She finds one compelling answer in religion:
In an email to Eileen, Alice queries the justification for the objective worth of beauty. It lingers instead on Alice and Eileen’s aesthetic fascination with faith. But the novel is less interested in these two positions. Felix, a warehouse worker whom Alice meets on a dating app after moving to the Irish countryside at the beginning of the novel, acts as a kind of foil to Simon and disparages religion. Simon, Eileen’s teenage crush-turned-friend-turned-lover, is the only self-proclaimed Catholic in the quartet. The two male protagonists of the novel represent archetypal attitudes toward religion.
What is new and a little unexpected is the turn to Catholicism in this most recent work. Writing the experience of modern millennial malaise is Rooney’s specialty. They despair at the shocking abundance of plastic, the invention of which Alice believes has deprived the world of the “instinct for beauty.” They angst over convenience-shop lunches implicated in labor exploitation. Sally Rooney’s latest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You follows four millennials who yearn for beauty and goodness in a world on the brink of “general systems collapse.” Over email, Alice, a novelist whose meteoric rise to fame led her to a nervous breakdown, and her best friend Eileen, an editor at a literary magazine in Dublin, muse about the impasse of identity politics (“Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve.”).
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