Review of beautiful world where are you5/19/2023 ![]() Intellectually as well as stylistically, the tone is flat. When Alice and Felix visit Rome, which may well contain the most impressive collection of objets d’art in the world, the reader is told peremptorily that “Felix spent the morning wandering around the city looking at things”. She favours bland adjectives, such as “little”, “clear” and “thin”. But her new book pushes her devotion to ordinariness to its logical extreme. In “Normal People” especially, Ms Rooney (who is still only 30) combined simplicity with sparkle. ![]() Relationships meander in a state of quantum irresolution, the parties likely to have different perceptions of whether they are off or on. Sex, which she describes unsqueamishly and arrestingly, is a beginning not a destination, and tends to lead to an enervating stasis (male domination and female masochism crop up frequently). ![]() But compared with the work of Jane Austen-which Ms Rooney admires, and in which courtship drives the plot and the climax is marriage-her tales of messy modern love follow improvised patterns. The story vibrates to their romantic havering. Her best friend Eileen, dismally house-sharing in Dublin, is tortured by her infatuation with Simon, whom she has known since childhood. Alice, a successful but troubled novelist, has moved to the Irish coast where she meets Felix, a warehouse worker. The outline of “Beautiful World, Where Are You” will seem familiar to readers of its predecessors. ![]()
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