![]() ![]() Simon, Eileen’s teenage crush-turned-friend-turned-lover, is the only self-proclaimed Catholic in the quartet. The two male protagonists of the novel represent archetypal attitudes toward religion. What is new and a little unexpected is the turn to Catholicism in this most recent work. Writing the experience of modern millennial malaise is Rooney’s specialty. They despair at the shocking abundance of plastic, the invention of which Alice believes has deprived the world of the “instinct for beauty.” ![]() ![]() They angst over convenience-shop lunches implicated in labor exploitation. Sally Rooney’s latest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You follows four millennials who yearn for beauty and goodness in a world on the brink of “general systems collapse.” Over email, Alice, a novelist whose meteoric rise to fame led her to a nervous breakdown, and her best friend Eileen, an editor at a literary magazine in Dublin, muse about the impasse of identity politics (“Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve.”). ![]()
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