How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bourgeois Novel

A review of Sally Rooney's "Beautiful World, Where Are You"

The characters in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You are keenly aware of the crisis of the contemporary novel. They’re committed millennial Marxist intellectuals—they know the novel “relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth.” They know they have “the extraordinary privilege of being …