They can’t imagine a life without the other in it, but their fear of losing what they do have together threatens to prevent their connection from moving further. Eileen and Simon are childhood neighbors whose ongoing flirtation and friendship has recently crossed the threshold of platonic deniability.
Likewise, in Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rooney’s third and latest book, the four main characters are held together by the unbreakable bonds of emotional neurosis. Beautiful World, Where Are You, the latest novel by Sally Rooney. And the friendship between Frances and Bobbi - arguably the more interesting relationship of that book, characterized as it is by rivalry, resentment, attraction, and unconditional love - is crucial for both characters. In Rooney’s debut, Conversations With Friends, although Frances and Nick are clearly involved in an ill-fated sexual entanglement, each is living rent-free in the other’s brain, alternating between reaching out and pushing the other away throughout their affair.
Even though they part ways at the end of the novel, they spend the majority of their young adulthood orbiting each other romantically, despite their very different class backgrounds.
In Normal People, Rooney’s second book that catapulted her to mainstream fame (much to her chagrin, as the bulk of her recent interviews suggest), Marianne and Connell have an on-again, off-again involvement beginning in high school. Under these conditions alone, the world of a Sally Rooney novel could seem like a utopia of sorts - aside from the organizing principle of political despair that pervades the characters’ consciousness. There is no unrequited love in Rooney’s books, only miscommunication that results from a lack of self-actualization. The great thing about being a character in a Sally Rooney novel is that the person you are obsessed with is always obsessed with you, too. Review of Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)
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