From an early age, Simon has been polite, clean, and plagued by romantic fits of epilepsy. The recuperation of Catholicism is staged most overtly through Eileen’s romantic interest - fair-haired heartthrob Simon, a childhood crush that has turned fitfully into an adult one, and a regular churchgoer with a prehistory that reads more like hagiography. In Rooney’s attempt to imagine the world radically otherwise, she returns to two venerable national devotions: Irish Catholicism and James Joyce. In their email exchanges, Alice and Eileen parse the slow violence of their contemporary moment - imminent environmental catastrophe, xenophobic conservative politics, and, by the novel’s end, an ongoing global pandemic. Her friend Alice shares a partial biography with Rooney: she’s a well-spoken novelist grappling with raging success and exasperating celebrity before the age of 30. Eileen is a smart and woefully underpaid editorial assistant in Dublin. THE EPISTOLARY NOVEL hits inboxes in Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You.
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