![]() ![]() ![]() At one level, Beautiful World, Where Are You is about a writer, cast rather conspicuously in the mold of Rooney herself, navigating the fallout of a personal crisis. “In this world, what does it matter?” If Alice’s takedown of contemporary fiction serves as a thesis of sorts for the Irish author’s self-reflexive third novel, it also demonstrates the book’s twofold nature. “Do the protagonists break up or stay together?” she writes dismissively. Their work is dishonest, deliberately “suppressing the truth of the world-packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text.” Divorced from the real world, the novel has forfeited its claim to representational legitimacy. Novelists are vain, she writes to her friend Eileen Lydon, a magazine editor in Dublin. Around the hundred-page mark of Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, the novelist protagonist Alice Kelleher delivers an indictment of her own profession. ![]()
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