They brood over the story of Linear B, an ancient Greek script thought indecipherable until the 1950s. Alice writes to Eileen that “markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions,” and Eileen writes back, “my theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence.” They complain, as many people in their age cohort do, rather airily about “capitalism.” They discuss the mysterious collapse of Late Bronze Age civilization in the Mediterranean, after which “literacy all but died out and entire writing systems were lost,” erasing exactly the sort of work they have devoted their own lives to.

Confronting this fact makes me feel I am already dead.”Įven so, Alice and Eileen’s lofty political thinking is not the sort that lends itself to action beyond the making of sweeping pronouncements. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. “I keep encountering this person, who is myself,” she writes in an email to Eileen, “and I hate her with all my energy. Alice, like her creator, loathes her celebrity, and the vile double it has spawned, a false version of Alice that some people adore and others detest. She still does a certain amount of publicity work, however, treating this, as she explains to Eileen, as her “job.” For all the press junkets to Paris and Rome, however, she finds it a joyless labor. “And yet it’s what I do with my life, the only thing I want to do.” Alice, whose recent history resembles Rooney’s own in several aspects, has become famous thanks to her first two books and now hasn’t written a page in two years. “I find my own work morally and politically worthless,” writes Alice, an Irish novelist and one of the two main characters in Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, to the other main character, her best friend, Eileen.

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Books by sally rooney