She’s also been called the first great millennial novelist.

She’s been hailed as “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”-a snappy alliterative phrase that reveals that whoever wrote it, and everybody who keeps using it, knows nothing about people Rooney’s age. She wrote a brilliant essay in the Dublin Review about how she found it “depressing and vaguely amoral,” which attracted the attention of a literary agent, which led to her book deal. When she was in college, Rooney was the number one competitive debater in Europe. They are the Brahmin left-the fictional embodiments of class dealignment.īefore I get to Beautiful World in any detail, here are certain facts all reviewers are obliged to note if they write about Sally Rooney.

If they lived in New York, you’d find them debating the latest Jacobin article on austerity politics over a glass of orange wine at a table on a Brooklyn sidewalk. Over drinks at the bar, they fight about who exactly should count as working class. They want to end the patriarchy, they are anti-capitalists, they are dismayed by global inequality. The social set of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You is the same as her first two novels: Trinity-educated millennials living in post-crisis Ireland who go to poetry readings in Dublin, visit museums on trips to Europe, wear bags emblazoned with the logos of London literary magazines, and read the Bible, Shakespeare, Keats, Dostoevsky, Henry James, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde for pleasure.

B eautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2021)

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