Beautiful World, Where Are You is Sally Rooney’s third novel, following Conversations with Friends in 2017 and Normal People in 2018. Rooney’s work has been both critically and commercially successful, and her first two novels have already been adapted for television.

The similarity between the author and her character, Alice Kelleher, is immediately clear. Alice is also a novelist who enjoyed an unusual degree of success in her mid-twenties and is now a millionaire and a celebrity. In an interview with Lauren Christensen which appeared in the New York Times on August 28, 2021, Rooney said that she created Alice as a way of writing about and coping with the level of attention that has become part of her life as a best-selling and critically acclaimed author. However, she also points out that she is from a working-class background and that there are plenty of people in her family like Felix, Alice’s partner who works in a warehouse and has no interest in reading her books.

Although Alice is the character who superficially most resembles Rooney, she could not be called the protagonist of Beautiful World, Where Are You, which focuses on a balanced ensemble of four characters. The two women, Alice and Eileen, command rather more attention than the men, Simon and Felix, because they reveal more of their interior life in their email messages to each other. Among other things, this is a novel of ideas, and the ideas in question are almost all Alice’s and Eileen’s ideas as they discuss literature, civilization, relationships, love, sex, and what they believe really matters in life.

Simon and Felix are both more enigmatic characters, and only partly because neither of them contributes to the narration of the story in the first person. Simon’s father says that he has a messiah complex, and Alice later says that he has what she calls a martyr complex, which appears to be similar. Both Eileen and Alice recognize that Simon is detached, unwilling to show emotion, and never gives evidence of strong desires or personal preferences. Felix is quite different, a hedonist who is happy to show his desires and act impulsively on them. However, he displays a reticence similar to Simon’s in the matter of deep emotions. He likes to hear Alice say how much she loves him, but only reluctantly and late in the narrative does he express any love for her.

There is not much intellectual or ideological conflict between the four characters. Simon is religious, something the other three find extraordinary, but without proselytizing, he silently brings them around to his viewpoint by means of his own evident sincerity and sanity. By the end of the novel, Eileen has been impressed by the serene atmosphere of Simon’s church, while Alice has begun to express a vague and agnostic belief in God. Even Felix, who is bisexual and worried that Simon’s religion might lead him to be prejudiced against same-sex relationships, quickly sees that Simon has no such intolerant beliefs. Felix even begins to make low-key sexual advances toward Simon, though without any success.

The lack of ideological conflict in the novel means that Alice does not necessarily function as the author’s surrogate, since all four characters express similar ideas, rooted in liberal values and existential pessimism. Almost all the conflict is emotional, derived not from any fundamental differences in outlook, but from the characters’ psychological flaws and insecurities. Eileen in particular needs a demonstrativeness from both Simon and Alice which neither is capable of giving her, and she seems to create scenes of conflict in order to give them...