Sally Rooney's "Beautiful World Where Are You" ends with domestic bliss, like a Victorian novel.
In "Beautiful World Where Are You," email serves the same purpose as letters did in 18th century and 19th century fiction.
The computer exchanges between Alice Kelleher, a successful Irish novelist resembling Rooney, and her best friend Eileen Lydon at first stifle the narrative. As the book progresses, the emails effectively reveal character and advance the plot.
The book returns to themes of Rooney's first two books, "Conversations With Friends" and "Normal People."
As in those generational touchstones, young people struggle to find love and happiness in a world beset by economic uncertainty and environmental despair.
Not a total breakthrough, "Beautiful World Where Are You" explores new directions, growing more assured as the novel progresses.
Rooney at times overdescribes the smallest details. Those granular moments build into a visually vivid narrative.
Covering familiar ground, the book progresses Rooney's career, raising expectations for the future.
Alice and Eileen in their emails express opinions on climate change, commercialism and career fulfillment. And lovely thoughts on art and beauty to enthrall aesthetes, wherever you are.
A successful novelist, Alice wonders if literature still has any purpose, and suffers a "nervous breakdown." The sensitive and literary Eileen works as a low-paid editorial assistant at a Dublin literary journal, carrying out tasks such as placing periods between W.H. Auden’s initials.
Alternating with the emails, the microscopically observed third-person narration unwinds Eileen's conflicted relationship with Simon Costigan, a liflelong friend of her and Alice.
A dual plot tells of Alice's attraction to Felix Brady, a blue-collar factory worker who wields his disdain for reading and literary culture like a shield.
It's implausible that the literature-obsessed Alice would fall for someone who takes such wilful pride in ignorance. Yet Rooney makes the relationship believable. While Felix's cynicism and hostility raise expectations that he'll turn violent, Felix is slowly revealed as sensitive and compassionate.
In a salute to fellow Irish novelist James Joyce, Felix at a party brings Alice to tears by singing "The Lass of Aughrim," the song that haunts Joyce's "The Dead." As with Joyce's "epiphanies," the moment shows Felix in a new sympathetic light. His and Alice's relationship blossoms.
Simon and Eileen's love takes a similar course. The older Simon, who suffered boyhood epileptic attacks, lived with Eileen's family during her childhood, working on their farm. He also befriended Eileen, who unlike her popular sister was shunned by her classmates.
As adults, Simon and Eileen have a close platonic friendship that turns intermittently sexual. Simon, who works as an international bureaucrat, is a faithful Catholic, regularly attending daily Mass. That doesn't stop him from dating a series of beautiful women, returning to Eileen episodically.
At the end of the book, the two couples draw close to each other at the unnamed seaside village where Alice rents on old house.
Felix has grown up in the village, unlike the others working in a physically hazardous job. He suffers long hours in a warehouse that sounds like one of Amazon's. The bisexual Felix even makes apparently unconsummated passes at the attractive Simon.
While Felix, Alice and Eileen mock Simon's religion, they turn away from their agnosticism toward spirituality and a belief in a higher power, if not organized religion. Showing signs of hasty writing in response to the Covid epidemic, the novel's concluding emails describe both couples living in happiness, withdrawn from the world.
Yes, Eileen announes that she's pregnant. Rooney, the groundbreaking novelist of the millennial generation, resorts to the most conventional of Victorian conventions.
Rooney also evokes Joyce in her passages extolling the Irish landscape, especially a vision of the sea that has rhythms reminiscent of the famous ending of "The Dead."
"Beautiful World Where Are You" answers its own question.