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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

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Chelsea bingham, more online by chelsea bingham.

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Beautiful World, Where Are You

By sally rooney, reviewed by chelsea bingham.

Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You is her third novel, after Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018). While Conversations with Friends was nominated for awards and critically successful, Normal People made Rooney a household name. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2018) and Women’s Prize for Fiction (2019), Normal People won the Costa Book Awards for best novel (2018) and British Book Award for Book of the Year (2019). In 2020, it was adapted into an award-winning series for BBC Three and Hulu, and Rooney herself was nominated for multiple awards for her work on the show, winning Best Script at the IFTA Film and Drama Awards. A television adaptation for Conversations with Friends is now in development. Rooney has, with her incisive character studies, deadpan wit, and unputdownable plots, thoroughly bridged the popular and the literary.

Beautiful World, Where Are You builds on her previous success and demonstrates an expansion of her range. It follows Alice Kelleher, a financially successful and critically acclaimed novelist, and her best friend Eileen Lydon, a low-paid editor at a literary journal, through the twenty-ninth year of their lives. Alice, after experiencing a mental breakdown, moves to a large house by the sea three hours outside of Dublin and meets Felix Brady, a warehouse worker who has no idea who she is. Back in Dublin, Eileen has gone through a breakup and renews an intimate relationship with a man she’s known since childhood, Simon Costigan, a politician five years her senior.

Alice and Felix’s unlikely relationship begins with an inauspicious first date and spontaneous trip to Rome where Alice is doing publicity for her new book. Still strangers, they share an apartment (and eventually a bed), but not without conflict along the way. Meanwhile, Eileen and Simon’s fifteen-year history might be the very complication that prevents their having a successful relationship, despite a deep and caring friendship underpinning their romantic attraction. Rooney writes about love and sex with depth and sensitivity, but never takes either topic too seriously. That is not to say that this is not a serious novel—the plot may be driven by young, attractive people falling in love and having sex, but it is at its heart about how to find meaning in an increasingly ugly world.

Every sentence compels you to read more, but Rooney is at her best with Alice and Eileen’s correspondence. Their ability to reflect with seriousness on “cataclysmic historic events that structure [their] present sense of reality” comfortably coexists with their hyperbolic expressions of their personal lives. In one email, Eileen tells Alice, “It has become normal in my life, for example, to send text messages like the following: tillerson out at state lmaoooo. It just strikes me that it really shouldn’t be normal to send texts like that.” Shortly thereafter, she writes that she saw her ex-boyfriend “randomly on the street the other day and immediately had a heart attack and died.” The way Alice and Eileen fluidly shift between formal speech and slang, and global and personal topics, highlights their education and their standing as digital natives steeped in Internet culture and the endless news cycle. Rooney excels at depicting the densely layered and varied ways that this generation communicates.

In their back-and-forth, the women discuss topics ranging from politics to plastics, celebrity culture to religion. A particular preoccupation is our dying planet and the worth (or worthlessness) of making art when it feels like the end is near: “You should know,” writes Alice, “that our correspondence is my way of holding on to life, taking notes on it, and thereby preserving something of my—otherwise almost worthless, or even entirely worthless—existence on this rapidly degenerating planet.” It brings her to question her entire profession: what is the use of “making up stories about people who don’t exist,” when it contributes nothing to solving the concrete problems of the world?

It doesn’t help that the one thing that gives Alice’s life meaning—writing—also led to her psychological breakdown. Exposure to other successful writers, who “pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism—when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times,” only adds to her loss of faith in her occupation. Through Alice’s disillusionment, Rooney puts on display the toxicity of the literary world: Alice grows rich while Eileen can barely make a living, and Felix is torn apart on the internet because he has never read Alice’s books. Alice tells Eileen that “the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world—packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. […] My own work is, it goes without saying, the worst culprit in this regard. For this reason I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel again.” Alice rightfully struggles to reconcile her part in contributing to this toxicity with her personal beliefs about capitalism. What she neglects to acknowledge is the ability of art to alleviate suffering and examine inequities. Beautiful World, Where Are You is itself an exercise in doing so.

It is in some ways by accepting their ephemerality that Alice and Eileen can begin to see a future that isn’t completely grim. Eileen writes to Alice,

When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I don’t think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered. Well, we’ve both had that particular error ground out of us in different ways—me by achieving precisely nothing in over a decade of adult life, and you (if you’ll forgive me) by achieving as much as you possibly could and still not making one grain of difference to the smooth functioning of the capitalist system.

Their youthful determination to care for the earth and everything on it has—in just a handful of years—given way to “trying not to let down [their] loved ones, trying not to use too much plastic, and in [Alice’s] case trying to write an interesting book once every few years.” However, for all their seriousness about the state of the world and the futility of doing just about anything, the two women are still fully engaged in it. Their willingness to love their partners, write to one another, and bring books—maybe even babies—into the world, demonstrates their investment in a future that isn’t devoid of meaning. Rooney, unlike her fictional novelist, is willing to explore, rather than suppress, truths of the world. And while her text is tightly packed with meaning and imagery, it glitters less than it illuminates. She writes without pretense and with undeniable beauty.

Published on September 9, 2021

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By Brandon Taylor

• Published Sept. 7, 2021 Updated Oct. 12, 2021

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU By Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney ’s new novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” has the arid, intense melancholy of a Hopper painting. The novel follows Alice, a writer of global acclaim, and her best friend, Eileen, who works at a literary magazine in Dublin. Recovering from a breakdown brought about by complications of modern fame, Alice is morbid but openhearted, a secret idealist in wolf’s clothing. Eileen is the standard Rooney protagonist — ambivalent, sensitive, lethal in conversation. She’s got the classic mistrustful delusion of a younger child, needy and convinced of her own victimhood.

The novel opens with a familiar scene: Alice sitting in a bar waiting to meet Felix, a guy from an app. They engage in some first-date talk, and Alice takes him back to the huge house she’s borrowing, prompting Felix, who works in a warehouse, to ask, “What kind of things do you write? If you’re a writer.” Her reply: “I don’t suppose you think I’ve been lying. I would have come up with something better if I had been. I’m a novelist. I write books.” Felix rallies, “You make money doing that, do you?” Alice ends this line of conversation with defensive finality: “Yes, I do.” This anxious, thwarted flirting perfectly captures the preoccupations of “Beautiful World, Where Are You”: class, gender, power and sex.

After the terrible date, Alice writes a long email to Eileen. Their messages crosshatch the novel with funny, often profound ruminations on things like the Bronze Age, climate change and the nature and purpose of aesthetic beauty. In these sections, particularly passages written in Eileen’s voice, Rooney sheds the stiff pelt of scene-building and attains a clarity reminiscent of Rachel Cusk’s in her “Outline” trilogy.

We find Eileen restless in Dublin. She works at her desk, goes on lunch breaks, reads the social media feeds of her ex-boyfriend and rekindles a flirtation with Simon, a man she’s known since childhood. She hates her roommates; they seem to hate her. The novel switches back to Alice and Felix, who have another awkward run-in — and then, for reasons that seem to evade even her, Alice invites Felix to Italy for a work trip. They become intimate. They have sex. Things get complicated. They stop speaking. Another email to Eileen, who is again sleeping with Simon and dealing with her sister’s impending wedding. The novel spans a year or so as these four people fall in and out of love and try to figure out what it means to act with agency.

There is an argument to be made that “Beautiful World, Where Are You” is the kind of plotless un-novel we’re growing accustomed to. The characters banter about the uselessness of modern structures and our lack of faith in overriding narrative. While the techniques of modernism and postmodernism have been borrowed, assembled and arranged like items selected from an Ikea catalog, the contemporary un-novel has none of modernism’s or postmodernism’s desperate crisis of faith. That is, “Beautiful World, Where Are You” is carefully formless and its characters are fluent in our lingua franca of systemic collapse, that neoliberal patter of learned helplessness in the face of larger capital and labor systems.

Alice summarizes it neatly when she says of contemporary novelists: “Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism — when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in The New York Times?” I laughed at this line, and underlined it. I wrote “too true bestie ” in the margins. Later, she says, “The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful.”

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2021

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 2021

A novel of capacious intelligence and plenty of page-turning emotional drama.

Two erudite Irishwomen struggle with romance against the backdrop of the Trump/Brexit years.

Eileen and Alice have been friends since their university days. Now in their late 20s, Eileen works as an editorial assistant at a literary magazine in Dublin. Alice is a famous novelist recovering from a psychiatric hospitalization and staying in a large empty rectory on the west coast of Ireland. Since Alice’s breakdown, the two have kept in touch primarily through lengthy emails that alternate between recounting their romantic lives and working through their angst about the current social and political climate. (In one of these letters, Eileen laments that the introduction of plastic has ruined humanity’s aesthetic calibration and in the next paragraph, she’s eager to know if Alice is sleeping with the new man she’s met.) Eileen has spent many years entangled in an occasionally intimate friendship with her teenage crush, a slightly older man named Simon who is a devout Catholic and who works in the Irish Parliament as an assistant. As Eileen and Simon’s relationship becomes more complicated, Alice meets Felix, a warehouse worker who is unsure what to make of her fame and aloofness. In many ways, this book, a work of both philosophy and romantic tragicomedy about the ways people love and hurt one another, is exactly the type of book one would expect Rooney to write out of the political environment of the past few years. But just because the novel is so characteristic of Rooney doesn’t take anything away from its considerable power. As Alice herself puts it, “Humanity on the cusp of extinction [and] here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?”

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-374-60260-4

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Sally Rooney

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PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2024

Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”

A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.

Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!

Pub Date: June 11, 2024

ISBN: 9780316258876

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Elin Hilderbrand

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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Sally Rooney Addresses Her Critics

The Irish writer has been accused of being overly sentimental and insufficiently political. In her new novel, she makes the case for her approach to fiction.

This article was published online on August 10, 2021.

I n her first two novels , Conversations With Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), the young Irish writer Sally Rooney resurrected the depressive, evacuated style that Ernest Hemingway made his signature. “The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white,” he famously wrote in his short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” and in much the same deadpan way, Rooney has Frances, the narrator of her debut, look around a college library and think, “Inside, everything was very brown.” Ridiculous in isolation, Rooney’s line makes sense in context: Frances has just received an email from her lover’s wife, and while she waits for the courage to read it, she tries, unsuccessfully, to distract herself by focusing on her surroundings. At least, that’s what I imagine is going on in Frances’s head. With a writer so chary of detail, the reader rushes to fill in.

Rooney also resembled Hemingway—and Raymond Carver, a renovator of Hemingway’s minimalism whom Rooney has cited as an influence—in her ability to write dialogue that sounds unpremeditated but has a neutron-star density of drama and emotion. Here are Connell and Marianne, the teenage lovers of Normal People , after their first kiss:

All right, he said. What are you laughing for? Nothing. You’re acting like you’ve never kissed anyone before. Well, I haven’t, she said.

Rooney showed mastery of point of view as well. Her control was so fine that she was able to convey Connell’s arousal during a reunion with Marianne by slowing down his perception and amping up its sensuousness: “She’s wearing a white dress with a halter-neck and her skin looks tanned. She’s been hanging washing on the line. The air outside is very still and the laundry hangs there in damp colors, not moving.” Rooney’s respect for the limits and biases of her characters’ minds was strict. Frances, young and unsophisticated, has never tasted a fresh avocado before, fantasizes about seeing her name printed in a magazine “in a serif font with thick stems,” and describes the torso of her first male lover with an almost generic simile: “like a piece of statuary.”

Read: The small rebellions of Sally Rooney’s Normal People

The rigor with which Rooney conformed narrative voice to the shape of her characters’ consciousness won her praise as a portraitist of her Millennial generation —and also left her vulnerable to political critique. Many of her characters are college-age leftists of an idealistic sort and, like tyro intellectuals since the dawn of time, are deadly earnest without altogether knowing what they’re talking about . They are besotted with theory but literally haven’t done the homework. At a performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Frances catches sight of the washing-instruction label on the lead actor’s slip, and the spell of the performance is broken: “I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the issues his writing addressed.” A whole essay could be written about this sentence’s simultaneous knowingness and not-knowingness, but as a snapshot of a young person who knows which names to invoke but not (lucky for her) their actual work, it can’t be bettered. And in fact, Frances’s insight is a good one—whoever thought it up first.

Rooney told interviewers that she, like some of her characters, was a Marxist, and American critics—many of them her Millennial contemporaries—drafted her into the war over tone of voice, ideological purity, and evidentiary standards that has been raging in progressive political circles since at least the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. In The New York Review of Books , Madeleine Schwartz complained that “the politics are mostly gestural” in Rooney’s books, pointing out that her protagonists, far from being rebels, “are all good students.” Becca Rothfeld, writing in The Point , also saw the leftism as fashionable posturing and seemed sorry that Rooney hadn’t more explicitly punctured it. In a follow-up essay in Liberties , Rothfeld went so far as to dismiss Rooney’s fiction as “sanctimony literature”: “full of self-promotion and the airing of performatively righteous opinions.”

I agree that the leftism of Rooney’s characters is shallow, and that their worldview is to a great extent undermined by the novels’ plots . “The whole idea of ‘meritocracy’ or whatever, it’s evil, you know I think that,” Marianne tells Connell, a working-class boy from a single-parent home who, thanks to hard work and native talent, gets into an elite university, where he becomes “rich-adjacent”—the epitome of a meritocrat, in other words (though never, as befits a romantic lead, an entitled one). Frances, meanwhile, is described as a Communist by her sometime girlfriend, Bobbi, but once Frances’s writerly ambition awakens, she expropriates Bobbi’s life story as literary grist, which Bobbi only discovers from a third party, just as the revealing story is about to appear in print. I don’t find that the inconsistency compromises the novels, maybe because I’m what the internet calls an old, who thinks of politics and literature as different endeavors. Plenty of young people do think and talk like Rooney’s characters, and I like reading novels that look at their world from a sympathetic but significant distance.

At least as salient as the nod to radical politics in Rooney’s first two novels was a troubled longing for traditional relationships, which struck many of the same critics as unexamined, if not ill-advised. The union of a strong man and a submissive woman seemed to fascinate Rooney, the way faith in God once fascinated Matthew Arnold: She could no longer bring herself to believe, but she also couldn’t stop mourning the shape and meaning that such a union once gave to life. In the lives of her heroines, the mourning sometimes took the form of masochism. Frances tears open the skin in the crook of an elbow after she learns she hasn’t been made pregnant by her married lover, whom she later asks to hit her. Marianne lets a boyfriend beat her up and lets another lover tie her wrists and tell her she’s worthless, and she, too, ends up asking the love of her life to hit her.

I find I don’t need Rooney to condemn or fully explain here either; a novelist’s role is to notice and explore. It would be unnatural if characters as young as Rooney’s had already worked out what to do with such impulses. Frances tries to soften her urge to punish herself—tries to tame and socialize it—by submitting herself to a partly homemade Christianity, a wider communion that she seems to hope will dilute the guilt she has incurred in romantic couples and triangles. She starts reading the Gospels and, while sitting in church, has a vision of the world, including herself, as created by the work of many different human beings. “Now I see that nothing consists of two people, or even three,” she writes to Bobbi. Toward the end of Normal People , Marianne tries to transcend her masochism by making her choice to surrender to Connell, who has refused to hurt her in bed, a conscious one, and her rationale echoes Frances’s communal vision: “No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.” Unfortunately, an impulse to abase oneself isn’t resolved by a recognition that human life is a collaboration. Rooney’s characters never quite work through the conflicts they’ve been acting out.

Rooney seems to have been aware that she left the puzzle uncompleted: Submissive impulses, homemade Christianity, and an ethos of mutual care return in her new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You . The book takes its title from a poem of Friedrich Schiller’s praising a mythic past when contact with the divine was part of daily life. Like Conversations With Friends , the new book tells the story of two Irish couples. The first consists of Alice Kelleher, a young Dublin novelist who has moved to the west of Ireland after a nervous breakdown in New York, and Felix Brady, a taciturn, hard-drinking warehouse picker she meets through an app. Rooney loans Alice the shape of her own career: Only 29, Alice has become rich and famous for writing two novels that won a lot of attention from the press—“mostly positive at first,” Rooney writes, “and then some negative pieces reacting to the fawning positivity.”

Read: The hazards of Writing While Female

The loan gives Rooney an opportunity to reply to her critics, with whom, it turns out, she agrees that while a novelist may be Marxist, novels rarely are. “The novel works by suppressing the truth of the world,” Alice writes in one of the meditative emails that she and her best friend, whom she’s known since college, exchange over the course of the book; fiction soothes readers into feeling at liberty to care about such trivial matters as “whether people break up or stay together.” The problem is more general than novels, the friend responds, noting that most people, on their deathbeds, keenly aware that time is precious, talk about close personal relationships rather than human justice in the abstract.

The novel’s second couple consists of Eileen Lydon, Alice’s email correspondent, and Eileen’s childhood friend Simon Costigan. Eileen works at a literary magazine and thinks of herself as socially awkward. Simon—five years older and strikingly beautiful—works as a political consultant for high-minded left-wing politicians, is a communicant in the Roman Catholic Church, and has considered joining the priesthood. His father accuses him of having a messiah complex, and no one in the novel much dissents from the diagnosis. The morning after Simon and Eileen renew a romance that started almost a decade earlier, Eileen accompanies him to Mass, where they hold hands, and ideas about religion and morality soon become integrated into the gentle dominance-and-submission games they play in bed. “I think I enjoy being bossed around by you,” she tells him, and he tells her, when she obeys, with a couple of his fingers inside her, that she’s being “good.” Sexual worldliness, a whiff of incense—it’s all very Muriel Spark, except in pastel.

Alice and Felix, meanwhile, seem charged with menace on their first date—she appears capable of mockery and condescension, and he of scorn or even violence. Indeed, he goes on to ghost her, stand her up, ask her for sex while drunk and high, and tell her no one cares about her. Rooney stage-manages the scenes so that Alice retains much of her dignity—at the cost, I think, of Felix’s coherence as a character. The same man, the reader is told, asks which terms for sex acts she prefers in bed. Rooney claims Felix is bisexual, a claim that goes largely unsubstantiated, and makes his outlines even blurrier. I came to think of his bisexuality as a bay leaf that was said to have been added to the soup but hadn’t been.

Chasing her ideas about love, Rooney hasn’t sufficiently incarnated them. Unlike the wayward human beings of her earlier novels, the foursome in Beautiful World seems carefully planned and a little static, like figures in an allegory. Rooney’s efforts to introduce romantic suspense feel added on. I couldn’t manage to believe that Alice and Felix would ever make a couple except briefly and painfully, and I couldn’t see why Eileen and Simon weren’t settled lovers from Chapter 3 onward.

I suspect that many readers will miss the ruthless speed and economy that Rooney displayed in her first two books, but she remains a great talent. Among the considerable pleasures here are her bold variations in perspective. Interspersing the long emails between Alice and Eileen is narration from a third-person omniscient point of view, the first time Rooney has tried this in a novel, and I felt the excitement of watching a serious artist try out a new tool. One of her chapters, for example, begins with a description of Simon’s living room before anyone has entered it and ends with a description of the same room after he and Eileen have gone into his bedroom and closed the door. Elsewhere, Rooney describes Felix’s warehouse-picking in tandem with Alice’s performance of publicity duties, even though the two actions are taking place at a distance from each other. I loved this playfulness.

And then there are the ideas themselves. As the riff about realism and clothing labels in Rooney’s first novel demonstrated, a powerful intellect beats beneath her underdressed prose. Like every thinking person, she has felt driven to come up with new theories about the world during the crises of the past few years, and in the emails between Alice and Eileen, she ruminates on capitalism, the fall of communism, beauty, plastic, minority identities (Eileen seems to be a class-first socialist), the role of art in the Trump era, and the abrupt degradation and collapse of several Mediterranean civilizations during the Late Bronze Age.

The emails come to seem less like chapters in a novel than like installments of a discursive essay. The central question that Eileen and Alice keep returning to is how to make a community out of loving interdependence. Selflessness, in the name of some higher unity, seems necessary. Eileen admires the way congregants at Mass earnestly lift their hearts to the Lord. Alice quotes a sentence of Proust’s suggesting the existence of a single intelligence in the world, which everyone looks at from their own body, the way members of an audience look at a single stage from many different seats.

But structure seems necessary too. The substance that makes up relationships is “soft like sand or water,” Alice writes, and without a vessel to contain it, people can only “pour the water out and let it fall,” leading not to utopia but to waste. Although Alice, like Rooney characters before her, is disenchanted with traditional marriage, “it was at least a way of doing things,” she writes, sounding less Marxist than Burkean. Rooney hints that friendship might be the shapeless vessel needed for a shapeless substance. When Alice and Eileen reunite in person after a separation, Rooney wonders if they glimpse “something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world.”

There’s something a little 18th-century about Beautiful World , with its philosophical tone and its abstractly conceived characters who can’t stop talking about how to reconcile romantic liberty with love’s responsibilities. It reminds me of Goethe’s Elective Affinities , and like that book, it has held my attention more strongly than is easy to explain. In her new novel, Rooney hasn’t quite found the right vessel for her vision, any more than her characters have found the ideal sociopolitical structure for channeling human connectedness. Rooney could have taken the safer route of repeating herself, but she seems to have an Enlightenment idea of the artist’s calling: She experiments.

This article appears in the September 2021 print edition with the headline “Sally Rooney Addresses Her Critics.”

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Beautiful World, Where Are You review: Sally Rooney's novel asks big questions — and doesn't always have the answers

There's no actual question mark in the title of Beautiful World, Where Are You , maybe because its weary, wary young protagonists have already come to their own grim conclusions: "I think of the 20th century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong," one character confides early on. "Aren't we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us." And yet! They still argue and struggle and hope — and, this being a Sally Rooney novel, have a lot of semi-explicit and possibly ill-advised sex, the messy consequences of which will steer the narrative for the next 350-plus pages.

Rooney, of course, is the celebrated writer of Normal People and Conversations With Friends , both published before her 30th birthday. Alone, each book was a phenomenon; combined with last year's obsessively watched TV adaptation of Normal (and the coming limited series for Conversations , due to premiere next year), she became something exceedingly rare in an age of itchy digital distraction: a literary novelist who's also a household name.

Beautiful is the first of her works to be at least in part about that — "that" being money and fame and what it feels like to live inside the blast radius of your own sudden, life-obliterating success. And if those disclosures offer sometimes startling insight into its author's deeply rattled state of mind, they do not, alas, always serve her story. Rooney's proxy here is a woman named Alice, a fair-haired Dubliner driven to take up residence in the remote Irish countryside after her own precocious lit-world triumph leads to a psychiatric breakdown. Hardly anyone knows how to even find her on a map aside from her two closest friends: Eileen, an overeducated and underpaid magazine editor, and Simon, an earnestly handsome political activist five years older than them both. Eileen and Simon have long had a thing, though they seem loathe to acknowledge it to each other, or to themselves; Alice is single until she begins seeing Felix — a taciturn local who's shruggingly indifferent to his job in an Amazon-like warehouse, and shows even less interest in the fact that his new would-be girlfriend has her own Wikipedia page. (Though he's still willing to tag along as her plus-one on a work trip to Rome, generously sponsored by her publishers.)

The romantic roundelays and betrayals that ricochet between the foursome form the backbone of the book's scattered plot, such as it is. But much of the story lives in the letters that Alice and Eileen exchange over time — chatty, intimate epistles on faith and politics and sexual identity, the broken institution of marriage and the smoldering trash heap that is social media. There is much despairing discussion of celebrity as a "disfiguring social disease" and beauty as a thing that died in 1976, along with the birth of modern plastics. But Alice's harshest critiques are reserved for herself — or rather, the fun-house mirror of public perception she sees her warped reflection in: "I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me. Confronting this fact makes me feel I am already dead."

Alice and the rest of Beautiful 's restless youth are exactly the kind of fervent, clever truth seekers that Rooney has made her signature; at its best, the clarity of their presence slices across the page like a hot knife through butter. But the book's millennial cri de coeur can also tip into navel-gazing indulgence, heavy with the undergrad fugue of late night dorm-room debates and clove-cigarette smoke. Their World isn't really new, after all; it's just new to them, spinning at the center as fast as they can. B

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'Beautiful World' Is Sally Rooney's Toughest, Most Sweeping Novel To Date

Maureen Corrigan

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a cerebral novel that traces the relationships between four characters, and shifts between themes of sex, friendship and life's dark uncertainty.

Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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BookBrowse Reviews Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

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Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

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• Coming of Age
• Adult-YA Crossover Fiction
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A novel that navigates the complexities of love, sex and friendship in modern Dublin while raising questions about social injustice.

Beautiful World, Where Are You centers around four key characters, the most prominent of which are Eileen and Alice, both in their late 20s, who have been friends since their university days at Trinity College. Since then, their lives have followed very different trajectories: While Eileen works in a low-paid — if enjoyable — job for a Dublin-based literary magazine, Alice has rapidly found fame and fortune as a young novelist, an ascent that has resulted in her hospitalization for burnout and depression. The novel primarily pivots around the relationship between these two young women. This relationship is complicated by Alice and Eileen's connection with staunch Catholic Simon, who works for the Irish Parliament and becomes increasingly aware of his inability to effect positive social change despite his political insider status. Simon has known Eileen all her life and is five years her senior. The relationship between the two has always been based on a close emotional bond, occasionally veering into something more. Neither, however, verbalizes their true feelings for the other, providing a "will they or won't they" element for the reader. Add to the mix Felix, a warehouse worker who meets Alice on a dating app and happens to live in the coastal town to which she has fled post-breakdown, and the scene is set for the hotbed of insecurities, yearnings and ambiguities that make up Rooney's typical subject matter, as previously explored in Conversations with Friends and the acclaimed Normal People . The novel's title is posed as a question, yet the omission of the question mark may cause the reader to wonder as to the reason for this. It could suggest that the characters are on some kind of quest to find meaning in their lives; however, the tentative tone of the question indicates that there is no real expectation of an answer. Indeed, the lack of centeredness that young adults face in the early 21st century seems to be a theme that Rooney is examining. Much of the narrative is epistolary in form, comprised of lengthy email exchanges — whole chapters — between Eileen and Alice. It is through these highly introspective communications that the characters' lack of direction and purpose, as well as their helplessness, are revealed. Very early in the novel, for example, Eileen recounts an episode in a local convenience store, during which it suddenly strikes her that the vast array of choice on offer is a "culmination of all the labor in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations." She ruminates that this "lifestyle" supported by the world's capitalist enterprises is not even satisfying; it is later noted that much of the modern world, with all its plastic and concrete, is in fact rather ugly. Such political awareness is pronounced in today's young adults, who stand at a unique moment in time wherein many global concerns are made inescapably apparent via mass media. Because of this, Eileen's sense of discontent will strike a chord only too well with contemporary readers, and echoes the sentiments of the novel's title. Despite their awareness of global crises and injustices, the characters always circle back to the "trivialities" that define their immediate, intimate world. They perceive it as "vulgar, decadent" to invest their efforts in personal relationships while "human civilization is facing collapse." But is it in society where their "beautiful world" can be found? Is this where they will locate their center? After all, public acclaim has brought the economically affluent Alice financial security but no happiness. These are questions with which the characters must grapple as they struggle to reconcile their personal lives with more public concerns. Rooney speaks to a generation of readers caught up in zeitgeisty dilemmas, much like J.D. Salinger held up a mirror to 1950s America in The Catcher in the Rye . At every turn, the novel confronts familiar features of our time, such as when Eileen reveals that two-thirds of her salary (only 20,000 euros per annum) goes to rent; this will resonate with young workers struggling to make it onto the housing ladder with little hope of a secure future. Such weighty concerns could be deeply depressing (at one point Eileen describes life as "standing in the last lighted room before the apocalypse"), yet Rooney does hint that there is joy to be found — most likely in the realm of the personal. Rooney connoisseurs will be unfazed by her trademark stylistic practices, including her eschewing of quotation marks in direct speech. She is far from the first writer to reject this convention — among many others, her fellow Dubliner James Joyce completely disregarded the punctuation device . A lack of quotation marks is perhaps consistent with the fluency of communication in all its forms, whether email, direct speech or interior monologue. While it may be a source of irritation to some readers, for Rooney, it seems to reflect a cohesive marriage of style and subject matter. As we observe the relationship between Eileen and Alice imploding and unraveling, we bear witness to how blurred the boundaries of communication have become — but these more "modern" ways of communicating also form the bridge that allows them to rebuild their relationship. Beautiful World, Where Are You will appeal to anyone interested in the human condition and the psychology of relationships — and it's quite the page-turner too.

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In Sally Rooney’s new novel, a celebrity author fights her own brand

Beautiful World, Where Are You is unlikely to be a crowd pleaser. But it’s gorgeous.

by Constance Grady

Early on in Sally Rooney’s fraught and lovely new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You , it becomes clear that one of the big problems Rooney is struggling with on the page is herself. Or rather, the phenomenon of herself.

Sally Rooney has become that rarest of creatures among literary novelists: a brand name. There are other literary novelists who have bestselling books and hit TV show adaptations of their work, but only Sally Rooney has a hypebeast bucket hat and a pop-up shop . Early galleys of Beautiful World, Where Are You sold for hundreds of dollars online , and even the promotional tote bag her publisher put together can fetch about $80 on the resale market.

Since her first book came out in 2017, Rooney has gone from much-admired young writer to Instagram status symbol to metaphor for everything that is ailing white middle-class millennials. And she’s done it all, apparently, without much caring for the experience.

“I can’t believe I have to tolerate these things — having articles written about me, and seeing my photograph on the internet, and reading comments about myself,” says Alice, the celebrity novelist who is one of the four central characters of Beautiful World, Where Are You . “When I put it like that, I think: that’s it? And so what? But the fact is, although it’s nothing, it makes me miserable, and I don’t want to live this kind of life.”

Alice’s discontent with her life and her work is one of the chief animating forces of the novel. Like Rooney’s previous books — 2017’s Conversations with Friends and 2019’s Normal People — Beautiful World, Where Are You might be reductively summarized as being about the interesting love lives of a set of intellectually discontented young Marxist Dubliners. At its core, it is obsessed with the same set of questions that have always preoccupied Rooney : As the world collapses all around us, is it morally defensible to devote your life to love, relationships, and the aesthetic pleasure of books? What if you get rich from it?

The love stories provide the plot skeleton, and Rooney sketches them out with her characteristically sharp eye for the ever-shifting power dynamics of relationships and impressively intimate sex scenes. (Rooney’s tool kit also comes, it must be said, with a tendency to occasionally have characters break up over a misunderstanding so stupid that you kind of just say, “Okay, Sally, we’ll let it go because it’s you.”)

Alice is the principal character in our first dyad. Like Rooney, Alicerecently published two novels that were met with a level of acclaim she finds baffling. She has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, and now she is convalescing in an enormous borrowed house in a tiny Irish town. There, she strikes up a relationship with Felix, a warehouse worker she meets on Tinder who tells her flatly that he never plans to read her novels. They embark on a relationship animated simultaneouslyby Felix’s apparent disdain for Alice and her own fawning admiration for him, and by their shared understanding that this apparent dynamic is fundamentally false, and masks something murkier occurring between them under the surface.

Our other couple is firmly rooted in Dublin. There, Alice’s best friend Eileen works a poorly paid job at a literary magazine, grieves her recent breakup with a longtime boyfriend, and lives in a flatshare with a married couple. She’s nearing 30, and she’s beginning to fear that she’ll never really grow up.

Eileen’s strongest support system is with her childhood friend Simon: 35, handsome, wealthy, and saintly. Eileen and Simon are plainly in love with each other from page one, but their five-year age gap makes the power dynamics of their Emma-Knightley-esque friendship so fraught that they can only approach the possibility of a relationship on tiptoe, pretending they don’t realize what they’re doing.

Rooney gives us these two love stories in highly distant third-person prose. The narrator’s eye is like a camera’s lens, showing us only her characters’ physical movements, their dialogue, the emotions their facial expressions might seem to suggest. We have no access to what’s going on inside their heads, no way of knowing when they are lying to themselves or to each other, outside of minute tells: Alice tucking her hair behind one ear when she runs into Felix; Eileen coming straight home to microwave refrigerated leftovers covered in cling film.

The only time we begin to get a glimpse of their interior monologues comes in the chapters that bridge the book’s two romances: long, discursive emails between Eileen and Alice. There, they comfortablytransition back and forth between gossiping about their love lives and careers to heady intellectual debates about why civilizations collapse, whether it matters to the vast majority of humanity if they do, and whether beauty matters when so much of the rest of the world is miserable. Eileen thinks humanity lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, “when plastics became the most widespread material in existence;” Alice thinks it happened after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Beautiful World, Where Are You gets much of its tension from the disconnect between the spare prose of the third-person sections and the rambling soliloquies of the emails between Eileen and Alice. As they remind each other in their emails over and over again, they both know that the world is in a state of crisis. The environment is collapsing, reactionary right-wing political movements are on the upswing, and most of the world’s population lives in grinding poverty to subsidize the unconscionable wealth of the rest of the world.

Yet, in their day-to-day lives, they both seem to find themselves most often concerned with their romantic travails, their careers, their families and friendships, and the art that moves them and brings them pleasure. The contradiction strikes them as by turns insufferably immoral and beautifully human.

This same contradiction is also the animating force behind Conversations with Friends and Normal People . Sally Rooney’s novels are in many ways 19th-century bourgeois marriage novels with more sex and texting, and she and her characters seem to be constantly torn between taking a visceral delight in the pleasures of the form — the sheer emotional power of hoping that Mr. Knightley and Emma will at last finally admit their love for one another — and horrified by their lack of ethical and political power.

Rooney’s earlier novels kept this debate mostly subtextual. It was the visceral, erotic tug between her characters that pulled the reader in, that lit up her sparse prose and turned her books into sensations. Beautiful World , in contrast, is unlikely to be quite such a hit with readers, however successful it is on its own terms. It takes place very determinedly outside of the realm of the body. The love stories exist, but the ethical problem of art is what this novel is capital-A About.

“The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth,” Alice proclaims in one email to Eileen. “Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world — packing it down tightly underneath the glittering surface of the text.”

“I agree it seems vulgar, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse,” Eileen responds. “But at the same time, that is what I do every day.”

Within the framework of this debate, turning a novelist like Sally Rooney into a merch-hawking celeb does feel as though it’s in such poor taste as to be almost violent. It detaches Rooney the human being and Rooney the artist from Rooney the brand name, whose primary value is its ability to make money for Rooney’s publisher. Books, in this world, are only barely morally defensible as it is, given their limited ability to fix society’s ills. Thinking about them as tools by which to mine wealth and social capital from the celebrity ecosystem — turning novelists into brand names — would be willfully dehumanizing.

But Rooney does offer us a possible solution to the terrible moral problem of the novel. Toward the end of Beautiful World , we take a trip to a wedding, that traditional climax of a marriage novel. At last, the camera lens through which we’ve been seeing the world breaks, and we slip seamlessly into our characters’ minds and bodies, the sensual details that occupy them most, in a long lyrical, ecstatic burst of prose.

Here, finally, is the end of alienation. Here, finally, is what it means to live life in a body, as a human being, not as a dry, mechanical observer or as a bodiless brain in cyberspace. That is what novels can offer us, even bourgeois realist novels, and especially Rooney’s earlier novels. And that, she seems to argue, is what matters most of all.

It is also what makes Beautiful World , for me, even more moving than Normal People or Conversations with Friends , although I think it’s unlikely to be a crowd-pleaser on the level the other two novels were. There is something tender about the way Rooney turns again and again to the novel, almost against her will, as though, Mr. Darcy-like, she has struggled in vain to deny her true feelings. Beautiful World, Where Are You is still very dialectical and Marxist and interested in political debates. Yet it is also a love letter to the novel as a form of art — and, by extension, to the ways in which human beings relate to one another.

“And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine?” Eileen posits at one point. “Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting.”

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a love letter to all of us, to all the ways we love. It’s much sweeter and smarter than all the merch would lead you to believe.

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Sally Rooney in the Struggle

Early on in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You , a young man named Felix introduces the semi-famous writer he’s semi-seeing to a room full of his friends: “This is Alice … She’s a novelist.” His friends do what anyone confronted by a supposedly well-known person would do: They Google her. In front of Alice, they list the details of her Wikipedia page, from “Literary work” to “Adaptations” to “Personal life.” Felix, growing visibly uncomfortable, deflects by downplaying the fact that Alice has a Wikipedia page at all. “Anyone can have one of those,” he says to Alice. “You probably wrote it yourself.” But Alice rejects this collapse between her internet persona and her personal life. “No,” she replies, “just the books.”

It’s a scene that one could easily read through the lens of Rooney’s reputation. The 30-year-old Irish writer has published two novels before this — her 2017 debut, Conversations With Friends , quickly followed by Normal People — each to a tide of adulation. Following that was the predictable backlash, especially around Rooney’s self-proclaimed Marxist politics (which she frequently cites in interviews) and the lack of Marxist praxis in her mostly orthodox romance novels. “Up till now, the books that I’ve written have been about people kind of like me,” reflected Rooney upon the massive popularity of her first two novels. “Now that my life is different, I don’t know to what extent I can keep doing that or how much of my social world I can now accommodate in my writing.” Reading Rooney’s latest, you can feel her struggling to reconcile her own strange reality with the ideals that have become so much part of her image.

Beautiful World, Where Are You builds on the conventions of Rooney’s prior work, exploring themes of millennial romance, female friendship, post-2008 economic precarity, class differences, and the existential malaise of how a (white middle-class) person should be. The story follows two pairs of lovers hovering around 30 over the course of a few short months. There’s the successful novelist Alice, who, following a mental breakdown, rents a rural seaside house in the town where she meets Felix, a rugged warehouse worker. And there’s Alice’s best friend, Eileen, who works at a literary magazine in Dublin, where she seemingly spends most of her time flirting with and then friend-zoning Simon, a left-wing government policy adviser several years her elder. As with Marianne and Connell in Normal People , Eileen and Simon have known each other since childhood and are similarly “two people who … apparently could not leave one another alone.”

Most of the book unfolds with Rooney’s typical effervescent prose, whose extreme readability lies partly in its narrative economy. Characters attend dinner parties, go shopping, and have mostly sweet, mostly straight sex. With the exception of Felix, they are rarely depicted while actually working. Some of Rooney’s best phrases come from descriptions of the natural environment, as when the omniscient narrator lingers on “the sea to the west, a length of dark cloth,” or the “crescent moon hanging low over the dark water. Tide returning now with a faint repeating rush over the sand.” Rooney’s title, Beautiful World, Where Are You, is drawn from a Schiller poem and gestures longingly outward. But the novel itself largely takes place in Ireland, alternating between Alice’s life in Ballina and Eileen’s in Dublin. Sprinkled throughout are Rooney’s obligatory touches of wine-drinking, delicate cotton nightgowns, cashmere sweaters, and lots of theorizing on — though no practicing of — anti-capitalism. As in her past books, the life of the body trumps the life of the mind: I continue to find Rooney to be a remarkably unembarrassing writer of sex scenes and, if anything, wished this novel had more of them.

Sounds fun, right? Well, sort of. While Rooney’s newest book luxuriates in the same bourgeois comforts as her first two — the domestic details and interpersonal dramas that make reading Austen so pleasurable — it adds yet another, more pedantic layer of realist detail to her characters’ lives. Between alternating chapters on Alice and Eileen’s day-to-days, Rooney inserts interludes made of alternating emails between Alice and Eileen, in which subtext of millennial malaise, economic precarity, and the value of writing contemporary novels become the literal text of their exchange. It’s an epistolary novel meets Ulysses lite. The aesthetic goal is admirable, but the effect is haphazard, as the two parts of the novel never quite cohere: While one side occupies itself with the events of real life, the emails burrow into debates over “real life,” scare quotes courtesy of Alice and Eileen.

One might expect these chapters to at least offer deeper insight into their friendship, but they more often read like extended abstract musings on the general state of the world. “I’ve been thinking lately about right-wing politics (haven’t we all),” writes Alice in her first email to Eileen, “and how it is that conservatism (the social force) came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism.” Eileen’s response: “I’ve also been thinking lately about time and political conservatism, although in a different way. At the moment I think it’s fair to say we’re living in a period of historical crisis, and this idea seems to be accepted by most of the population.” These messages sound as implausible as the notion of two 29-year-old best friends doing all their correspondence via long email. (Alice and Eileen do not text or call one another; even one-sentence communiqués are sent via email.) As the novel unfolds, the stilted and superficial cadence of their letters hints at deeper troubles. This conversation between friends is dominated by thinky tangents, but the unspoken tension driving it is whether, and when, Eileen will finally visit her faraway friend. It’s an interesting conceit — to make theorization the deferral of real talk, real life — but it doesn’t make these sections any more readable.

When recently asked whether Rooney thought much about the portrayal of online life in her latest novel, the author said no, adding, “I also haven’t read much contemporary fiction over the last few years, so I haven’t been keeping up with developments in this area.” Nonetheless, Rooney still manages to share traits with some of this year’s other so-called internet novels, from the clipped, wry cadences of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This to the defensive irony of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts . “Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?” begins one of Eileen’s emails. “The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth,” responds Alice, in another, before quickly adding, “My own work is, it goes without saying, the worst culprit in this regard.” If this is the famous self-awareness frequently associated with Rooney’s fiction, then it’s self-awareness approaching self-parody.

By having her characters repeatedly and explicitly fret over what it means to write in an era of economic and environmental collapse, Rooney’s third book reveals itself as preemptively and perhaps a little too conscious about how it will be received. Her stock characters have hardly evolved: The story once again revolves around eccentrically irritable and conspicuously thin white women and their implausibly hot and tolerant white suitors who range from the professional to the working class. What has changed, however, is the degree to which the novel seems to anxiously belabor its own status, especially in Alice’s emails.

It is difficult not to interpret the character as a stand-in for Rooney. “Have I told you I can’t read contemporary novels anymore?” writes Alice in one of her emails to Eileen. “I think it’s because I know too many of the people who write them. I see them all the time at festivals, drinking red wine and talking about who’s publishing who in New York.” (Rooney spent a year working on this novel as a Cullman Center fellow at the New York Public Library.) Throughout, Alice’s depression seems to hinge less on the state of the world’s immiserated surplus populations or climate change but on her own status as a writer successful enough to be flown out to literary conferences and rent an entire house just for herself. “If novelists wrote honestly about their own lives, no one would read novels — and quite rightly!” asserts Alice at one point. “Maybe then we would finally have to confront how wrong, how deeply philosophically wrong, the current system of literary production really is — how it takes writers away from normal life, shuts the door behind them, and tells them again and again how special they are and how important their opinions must be.” Frequently, Alice threatens never to write another novel again.

Rooney herself has often questioned the value of her labor. Her politics do suggest there are other more urgent and materially valuable things she might be doing. And “even if a book is full of Marxist propaganda,” admitted the writer in a 2019 interview , “it’s still sealed off from real political potential because of its position as a commodity in this market.” The emails in Rooney’s latest novel are her most overt attempt to counter that. Ultimately, though, these long philosophical tangents on the value of fiction, the meaning of art, and the decline of beauty read like overindulgent and anxious attempts to preemptively control the cacophony that surrounds the reception of her work. To read them is to feel the discourse winning.

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Culture | Books

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney review: This celebrity novelist is newly self-conscious

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“I am listening,” says the 29-year-old Eileen on the phone to her fretful mother about 30 pages into Sally Rooney ‘s new novel – the most eagerly awaited publication of the year. “But I am not sure why you think your unhappiness is more important than mine.” A sentence of such startling entitlement that only a character in a book by the author of Conversations with Friends and Normal People could possibly have got away with it.

It’s precisely Sally Rooney‘s ability to give voice to the self-aware self-absorption of an entire generation, not to mention their feelings of political helplessness, neediness and seemingly intractable loneliness, that has won the 30-year-old author a celebrity not experienced by a novelist arguably since the 1980s. Such is the anticipation for Beautiful World, Where Are You that several London bookshops are planning to open at midnight next Monday, ahead of the novel’s publication.

One wonders if they – and Rooney‘s publishers for that matter – have actually read it, since, alongside all the extraordinary descriptions of sex and worldly conversations about books, it’s an anguished cry against the commercially powerful and psychologically challenging situation this globally feted author now finds herself in. “Whatever insignificant talent I might have, people just expect me to sell it – I mean literally sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left,” writes Alice, an extremely successful novelist living in semi-exile on the Irish coast following a breakdown, in an email to her best friend Eileen, an editorial assistant in Dublin who likes to read Dostoevsky in her lunch break. And: “I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public enquiries into my personality and upbringing.”

Beautiful World Where Are You centres on two couples: Alice and Felix, a warehouse worker she met on Tinder who watches violent porn on his phone and has apparently never read a book in his life; and Eileen and Simon, a left-wing policy adviser and committed Catholic, who have known each other since childhood. There is a lot of talk about how unhappy everyone is, a fair amount about God and quite a bit about capitalism. The meat of the novel though consists of lengthy emails between Alice and Eileen in which both women restlessly test out their thoughts on the fundamental challenge of how to live in the face of collapsing political and environmental certainties (Rooney may be fixated with sex and relationships but she also aces the Bechdel test). At one point this comes down to the question of what to eat for lunch. “All the pre-packaged lunch deals and confectionary in sealed bags – this is it, the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels….all so I could choose from various lunch options,” writes Alice. Naturally, she chooses one.

For Rooney, these emails clearly serve as proxies for her own ethical and intellectual anxieties, and indeed for a millennial generation caught between the imperatives of activism and privilege, not to mention a culturally unprecedented obsession with the minutiae of their own selfhood. Yet for Rooney the question is also aesthetic. Is it obscene for novels to depict the desires and obsessions of naval-gazing digital natives when so much of the world is starving? (Rooney has evidently been stung by criticisms that her books do precisely that.) No, is her eventual conclusion, because we love each other too much, and find each other interesting.

The problem Rooney comes up against is that Beautiful World never quite bears out her own defence. We can’t quite fall in love with this quartet, or indeed find them particularly interesting. The email essays are very interesting but they don’t feel convincingly embedded within the characters who write them. What’s more, there is very little drama or momentum, of the sort that sustained the relationship between Connell and Marianne, for instance. Rooney still writes beautifully steady, clear-eyed sentences and remains excellent at parsing the micro tensions within individual encounters, but there is a new self-conscious to her writing. This feels like a very personal novel; a cri de coeur from an extravagantly talented writer who has become badly disillusioned with the world, and even at times with the novel form. “I’m burned out. I only ever had two ideas,” writes Alice at one point. In fact, she does end up writing another book. Rooney‘s fans, whatever they think of this novel, will be hoping she does so, too.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Faber, £16.99)

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Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney - review

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The cult of Sally Rooney - can Beautiful World, Where Are You live up to the hype?

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'Beautiful World, Where Are You': Sally Rooney finds meaning in sex, friendship as the world burns

How do we go about the daily business of living when the world is collapsing around us ?

How could our insignificant little lives – our day jobs and dinner parties, unanswered emails and bad first dates, minuscule insecurities and anxieties – possibly matter in the face of looming economic, social and environmental collapse? What is the value of sex and friendship, and literature about sex and friendship, when the world is quite literally burning?

In Sally Rooney’s fiction, they still matter very much. The Irish author’s new novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pp.  ★★★★ out of four), is her third consecutive banger after “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends,” an intimate and piercingly smart story about sex and friendship that finds the profound in the everyday.

Two college friends, Alice and Eileen – young Irish women hovering around 30 – send each other emails, apprising each other of their lives and fretting about the state of the world. (“Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?” Alice writes.)

Review: Peter Heller’s new COVID-era thriller ‘The Guide’ will fill you with dread, in the best way

Alice is a novelist – a successful one with two bestselling books and the sudden wealth, fame and literary acclaim that come with them (how much of Alice is autobiographical is anyone’s guess; Rooney is decidedly offline). Her bestsellers also came with a nervous breakdown and a stint in the hospital from which she’s still recovering. While she waxes philosophical in her emails to Eileen about right-wing politics, wealth inequality and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life (“But why should anyone be rich and famous while other people live in desperate poverty?” the reluctant millionaire muses), she has begun seeing a man, Felix, she met on Tinder.

A blue-collar worker in an Amazon-like warehouse, Felix doesn’t read books, never mind Alice’s, and he’s not terribly impressed or intimidated by Alice’s success. Despite a disastrous first date and lack of common ground, Alice invites him to accompany her to Rome on a literary trip, and they begin a relationship that looks more like a power struggle.

Eileen, meanwhile, is foundering in work and love. She is Alice’s professional foil, toiling and underpaid as an editor at a small literary magazine. “I have to buy illegal antibiotics on the internet when I get a urinary tract infection because I’m too poor to go to the doctor,” she opines, “and every election everywhere on earth makes me feel like I’m physically getting kicked in the face.” Single now after the failure of a long-term relationship, she pines for Simon, an older friend she has loved since childhood, tall and golden with a succession of ever-younger girlfriends who aren’t Eileen.

Alice and Eileen orbit one another through emails, pushing and prodding and pulling away until all four young adults come crashing together in person, their desires, neuroses and class conflicts laid bare. What constitutes a happy life in the 21st century, and can any of these millennials manage to live one?

If one were to plot out the action, not a whole lot happens really in “Beautiful World.” It’s just four people going about the daily business of living: preparing and serving meals, smoking and stubbing out cigarettes, pouring another glass of wine, typing and deleting and retyping text messages.

“Beautiful World” is sensual with lingering details: “A fruit crumble warming in the oven. On the table the detritus of a meal, a soiled napkin, sodden leaves in the salad bowl, soft drops of blue-white candle wax on the tablecloth.” Rooney is masterful at finding profound meaning in the quotidian, in ramping up the tension and heightening the stakes in the most microscopic of interactions. The pages fly as fast as in any thriller to find out if these four young adults can figure out how and why to live.

“So of course in the midst of everything,” Alice writes, “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. What else is there to live for?”

What else is there to write and read for, as long as the world still turns?

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, beautiful world, where are you.

Eileen and Simon and Felix and Alice. They’re the quartet of Irish young adults whose lives and loves provide the subject matter of Sally Rooney’s reflective third novel, BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU. And while there are those who might have feared that Rooney had mined that lode to exhaustion after her critically lauded and popular books CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS and NORMAL PEOPLE, her latest only serves to confirm her estimable talent and prove them wrong.

At the heart of the story is the intimate friendship, forged in their days at university, of Alice Kelleher, a novelist whose writing has brought her considerable attention, not all of it desired, and financial security flowing from a lucrative book deal she signed at 24, and Eileen Lydon, who works as an editorial assistant at a literary magazine in Dublin. On the cusp of turning 30, the two young women don’t seem to be professional rivals in any true sense, but the tension that flows from Alice’s prodigious early success and Eileen’s modest circumstances is palpable.

"Rooney is an expert guide to the geometry of these relationships, carefully tracing their waxing and waning over time, and is especially well-attuned to how they manifest the delayed adulthood of her fellow Millennials."

Alice, who has spent time in a psychiatric hospital after a breakdown, lives alone in a converted rectory on the Irish coast and worries that she has “forgotten how to conduct social intercourse.” It’s there that she connects on Tinder to Felix Brady, who despises his job filling orders at a local warehouse. He struggles with drinking, alludes to some dubious aspects of his past, and professes little interest in Alice’s literary accomplishments. But after an unpromising first date, she invites him to accompany her on a trip to Rome to promote her books. Their improbable relationship takes root, albeit in fairly rocky soil.

Eileen’s romantic foil is Simon Costigan, who has known her since her birth and now works as an advisor to a left-wing parliamentary group. He’s only five years older than Eileen, but it seems he’s clearly the most mature member of the quartet, at times appearing almost as a fatherly figure. Simon is also a practicing Catholic, a status that places him at odds with the skepticism, if not outright hostility to religion, of the other characters.

Rooney is an expert guide to the geometry of these relationships, carefully tracing their waxing and waning over time, and is especially well-attuned to how they manifest the delayed adulthood of her fellow Millennials. “People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs,” Alice observes in an email to Eileen, “and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see.”

Though their match would make anyone question the algorithms that power online dating apps, Felix’s low regard for Alice’s literary eminence seems to make him even more attractive to her. The progress of Eileen and Simon’s episodic romance is shadowed by his succession of relationships with other women. But through it all, there is undeniable physical and emotional chemistry in these pairings, and Rooney effectively maintains our uncertainty about whether they will flower or wilt.

In addition to conventional narrative, Rooney relies on a technique that seems simultaneously timeless and utterly contemporary. While not truly an epistolary novel, lengthy and erudite email exchanges between Alice and Eileen are central to revealing their concerns and their character. In them, the self-proclaimed Marxists ruminate on subjects that include, in addition to climate change, the evils of capitalism, and the ticking of their biological clocks, Eileen’s belief that “civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life,” and Alice’s disdain for the “colossal speed and waste and godlessness of the twentieth century.” But even as they discourse on these weighty subjects, a portrait of their friendship emerges organically.

The emails allow Rooney to vent about the literary world that has elevated her to superstar status before age 30, something she does with biting wit. Alice, on her first date with Felix and in answer to his curiosity about what her books are about, replies, “Oh, I don’t know. People.” She dismisses herself as a “widely despised celebrity novelist” and observes that she can’t read contemporary novels anymore “because I know too many of the people who write them.” When they’re not complaining about “not enough publicity, or bad reviews, or someone else making more money,” she says they’re writing “their sensitive little novels about ‘real life.’ The truth is they know nothing about real life. Most of them haven’t so much as glanced up against the real world in decades.”

Whatever the source of Rooney’s own inspiration, her characters feel undeniably real. No one would characterize her as an experimental novelist, but here she displays a fondness for an unorthodox style that features paragraphs extending for multiple pages in which she embeds extensive conversational exchanges that are both true to life and somehow at a slight, but thoughtful, remove from it. She’s such a lucid writer, however, that there’s no risk of getting lost in what, in the hands of a lesser novelist, might turn into an impenetrable verbal thicket.

It’s been barely four years since CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS appeared. There are promising young novelists whose subsequent works don’t excite the same interest as their debuts. But now, three novels into her career, it’s clear that Sally Rooney’s stature is well-earned. We’ll be looking forward eagerly to her work for years to come.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg on September 17, 2021

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

• Publication Date: June 7, 2022
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Picador
• ISBN-10: 1250859042
• ISBN-13: 9781250859044

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Beautiful World, Where Are You (Review, Recap & Full Summary)

By sally rooney.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, sally Rooney's latest modern day romance.

In Beautiful World, Where Are You , Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

The one-paragraph version: Alice and Eileen are best friends from college, both 29 or 30-ish. Alice is a successful novelist who has recently had a nervous breakdown. She starts seeing Felix, a warehouse worker she met off Tinder. Meanwhile, Eileen is an editorial assistant at a literary magazine in Dublin. She starts a casual relationship with Simon, a handsome childhood friend. Felix initially resists a relationship with Alice, saying that she likes him behaving poorly towards her so that she can be morally superior. Simon, too, doesn't really pursue Eileen (even though he has always loved her), saying that she pushes people away. Alice and Eileen also have tension in their friendship, since each feels they care more than the other does. In the end, both couples (and the women) are able to be more vulnerable with one another. The couples end up together and the women forge a stronger friendship.

The book opens in a village a few hours away from Dublin with Alice Kelleher meeting a man from Tinder, Felix Brady , at a bar. Alice is a novelist who is new in town and who has published a successful book, and Felix is a warehouse worker. The date is awkward and the two don't quite hit it off.

Meanwhile, in Dublin, Eileen Lydon (Alice's best friend), 29, meets up with a family friend, Simon Costigan , for coffee. Eileen is an editorial assistant at a literary magazine. Eileen was a social outcast in primary and secondary school, and her older sister Lola was mean to her. Simon (who is 5 years older than her) was the first person to really befriend her when she was a teenager. Later, when she's 21, she ends up sleeping with Simon after he has a bad breakup, but nothing comes of it from there. In present day, Simon tells her he's bringing a woman he's been seeing ( Caroline ) to Lola's upcoming wedding, but he offers to go alone for Eileen's sake if she wants.

(Throughout the book, Alice and Eileen write letters back and forth updating each other on their personal lives and detailing their thoughts on various topics. In the letters, you can see that they care about each other a lot, but that there is some unspoken tension between them as well.)

Alice and Felix later run into each other in town and Felix invites her to a party at his place so she can meet some new people. Alice attends. She ends up telling Felix about how she had a nervous breakdown a while ago which landed her in the hospital for a short time. She also impulsively invites Felix on a work trip to Rome, offering to pay for everything since he can't afford to go otherwise.

In Dublin, Eileen repeatedly looks up her ex, Aidan Lavin , online to see what he's up to on social media. One night, she calls up Simon and has phone sex with him. A short while later, Eileen is upset to find out that Aidan has started dating someone new, and she ends up going to Simon's place and initiating sex with him. The next morning, she goes to Mass with him (because Simon is devoutly Catholic).

In Rome, Felix says to Alice that he knows she's in love with him. They later have a heart-to-heart where they each admit bad things they've done in the past, and Felix tells Alice that he likes her. They sleep together.

Meanwhile, in Dublin, Eileen and Simon continue hanging out and hooking up. However, they go to party where some else is flirting with Simon, where people are joking about how Simon likes younger women and they're talking about how great Caroline is. Eileen gets upset about all of it and leaves. Simon follows her and they argue. Simon says that he's asked her out before and she wasn't interested. It wasn't until he started seeing Caroline that she started wanting to sleep with him. Simon and Eileen decide to go back to be just being friends.

A while after returning from Rome, Alice and Felix finally see each other again. Felix has "ghosted" Alice since the trip, and Alice is upset with him. Felix says he's not looking for any "big commitments". Alice is fine with it as long as he doesn't ghost her again. They start casually seeing each other. One day, Felix admits that he's not known as the most reliable guy around town and has debts, but he reassures her that he won't be asking her for money. Later, they get into an argument when Felix accuses Alice of liking it when he "acts badly" towards her since it puts her morally above him, which is where she likes to be. Still, they keep seeing each other.

In June, Eileen and Simon see each other again at Lola's wedding and it reawakens their feelings for one another. Afterwards, they both head to Alice's place since they'd previously arranged to go see Alice. The first day there is idyllic with Felix hanging out with the three of them and Alice feeling very happy to have them all there. Simon also reveals that he broke up with Caroline because he was in love with Eileen.

The book ends with Alice and Eileen making up. It then jumps forward 18 months and we see that both couples are still together. (The pandemic is going on now.) Eileen has just found out that she's pregnant and she's very happy about it.

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ( $2 , $3 , or $5 ) or joining the Patreon !

Book Review

Beautiful World, Where Are You is Sally Rooney’s latest release, which has book clubs abuzz with excitement or irritation, depending on how you feel about her. She’s become somewhat of a controversial figure with some people absolutely loving her bleak modern-day romances and others bemoaning her writing and angrily denouncing what they view as an undeserved literary status.

While I’m not really a Sally Rooney fan, I also don’t like to tell people what the “should” or “should not” enjoy. (I realize this seems to contrary to being someone who reviews books, but my goal is to help lead people to books they might enjoy, not to tell people what they must or must not like.)

Anyway, in Beautiful World, Where Are You , Sally Rooney continues her Tumultuous Relationships book series (beginning with her first two novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People ), whereby young women chase after their respective love interests, resulting in miscommunications, too many things left unsaid and strained will-they-or-won’t-they scenarios.

Here, Rooney’s novel is centered about the romantic exploits of two best friends, Alice and Eileen. Alice is a novelist with one successful book under her belt, but she’s also recently had a nervous breakdown that landed her in a psychiatric facility for a short time. Eileen is beautiful and works as an assistant at a literary magazine. Alice is busy pursuing Felix, a working-class man she has recently met on Tinder. While Eileen is pursuing her old crush, a handsome family friend named Simon.

Like her first two books, the story is told with a focus on the women, and the narrative is centered around the push and pull of their relationships. The relationships here are similar in some ways to the ones in her previous books, but not carbon copies. Meanwhile, cursory discussions of things like political philosophy, art and other high-brow topics are scattered throughout the book.

I was glad to find that Beautiful World is a more mature book than her two prior novels. The two female protagonists write letters back and forth, which provides an Rooney with the opportunity to provide some perspective on the characters’ mindsets and sometimes a counterpoint to the other character’s comments.

For example, in one instance, the over-romanticized way that Eileen describes a night spent with Simon in a letter to Alice contrasts starkly with the sad, somewhat desperate way the events are actually narrated in the book. In other instances, the two women call each other out, such as when the other seems to be wallowing in self-pity or is making questionable decisions. I often feel like the epistolary form in novels ends up being a little gimmicky, but here Rooney really makes good use of it.

There’s also less of an obsession with being “cool” and “popular” than was seen in Rooney’s prior novels (which really irked me about those first two books). It’s not entirely gone — Rooney still feels the need to make clear what each woman’s social standing was at various points in their life and she repeats the same template of having a character who was a social outcast in high school being very popular in college. However, it’s more of an aside than something that’s harked on though-out the book.

Instead, in Beautiful World , Rooney spends more time on things like Simon’s Catholicism, ruminations about the current state of politics, the publishing industry, thoughts about the women’s careers and other more topics. Though these discussions are often more of a reflection of the characters’ mindsets at the time than an attempt to address these things substantively.

I should mention that many of Rooney’s writing habits that don’t sit well with me are still very much present as well. There is an element of repetitiveness in her novels with all her female characters seeming like slight variations of the same person. There’s so much pretension at every turn. There’s still no punctuation. The relationship dynamics have a sameness to them, even if there are slight variations. There’s also the same victim complex that permeates her protagonists.

Read it or Skip it?

The short version: Beautiful World, Where Are You is a more mature novel and represents growth for Sally Rooney as a writer, but it still feels like more of the same as well.

The longer version: I think fans of Rooney’s prior novels will love this book, and I do think it’s in some ways a stronger novel than her previous ones. Some people who disliked the first two books could consider giving this one a chance to see if Beautiful World appeals to you more, especially if you were someone who was on the fence about her (as opposed to outright loathing the first two books).

For me, personally, I think there’s just something inherently boring about reading about people pining after someone who doesn’t love/like them enough or isn’t mentally ready to be in a healthy relationship or people pursuing somewhat hopeless situations in general. When I was younger, I was more interested in this type of thing, seeing it as an engrossing will-they-or-won’t-they situation.

However, over time I’ve come to find the whole exercise really pointless. Ultimately, people who are lukewarm about you or too wrapped up in their own insecurities to be in a healthy relationship are just not viable prospects. My view is that unhealthy, tumultuous courtships tend to result in unhealthy, tumultuous relationships, so there’s nothing particularly romantic or sad about them ending up together or not. The only way that changes is if people are very actively working on themselves and trying to face up to their internal struggles, but those aren’t really the types of characters Rooney writes about.

Ultimately, I think Rooney will continue to elicit very divisive opinions, just because there’s things she does very well (like managing to evoke a range of very specific and relatable feelings from relationships that we’ve all had before and her careful fixation on the nuances in the interactions between people) and there’s things that will continue to irk people (how her protagonists constantly see themselves as victims of the world around them, the lack of punctuation, the similarities in the characters she writes, etc.).

Still, Beautiful World, Where Are You shows some compelling growth for her as a writer. Even if I wasn’t terribly impressed by it, I still liked it better than her first two books, and I enjoyed it enough to be curious about what she comes up with next. I think it’ll be interesting to see how her writing continues to develop.

See Beautiful World, Where Are You on Amazon.

Beautiful World, Where Are You Audiobook

Narrated by : Aoife McMahon Length : 10 hours 3 minutes

Hear a sample of the Beautiful World, Where Are You audiobook on Libro.fm.

Discussion Questions

• What were your initial impressions of the relationships described in the book, and how did your impressions of the relationships between these four characters change throughout the book?
• What did you think of the four main characters and were there some that you preferred over the others? Did you think some of them were more sympathetic or more relatable that the others? Were you rooting for any of them to get together?
• What did you think of the character of Lola and why do you think Rooney describes her the way she does (in her being mean to Eileen, etc.)?
• Why do you think Rooney decided to tell parts of this story in the form of letters?
• In certain parts of the book, Rooney describes the actions of two different characters in a side-by-side type fashion (where she describes what one of them is doing and what the other is doing at the exact same time). What do you think she was trying to achieve by doing this, and do you think it was effective?
• What do you think Felix meant (in Chapter 27) when he told Eileen that Simon and Alice weren’t like Felix and Eileen?
• How does religion play into the characters such as Simon and Alice? Why do you think Rooney depicted them this way?
• What did you think of Rooney’s discussions of things like politics, or art, or the concept of beauty?
• In what parts of the book did you think Rooney was talking most directly to the reader (as in expressing her own opinions as opposed to those of the character she was describing)? What did you think about Alice’s views on fame and being a celebrity author?
• Did you like the ending of the book, why or why not?
• Why do you think Rooney chose this title for this book?

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of Beautiful World, Where Are You

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In Beautiful World, Where Are You , Alice is a novelist who meets Felix, a warehouse worker, from Tinder. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a handsome, older childhood friend.

As they navigate these relationships, differences in class or lifestyles, miscommunications, and things left unsaid get in the way. Once again, Rooney offers up a compelling modern will-they-or-won't-they love story.

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Bookshelf: Development Diary

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I think the dog gets a raw deal. Cannot believe she is so neglected.

Definitely a return to form! I feel this book shows the developing maturity of Rooney as a novelist and artist.

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In Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You , Love Leaps Over All Obstacles

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In Beautiful World, Where Are You , the biggest obstacles aren’t material. They’re the barriers to connection and love the protagonists put in their own way.

Sally Rooney at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 22, 2017 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Simone Padovani / Awakening / Getty Images)

Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World Where Are You , takes almost its full length to suddenly snap its many disparate pieces — unlikely and reluctant lovers, strained friendships, questioned careers — into place in a coherent whole. You don’t think the moment when the book reveals its essence will come, but then it does, an aha! surfacing slowly enough to allow you to enjoy its arrival but then quickly revealing itself to be so robust and fully formed that you wonder how you didn’t see it coming all along.

Beautiful World is a love story. It is also a novel about class and crisis, and how these phenomena that rule our world shape our relationships with one another. Rooney seems to be grappling with questions about her own life and work: “Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?” one of our main characters, Eileen, asks her college friend in an email. She continues: “I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse.”

Rooney also seems to be wrestling with the huge question of how to live — as in, how to carry out a day-to-day life — as a Marxist, a person at once fully aware of the depths of the world’s rot and yet still optimistic about the fate of humanity. Beautiful World ’s characters grapple with these questions, too, transiting in and out of cynicism, hopefulness, resignation, and fulfillment. They struggle with that ultimate of questions — will I ever find and keep true love? — the answer to which will trump the answers to any of their other queries.

Unlike Rooney’s past novels, Conversations With Friends and Normal People , Beautiful World is long and embellished; it could be easy, among diverging plotlines and lengthy character backstories, to feel like Rooney is taking us on a very long yet ultimately pointless trip. Beautiful World is also much more crowded than Rooney’s past work, with scores of secondary characters orbiting the four protagonists, each of whom are cast in equally full light. (Rooney seems to have taken to heart the criticisms of Normal People that there were no real characters in it other than its protagonists, Marianne and Connell.)

Alice is a successful novelist, plucked from the world she once shared with college friend Eileen by money and fame. Eileen, meanwhile, feels like she’s been left behind in their old life, spending her days at a copyediting job at a literary magazine. Rooney opens up space around them, ending chapters in lightly metaphorical imagery — “Summer morning. Cold clear water cupped in the palm of a hand.” — or vistas of the vast world surrounding our characters — “And out the windows the sky was still dimming, darkening, the vast earth turning slowly on its axis.” Doors close between us and, for example, a couple entering a room; we don’t get to see what happens inside. Someone whispers in an ear, and we don’t hear what she says.

Beautiful World ’s characters are less immediately accessible than past Rooney characters, their distance making us more acutely aware of the vastness of the world around them and the space that vastness has put between them. They’re aware of their place, too — so aware, in fact, that at times the space between them threatens to become a permanent barrier, isolating them in their own little worlds. They’ll spend the whole novel chafing against those barriers, trying to figure out exactly how they got there — and how they might find the courage to remove them.

A Collection of Little Individual Worlds

The first half of Beautiful World , whose chapters alternate between email exchanges between friends-since-college Alice and Eileen and typical novelistic storytelling, is full of this awareness of place and its concomitant discomforts. Alice, living in an Irish countryside town after stints in New York City, dealing with unwanted fame, and white-knuckling it through a mental health crisis in a hospital, starts dating a local man, Felix, who she meets on Tinder. Felix works at a warehouse; he’s cranky and rude and not well-read. Even though Alice is famous, he doesn’t know who she is and doesn’t seem to care. He takes her to parties where his friends find out who Alice is and tease him for it. Early on, Alice asks him to go to a literary conference with her in Rome, and he says yes.

The whole trip, the difference in their class positions is grossly palpable. In one particularly uncomfortable scene, after Alice accidentally sees that Felix has been watching what looks like degradation porn on his phone, he admits to a particularly egregious sexist act from his youth. Alice is jarred — maybe not only because of Felix’s admitted behavior but also because she might not know anyone else who would cop to similar acts. In this moment, it seems impossible that Alice and Felix could ever really relate to each other; they are each suspended and sealed off inside their individual worlds, as if in amber.

At the same time, Alice is resentful of the world she moves in, accusing fellow novelists of only pretending to care about the state of the real world while not engaging in it at all. Still, she’s begrudgingly a part of it. We don’t see her toying with the idea of quitting writing to join Felix at the warehouse.

Meanwhile, Eileen spends her days “moving commas around” and her nights getting into arguments about the state of the world, politics, climate change, and recycling. In one scene, a group of friends and acquaintances debate Marxism, one guy insisting that “working doesn’t make you working class.” Eileen blithely declares that she doesn’t care that people are just now realizing Marxism is good: “welcome aboard, comrades.” She’s on her phone a lot, sometimes using social media to stalk her ex-boyfriend Aidan — they weren’t happy, but she’s still unhappy it ended — and sometimes messaging her childhood crush Simon, a devout Catholic with a habit of dating much younger women and with whom she has a complicated, if clichéd, will-they-won’t-they relationship.

These scenes, stretching well into the first half of the novel, are tense and uneasy, our characters looking at their own lives as if through glass and putting on their politics as they would outfits, some more ill-fitting and itchy than others. They’re so anxious about their position — class and otherwise — and how it might be perceived that they have a very hard time fully relating to anyone at all.

In their emails, Eileen and Alice think their way through problems out loud, together — I can’t believe my life turned out this way, why did I end up in this line of work, who is this guy you keep mentioning, are you sleeping with him — but they also perform for each other, acting out the person they think they should be, typing out the thoughts they think they should have. Between the lines of the emails is the constant pressure of the unanswerable question: What am I supposed to be doing?

Will They Find Each Other?

It would be easy to let the presence of that question imply that Beautiful World is a coming-of-age novel. But it isn’t; these characters are nearing their thirties. With that question at its core, Beautiful World is a novel of and for our current — heady, confused, righteously indignant yet directionally unclear — moment.

Alice and Eileen are anti-capitalists; they agree that the world is going to hell but don’t see how that changes anything about their daily lives. They do not know what they are supposed to be doing. Alice goes on writing; Eileen goes on moving commas around. Alice goes to Rome with Felix. Eileen sleeps with Simon and wonders out loud whether winning a better world is fundamentally incompatible with living a fulfilling life. Depressingly, she thinks the answer is yes.

I want to shake her. What is it that we socialists are fighting for, if not a fulfilling life? And how will we remember it’s worth fighting for if we don’t try to get as close to it as we can, right now? I know hundreds of socialists; most of us are always asking ourselves how much sacrifice is enough and how much is too much. How do we balance our desire for love, for fulfillment, for happiness, with our desire to win — and our need to fight for — a world where we can all have those things more easily?

As these characters try to find their way to one another and themselves, they sometimes drift toward caricatures of who they might be. Felix wants to settle for a companion, his hopes for his life bounded by the material limitations his class status has imposed on him; other characters we might more easily identify as middle-class go after some version of petit-bourgeois romantic love. The difference in Alice’s and Felix’s class positions mounts and runs through almost every exchange.

In one scene, Felix cuts his hand open at work and is not surprised when Alice is unhappy about it. Of course she would be, and of course the accident couldn’t be helped; these things happen to workers like him, and he finds the fact that she doesn’t understand annoying — and annoyingly predictable. The tension seems inescapable and irresolvable, and so takes on an existential quality, making Alice and Felix uneasy around each other and in their own skin.

Will they finally find each other? Will they be able to overcome the distance between them and exist in one, singular, beautiful world?

Love Is the Bedrock

There are a series of big fights, a blow-up that lasts a few pages, and then everybody calms down. Rooney smooths the paths our characters take back to one another. The end of the novel has the true-to-life feeling of everything being right after you thought it would be wrong forever. For all the discussion of her Marxism, both in this novel and in general, Rooney’s insistence seems to be the opposite of a vulgar socialist-realist: the biggest obstacles to overcome on the way to a happy life — to a beautiful world — are the ones we put in our own way. We ask the wrong questions ( what should I be doing? ); we fear being loved; we look at our lives as frozen and unchangeable.

Not that any of our characters have such huge material impediments to begin with. Eileen and Simon, having come from similar backgrounds and known each other since childhood, only have their personal neuroses to overcome. They have been driven apart by Simon’s ambition and Eileen’s relative lack thereof, by Simon’s self-searching through religious devotion and a career in humanitarian policymaking, by Eileen’s feeling of having been passed over by the life she was meant to have to instead edit other people’s writing.

But their bond predates any of that. It predates their jobs, and Simon’s religion, and Eileen’s failed relationship with Aidan, and Simon’s disappointing his mother by not being a doctor. It’s innocent, unadulterated. There are no complications beyond the ones they might create for themselves with their own anxieties, unresolved traumas, egos, self-sabotage. There are no major material obstacles, no children from a previous marriage, no alimony to pay, no expensive Dublin rent that one person can make while the other can’t, as in Normal People .

The world and its fate is something to worry about — Simon is dedicating his whole career to it. But ultimately, it matters very little for the outcomes of their lives. Rooney posits that the largest thing holding Eileen and Simon together is their love and their desire for its hugeness, and that the largest thing holding Eileen and Simon apart is their love and their fear of its hugeness. I believe her — but I would do so more readily if this love had more concrete obstacles to overcome.

Meanwhile, the tension in the relationship between Alice and Felix, born of their light class antagonism, gradually dissolves. We learn that Felix’s recently deceased mother has left him and his brother a house, which, when it sells, will turn into a large sum of money for Felix. Alice, meanwhile, is rich — very rich, maybe a millionaire, she says. She can, practically, afford to fall in love with Felix — it’s not like she needs two incomes to pay rent. She might even buy the house she’s renting. Their class antagonism has been little more than hand-wringing.

Late into the novel, the aha! moment emerges. The pandemic and its harsh threat of death have seemingly snapped our characters’ messy, only-halfway-fulfilled lives into place. Everyone’s gotten their heads out of their asses; their anxieties and fears have finally dissolved. They’ve found the courage to find one another. As it turns out, Beautiful World is just (“just”) a love story. Aha. Politics, religion, jobs, class, fame, the world turning on its axis — in the end, it’s all very interesting, very compelling window-dressing for the core of it all: the love between Simon and Eileen, between Alice and Felix, between Eileen and Alice.

Rooney is ridiculously optimistic. In Beautiful World, Where Are You , as in Conversations With Friends , as in Normal People , love leaps over obstacles, material and otherwise. After all the tension in the book’s first three hundred pages, our characters find frustratingly frictionless fulfillment. They have created their own personal beautiful worlds.

“I know I am lucky in so many ways,” writes Alice to Eileen. “And when I forget that,” she goes on, “I just remind myself of the fact that Felix is alive, and you are, and Simon is, and then I feel wonderfully and almost frighteningly lucky, and I pray that nothing bad will ever happen to any of you.” The world goes on around them; they’re still worried about its fate, but they have chosen to be happy; they have chosen to love. Beautiful World presents love and struggle as a zero-sum game — you’re either fighting or you’re loving — and as an escape hatch from the world and its miseries. While I was moved by Rooney’s depiction of the love between her characters, while I believe in its enormity and its transcendent power, I don’t believe that it frees any of us from the duty to struggle. Love is not the salve that makes it easier to live in a cruel world; it is the bedrock from which we struggle for a beautiful one.

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Book review: Pulling traditional legends into the modern world, ‘Chickaloonies 2′ is a giant leap forward

A page from from "Chickaloonies 2: Watering Ways" from Dimi Macheras and Casey Silver

“Chickaloonies 2: Watering Ways”

Dimi Macheras and Casey Silver; 80% Studios, 2024; 268 pages; $39.99

“You locked away your stories,” Drasco, a bear warrior who is a central character in “Chickaloonies 2: Watering Ways,” tells the mayor and citizens of a post-apocalyptic Palmer, Alaska. “You locked away your language, you locked away your culture. You’ve severed the source of your strength.”

Pointing at the exhibits in a shuttered Ahtna cultural center, Drasco continues, “These items are not meant to be locked away. They are alive!”

It’s the pivotal scene in a story that hinges on the recovery of culture as a means of overcoming challenges. In this action-packed fantasy story set in a Palmer that has been laid to waste by giant flying creatures called “moose-quitoes,” the challenge is getting to the source where the plague of monstrous insects is hatching from, and finding a way of stopping them. This will require looking finding guidance in the accumulated lore of the Ahtna.

“Chickaloonies,” an Alaska Native-rooted graphic novel series, is the brainchild of Dimi Macheras and Casey Silver. Macheras grew up in Chickaloon, enthralled by the traditional stories his late grandmother, revered elder Katherine Wade, and his late mother Patricia Wade — both Ahtna culture bearers — told him in his childhood. Growing up, he aided his mother in her work by illustrating the legends she preserved. Silver, originally from Rhode Island, is a talented artist and storyteller himself. Macheras and Silver share a comics partnership called 80% Studios, and “Chickaloonies” is their flagship work.

A page from from "Chickaloonies 2: Watering Ways" from Dimi Macheras and Casey Silver.

The first volume in the series, “First Frost,” was published in 2021 and introduced the primary characters. Sasquatch E. Moji is a 13-year-old behemoth of a child who speaks solely in emojis. Mister Yelly, a year younger and considerably smaller, is a bit of a scamp who depends on his older pal in a pinch but isn’t lacking in bravery himself.

The opening tale, which was fairly brief, took place in Chickaloon Village at a time when light had gone from the sky. It ended with Moji and Yelly, counseled by their grandmother, embarking on a quest atop a berry-powered snowmachine named Boba to find their missing cousin Vally. It was a brief and fun little fantasy, well-conceived with expressive and colorful manga-inspired art, but it merely set the stage.

“Watering Ways” is a giant leap forward for Macheras and Silver. It’s significantly longer and far more ambitious than its predecessor. The story opens with Moji and Yelly crossing a snow-covered landscape under a darkened sky as they come across ice creatures standing rigidly in a valley with human forms contained within them. Frightened by the sight, they hurriedly make for Palmer, where they find the city all but shut down. Quickly they learn of the moose-quitoes — giant, flying moose-mosquito hybrids spreading an unknown sickness among the residents — and are drawn into the mystery of where the creatures come from and how to combat them.

After encountering a storyteller named Baca, they visit Drasco for help finding their cousin. Initially reluctant, though not for long, Drasco instead sends them on their way and they return to the besieged Palmer. There these four and other key players assemble, and the story takes form as Moji and Yelly join in the quest to defeat the moose-quitoes.

“Watering Ways” is a standalone episode within the broader story arc of the series. It’s a fast-paced adventure that weaves Ahtna legends into an action-packed quest to save Palmer from the insect infestation that has overrun the town. It’s a tale filled with excitement, humor, entertaining characters, conflicts, camaraderie and a welcoming spirit that will appeal not just to the young readers who will make up its primary audience, but also to adults looking for a good yarn to escape into.

Macheras and Silver share both writing and artistic duties, which leads to a strong fusion of imagery and words. Often, and especially toward the end, the artwork alone tells the story. As artists, the duo use manga as their launching point, but their style reaches well beyond the form. Their use of deep colors creates a mood perfectly suited for the events occurring on the page. Echoes of the seminal 1960s and 1970s work of famed Marvel and DC artist Jack Kirby also surface subtly in a few panels, tastefully so and not as mimicry, connecting the duo’s work to the long, storied history of American comics.

“Chickaloonies” is a lot of fun, and it’s instructive along the way. Macheras and Silver draw from Ahtna lore to create an Alaska Native epic of their own. Stories passed through generations surface throughout the two books, offering key insight at critical points as the plot line unfolds. This knowledge is central to the narrative, and by including it, Macheras carries forward the work of his mother and grandmother, updating and adding to a tradition of oral literature and making it vibrant for modern readers.

The duo are working as part of a collective of Alaska comics producers operating under the name Luk’ae Tse’ Taas Comics (Fish Head Soup Comics) that is focused on bringing both Alaska themes and Native cultures to the world of graphic fiction. As a work geared toward younger readers, the “Chickaloonies” series is the most accessible of those being produced and provides an easy entry point for readers just getting acquainted with the shared universe that the creators are contributing to. It’s a new direction for Alaska arts and literature, and as this book makes clear, its potential is only beginning to be explored.

[ With the Luk’ae Tse’ Taas Comics collective, Alaska visual artists help build a broader universe ]

“When you embark on the journey of rediscovering the knowledge of your culture, listen for the voices of the ancestors,” Macheras and Silver write in a brief afterword to the book. “And remember the watering ways, as a beacon to help you find your way back home.” It’s the perfect coda for “Chickaloonies 2,” which pulls traditional legends into the modern world and crafts something at once both deeply rooted and intriguingly new.

David James

David A. James is a Fairbanks-based freelance writer, and editor of the Alaska literary collection “Writing on the Edge.” He can be reached at [email protected].

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9 Best Treehouse Hotels for a Bucket List Vacation

Goodbye, cell phone beeps. Hello, birdcalls.

Every item on this page was hand-picked by a House Beautiful editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

When you really want to get away from it all, a stay at one of the best treehouse hotels is what need. Whether it be a colossal redwood in Muir Woods or a birch in your own backyard, trees have an amazing ability to help us feel grounded. Aside from supplying us with oxygen, research shows that tree gazing (aka forest bathing) reduces stress and improves our overall mood. So, when planning your next vacation, why not get in touch with nature at a treetop hotel?

Private by design, treehouse hotel rooms typically are single villas or casitas that can accommodate a couple or a small group. Many treehouse resorts are adults-only or have age restrictions due to their design. (The decks can be 35 or more feet up in the tree canopy, which is amazing for panoramic views but not so great for keeping small children safe.) Often equipped with the best amenities and features, like freestanding bathtubs, fireplaces or woodburning stoves, expansive terraces with hot tubs or soaking tubs, and butler or concierge service, treehouse hotel rooms take your comfort seriously. But the most luxurious thing about them is the total immersion in nature. You'll wake up with a view of trees, and go to bed to the sounds of nature. In between, you have nothing more to do than relax and get to know your new neighbors, whether they be toucans and sloths or giraffes and antelope.

There's nothing quite like being surrounded by branching canopies and towering timber, and these nine spectacular treehouse hotels around the world prove it. From secluded mountaintop retreats to nests perched in pines, these properties are almost too breathtaking to be real. Take a tour and update your bucket list accordingly.

Chewton Glen, England

Nayara Gardens, Costa Rica

If you've always wanted to wake up in a rainforest, this is the place to do it in style. Nayara Gardens is set amid the Arenal Volcano Rainforest and Hot Springs, the latter of which feeds the luxury eco-resort's pools (including the private ones) with its mineral waters. Curl up in a hammock on your casita's terrace and take in the sights and sounds of the jungle canopy, from brightly colored bougainvillea and heliconia flowers to toucans and hummingbirds. Lest we forget, it's also a sloth preserve, so if you love their sweet faces you'll want to keep a lookout. Add fresh, healthy food and a swim-up bar—you're never going to want to leave.

andBeyond Ngala Treehouse, South Africa

If you're going on a safari, why not go big? Book a stay at Ngala Safari Lodge or Ngala Tented Camp in andBeyond's private Ngala Game Reserve (part of Kruger National Park), and add on a night at its Treehouse, seen here. The three-level structure has a weatherproof bedroom with 360-degree views in the center and a one-of-a-kind roof deck for wine at sunset or a starlit dinner. It may look a bit rustic, but inside is pure luxury, with a king-size bed, stocked bar, and snacks ideal for a honeymoon or bucket-list occasion. Did we mention Ngala means lion? Yes, you'll see them.

Lovango, U.S. Virgin Islands

A quick boat ride from St. John and St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands is one private island where you don't need to bring your passport. Designed by Michael Kramer, Lovango Resort & Beach Club consists of luxury treehouses for two adults and up to three kids, glamping tents for up to four adults, and a villa that can accommodate nine. All have sweeping views of Caneel Bay and heavenly sea breezes from their private decks.

Loire Valley Lodges, France

Art and nature mix in this private forest oasis. Each of the 18 uniquely named and appointed lodges is inspired and decorated by a contemporary artist. The Nude lodge was done by painter Gilles Ballini, while the Essential lodge was crafted by Tara, an international singer-songwriter. Each of Loire Valley Lodges ' luxury treetop lodges offers a different design experience in a pocket of France you might have never ventured to explore.

The Green O, Montana

A luxury all-inclusive woodland sanctuary 40 minutes outside Missoula, Montana, The Green O offers uninterrupted pine views from its floor-to-ceiling Tree Haus windows. A spiral staircase connects two floors, including a comfortable lounge room with an eco-kitchen and fireplace. Upstairs is a homey yet palatial bedroom and bathroom with a plunge tub and heavenly sheets from The Citizenry. When the snow starts to decorate the pines, you’ve got the best seat in the house.

Amilla, Maldives

Swim among the coconut trees in what may be the Maldives’ highest treetop pool villa. A 30-minute seaplane ride from Velana International Airport, Amilla Maldives has dreamy one- or two-bedroom treehouse options. You can sip Sri Lankan tea from your balcony while the birds chirp in the surrounding trees. After a dip in the glass-walled pool, head down to a beach area that's reserved especially for the resort’s tree-dwellers.

Treehotel, Sweden

The aptly named Treehotel is an hour drive from Luleå Airport in Swedish Lapland. But it's worth every minute: These aren’t your typical wooden treehouses. Here, you stay in a mirrored cube that reflects the pines, a bird's nest where you enter through a hatch in the floor (shown here), or a giant UFO floating amongst the trees. Book from September to March for a chance to see the Northern Lights from your treetop abode.

Matangi Island, Fiji

Paradise awaits you on this private island in Fiji. Matangi Island has three split-level treehouses with views of the turquoise water and white sands below. The bamboo-thatched interiors with an outdoor lava rock shower and private deck make it the perfect escape for couples. You'll need to take an international flight, domestic flight, car ride, and boat to reach the volcanic island, but as soon as your feet hit the water, it'll be worth it.

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Cirque du Soleil, Greek Festival, Pete Davidson and more happening this weekend

See a Maine State Ballet performance and get your fill of lobster rolls.

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We know that this weekend’s forecast for the next several days is a bit on the sketchy side, with some rain forecasted.

But will that stop us from getting out there and doing a whole bunch of stuff?

Absolutely not, because it’s still summer in Maine. Plus, we all know that if you want the weather to change here, you just need to give it a minute.

Portland Jazz Orchestra performing with Katie Oberholtzer at Congress Square Park. Photo by Christopher Andrew

Fingers crossed for tonight’s free performance in Congress Square Park from the Portland Jazz Orchestra. The music starts at 6 p.m.

See Portland Jazz Orchestra for free on Thursday

Kal Sugatski, left, and Katherine Liccardo laugh while pausing to remember the next segment of a song while playing their instruments on a forested shoreside trail on Mackworth Island for a portrait. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

Vigorous Tenderness immersive performance on Mackworth Island is Friday from 6-7:30 p.m. (Original date was today, change due to weather forecast). Advertisement

Concert series Vigorous Tenderness celebrates the change in seasons and classical music

There’s plenty to eat at the Greek Festival in Portland. Gordon Chibroski/Staff Photographer

Thankfully, the Greek Festival in Portland is beneath a gigantic tent. The festival started today and runs through Saturday. It’s also the first entry on our annual list of can’t-miss summer events .  The La Kermesse Franco-Americaine Festival also starts today and runs through Sunday.

Make it your best summer yet with these 17 events

Sole Pane’s brioche knot on the double burger from Kennebec Meat Co. Courtesy of Kennebec Meat Co.

If Greek food isn’t your thing, maybe a burger is. But not just any burger. The Kennebec Meat Co. in Bath makes a legendary one, and it’s only available on Saturdays.

This Bath butcher shop’s burger is worth planning your Saturday around

The lobster roll at Red’s Eats in Wiscasset. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

Still not satisfied? We’ve got two words for you: Lobster rolls! Here are seven places to get a great one, including Red’s Eats in Wiscasset and the White Barn Inn in Kennebunk.

What do you look for in a lobster roll? Here are 7 of Maine’s best, for all different reasons

A scene from Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo show. Photo by Maja Prgomet

Let’s shift from food to Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo show at the Cross Insurance Arena in Portland. Performances start tonight and run through Sunday. Other weekend options include Pete Davidson Friday at Merrill Auditorium and “Dancer’s Choice” tonight and tomorrow at Maine State Ballet.

See Cirque du Soleil, Maine State Ballet and Pete Davidson, all this weekend

Lagers clink at Argenta Brewing. Photo by Amanda Bizzaro

Quench your thirst this weekend (or anytime) with a cold lager. We’ve got several ideas of where to enjoy one including Bissell Brothers, Argenta Brewery and Batson River. Cheers!

Lagers gain in popularity at Maine’s craft breweries. Here’s where to find them.

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