succumbing to it, and whether that distinction matters at all.

There is no question mark in Rooney’s title, it’s presented as a lament – an elegy – not a quest: Beautiful World, Where Are You. ‘We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness,’ Rooney writes, ‘bearing witness to something.’ It’s a ghostly line, exquisite and painful, and it’s presented in this novel with all the grace and dignity of a calling. But it too is a trussed surrender. I prefer another line from literature’s lengthening shadows: ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’