Key themes
- What art is for — and whether making it is ethical when the world is ending
- Long friendship as the deepest love
- The gap between political conviction and personal behaviour
About this book
Alice, a novelist exhausted by fame, and Eileen, her childhood friend, correspond by email while navigating damaged relationships and questions about beauty, meaninglessness and what it means to care about art in a world heading toward catastrophe. Rooney's third novel is her most overtly intellectual — a correspondence novel asking what the novel is for.
Published in 2021, Beautiful World, Where Are You was immediately controversial — praised for its ambition and criticised for its philosophical passages. It is Rooney's most overtly political novel, written during the pandemic.
Discussion questions
- Alice and Eileen write each other long philosophical emails about beauty, meaning and the state of the world. How does Rooney use this epistolary form — and what can the email say that dialogue cannot?
- The novel is explicitly anxious about whether fiction matters in an age of catastrophe. Does Rooney resolve this anxiety — and does the novel's existence answer the question it asks?
- Felix and Simon are the partners that Alice and Eileen pursue. How do these relationships function alongside the friendship at the novel's centre — as tests of the friendship or as parallel structures?
- The novel's tone is more melancholy than its predecessors. What does this shift signal — and does Beautiful World feel like a writer moving in a new direction?
- Rooney's first three novels have been enormously popular among young women. What does she give her readers — and is there a risk that popularity makes her work harder to assess critically?
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