It’s a pleasure to read smart women courting each other’s love and admiration. “Wise, romantic, and ultimately consoling. Rooney gives her characters, herself, and the reader permission to feel the full range of the often-embarrassing emotions that come with loving and liking other people, despite impending doom, knowing that chaos and hope and stupidity all exist, messily, together.” “ Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney’s most buoyant and best work. “Brilliantly done: gripping, steamy, unbearably sad.” There is a touching honesty and truthfulness in these pages, along with a quiet brilliance.” A forceful case for caring about such seemingly insignificant matters as ‘whether people break up or stay together.’” Beautiful World, Where Are You offers the same pleasures as Rooney’s previous novels, and, in the discursive emails that Alice and Eileen exchange, the additional pleasure of her voice as an essayist. “This is a book that insists on the power of enduring relationships and also on their difficulty. Beautiful World combines the intricacies of Rooney’s lightning-rod style, like her deep well of sympathy for her characters and her precise economy of language, with a growing maturity.” This is Rooney stepping into herself as a fully-formed artist, ready to defend the validity and originality of her methods. “Rooney hammers out the problems and promises of contemporary novels and contemporary life-all while reminding us of her distinctive style’s disarming intimacies. Beautiful World, Where Are You is a love letter to all of us, to all the ways we love.” 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. Beautiful World, Where Are You is still very dialectical and Marxist and interested in political debates. “Even more moving than Normal People or Conversations with Friends. In this ambitious novel of sentiment and ideas, which is so up to the minute in its global concerns, Rooney ironically reaches back to one of the oldest forms of the novel, the epistolary or letter form, to tell her story.” We feel we’re in good company with our own end-time anxieties. “It’s a testament to Rooney's curious, cerebral gifts as a writer that she not only draws her readers into tolerating long stretches of such ruminations but makes them so entertaining. “The book moved me to tears more than once. The dialogue never falters, and the prose burns up the page.” Brandon Taylor, The New York Times Book Review Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney’s best novel yet."
It’s a narrative style I associate with the films of Andrew Haigh and Joanna Hogg, two great visual poets of social anxiety and reticence.
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