I never expected myself to describe a Sally Rooney novel as “sprawling,” but here I am, describing Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, as sprawling. Clocking in at 353 pages in the hardback edition I got from the library, Rooney’s latest is much longer, and much more ambitious, than her last two. Rooney obviously set her heights high on this one, and did she get there? I think she might have, but only partially.
The story of the novel centers around two women, Eileen and Alice, who have been friends since childhood, as they figure out how to live their lives at the close of their twenties. For both women this centers on romantic and sexual encounters, and here we’re given Rooney’s standard fare; we’ve seen this before in both Normal People and Conversations With Friends, and I’m not convinced she made any significant advances in this area with her latest. In a recent tweet, LitHub referred to Rooney as “the bard of millennial intimacy,” and they’re not exactly wrong, but it’s a bit played by this point.