HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Rooney’s first novel since Normal People (2019), which became a popular and award-winning Hulu series, is steadily drawing excitement. Writing with her trademark truthfulness and wit, Rooney compels with both these meta-conversations and the actions of her characters’ lives: their enthralling, intimate, and consequential grappling with themselves, with one another, with desire, and with the world. In September, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will release her new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, which follows four young characters in Ireland as they navigate the pressures of work and. Interspersed among chapters are emails between Alice and Eileen, not uncritical but steeped in affection, in which they discuss philosophy, politics, the degradation and collapse of societies, and how one can still be concerned about beauty, sex, and friendship, let alone something as inconsequential as a novel, in light of all that. Their actions often observed at a neutral distance, these four fully human and flawed characters navigate contemporary life, with its dating apps and worsening inequalities and horrifying quantities of plastic, in a novel that yet feels refreshingly old-fashioned. She’s known Simon, an activist and devout Catholic several years her senior, her whole life, and been in love with him for much of it. Alice’s best friend, Eileen, is an editorial assistant at a Dublin-based literary magazine who goes home to the sad room she’s been renting since her breakup. Alice, a famous young novelist renting a home on the Irish coast, goes on a date with local Felix, who works in a warehouse, and they don’t hit it off at first.
0 kommentar(er)
