In 2016, when Mitzi Angel, then publisher at Faber in London, first came across the manuscript of Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations With Friends, she was not envisioning bestseller lists and television adaptations. She was not imagining that Rooney’s future books would be compared to luxury handbags in Vanity Fair or that people would be scrambling to get their hands on her galleys. She did notice the young people around the office starting to talk about the characters as if they were real people.   

“Sally Rooney was an interesting case, as a bookseller, because she is one of the few writers I truly saw scale the ladder by word of mouth,” says Madeline Gressel, marketing director at McNally Jackson, the independent bookstore chain in New York, via email. She recalls Rooney’s debut novel moving from a single copy in the store, to facing out on the shelves, to a place on the store’s bestseller wall. 

Rooney was 26 when Conversations With Friends was published, followed by Normal People a year later. Her eagerly anticipated third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, with slightly older characters, facing slightly more grown up issues, is out today. (McNally Jackson has already ordered 500 signed copies.) 

Rooney’s third novel, which has slightly older characters facing slightly more grown up issues than in her previous books, is out today.

Photo: Courtesy of FSG

It’s hard to pin down the mysterious chemistry between a book and the culture, what causes one novel to catch on instead of another. What is it about Rooney’s world of tormented Dublin intellectuals that has beguiled the reading public so intensely? 

For one, her world is flattering to the anxieties and self-defeating torments and dramas of the young. She renders them stylish and urgent; she gives them a moody intensity. She has been compared to Salinger, to Austen, to Hemingway, but perhaps more salient is Joan Didion, who knew better than anyone how to make the anxieties of her generation stylish. 

Rooney’s work concerns itself with people who feel essentially awkward and painfully self-conscious and obsessively concerned with their place in the world but are also, by some improbable logic, cool. Her protagonists are nerds and gifted writers and Marxists and people who would’ve studied Foucault and Cixous in college trying to navigate fraught relationships. They are the kind of modishly ironic people who, like one character says in Conversations With Friends, “would never describe anyone as nice without quotation marks.”

Like Didion, Rooney has, amid her ascent, attracted the inevitable sniping. She has been attacked for being insufficiently Marxist, for the leftist politics in her novels being “gestural” and for not satirizing their emptiness more fully. She has been criticized for being successful, for pretending to be normal when she is not, for being insufficiently critical of traditional relationships, but fundamentally the books are pleasurable to read, and people continue to read them. 

“Over time her readership has changed,” says Gressel. “The women who originally read her have now encountered enough insightful and skillful takedowns to feel her popularity has exceeded her merits. Now, the women who buy her at our stores are more likely to be buying her books along with contemporary romance novels or Where the Crawdads Sing or Little Fires Everywhere and less likely alongside, say, Maggie Nelson and Sigrid Nunez. Which is to say, less literary, more conventional readers.” 

Being cast as a commercial writer, whose books are sold in airports, and marketed with bucket hats and pencils and totes, could be disorienting.  In a 2018 interview Rooney said, “Light and sparkling is the phrase that has been used. I can’t complain if people think it’s sparkling, but then there’s a sense that wasn’t what I set out to do.”  

Rooney has been cast as a commercial writer. With her books being sold in airports and marketed with bucket hats and pencils and totes, it could be disorienting.

Photo: Kalpesh Lathigra

In Beautiful World, Where Are You Rooney encodes a certain amount of contempt for the literary world that has made her a star. Alice, a 29-year-old Dublin novelist, who like Rooney has published two wildly feted novels, says, “They never tire of giving me awards, do they? It’s a shame I’ve tired so quickly of receiving them, or my life would be endless fun.”

Connell Waldron, the working-class aspiring writer in Normal People, muses on the shallow way popular culture consumes literature: “A lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured… it was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys… all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.” 

In an interview in the New Statesman, Rooney, sounding very much like one of her own characters, has said, “I’m not totally comfortable with the ways in which our culture monetises art and literature.” It is fundamentally very Rooney to succeed while critiquing that success, to be consummately commercial, while also somehow being anticommercial.

““They never tire of giving me awards, do they? It’s a shame I’ve tired so quickly of receiving them, or my life would be endless fun.””

Part of the appeal of a Rooney book is that her characters both deride the trappings of money and are obsessed with them; they scorn fame or status and also effortlessly stumble on it. Not having to do the work of resolving these contradictions is a gift Rooney is giving to her readers. If there is a fantasy of successful millennial life that involves accidentally falling into an artistic career you excel at without much work, visiting villas in the south of France and Italy, while spouting anticapitalist bon mots, Rooney delivers it. She adroitly mirrors the ambivalence of a certain liberal educated elite about the materialism and success and ambition they both disdain and crave. In Normal People, Connell observes, “That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.” 

Another reason may be that Rooney writes sex scenes well, not just as satiric fiascos, a rare talent among contemporary writers. Rooney’s sex scenes are sexy but also described as if they are just part of life. They are not overly lyrical or excessively stylized or fashionably numb. Other hyped young writers can do alienated sex scenes, or sex scenes where the woman wants to be hurt, or where someone elaborately humiliates someone else, but they seem more like poses or conceits, flat on the page, whereas Rooney’s seem like actual human encounters. 

“Part of the appeal of a Rooney book is that her characters both deride the trappings of money and are obsessed with them…”

“She’s romantic without sounding regressive,” says Gressel. Which is to say Rooney’s novels appeal to readers who want to read about love, but find that desire retrograde and embarrassing. Because her characters are reading Henry James or referencing Baudrillard, because they are innately and chattily suspicious of conventional relationships, the reader is permitted to harbor a glimmer of hope for the possibility of human intimacy.  

What will happen to Sally Rooney, now 30, amid all her fame and success? It can be hard to innovate and grow as a writer under so much scrutiny and pressure. Not to mention tempting to keep doing exactly the same thing, to churn out moody, spare sequels with bright, clever covers, like the Marvel franchise churning out the next Spider-Man movie. 

“What will happen to Sally Rooney, now 30, amid all her fame and success?”

So far, the evidence points to Rooney resisting this impulse; Beautiful World, Where Are You contains enough innovation—stylistic playfulness, a new, more cerebral mode, a variation in perspective—to signal that she is trying new things. There are signs of a person alone at a desk who is blocking out the world. 

Angel, her editor, is not worried. “Sally loves writing. She makes the space for herself to do what she likes to do, which is to write. There is a kind of determination in her to do that. I know that she takes pleasure in building the worlds that she builds. I have this feeling that will just be there for her.”