Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney review – author of her own discontent

Even in these accelerated times it seems bewildering: was it really only four years ago that Sally Rooney made her debut? The ecstatic welcome given to Conversations With Friends, a deadpan comedy of arty Dublin millennials, was a mere curtain-raiser to the escape velocity achieved a year later by her cross-class teen love story, Normal People. Amid the strenuously cerebral to-and-fro of the online Sallyology industry, arguing over how far the books reflected or betrayed the author’s avowed Marxism, it could be forgotten (though never, perversely, by her detractors) how purely and straightforwardly enjoyable Rooney is to read, which isn’t to say, as Will Self has, that Normal People represents “very simple stuff with no literary ambition”.

Rooney’s publisher recently announced the opening of a pop-up shop to sell copies of her latest novel. She’s still just 30 and while I can’t begin to imagine the oddity of her existence over the past few years, Beautiful World, Where Are You gives us a fair idea. Her third book, it’s her first to be written in the glare of expectation and, boy, can you tell. There are familiar delights here, for sure, but unalloyed pleasure isn’t on the agenda; a sort of Being Sally Rooney, it threatens – I suspect – to befuddle fans and leave naysayers cold, even if the point of all its agonised introspection seems to be that the darkest judgments issuing from the bowels of the internet have nothing on Rooney’s own guilty self-scrutiny.

The book centres on the sexual entanglements of a prize-winning writer, Alice, and her old university pal, Eileen, both turning 30. Burnt out after an ill-fated spell in New York, Alice feels she “only had two good ideas” (actual lol, as one of the characters might say) and won’t write another book, not just because she detests hype-cycle whims and media intrusion, but because writing fiction feels “vulgar, decadent and even epistemically violent” at a time when we ought to be redistributing global resources “and transitioning… to a sustainable economic model”.

Such thoughts, presented unsatirically, provide an uneasy context for the novel’s main action, a love-quadrangle storyline à la Conversations With Friends. Eileen, employed by a Dublin literary magazine, beds her girlhood crush, Simon, a political adviser; Alice, now living by the sea in Mayo, falls for her Tinder hookup, Felix, a warehouse worker. Their relationship crackles with the flinty repartee that is the shining currency of all Rooney’s fiction. “She’s got a Wikipedia page,” someone coos at a party, searching Alice’s name. “You probably wrote it yourself,” Felix says. “No, just the books,” Alice shoots back.

But this is far from Normal People 2: witness the first in a series of high-minded emails between Eileen and Alice, who has “been thinking lately about rightwing politics (haven’t we all), and how it is that conservatism (the social force) came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism”; other topics up for discussion include whether “human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976” and how “philosophically wrong the… system of literary production really is”.

It’s earnest stuff – “I wish there was a good theory of sexuality out there for me to read,” Alice says – and anyone who binge-watched Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones might well start to hanker for rather less theory and a bit more will-they-won’t-they. Only after Alice invites Felix to Rome for her Italian book launch (“I can pay for everything. I’m rich and famous, remember?”) does the story spring to life; he’s at the heart of all the novel’s best moments, not least when Eileen and Simon finally make a long-delayed visit to Alice for the first time since she returned to Ireland. A born stirrer, he unearths buried grudges (why didn’t they come sooner, he prods, if they’re all such great friends?) and his presence in the book affords much mischievous juxtaposition: “Between the hours of 8pm and midnight he drank six pints of Danish lager. Alice washed up after dinner and read an article on the internet about Annie Ernaux.”

Related: Sally Rooney: ‘I don’t respond to authority very well’

The engine of Rooney’s fiction is essentially epistolary, with texts, not letters, generating dramatic irony in the form of unsent drafts and contradictory replies to different recipients. But technology isn’t only played for laughs: there’s a strangely poignant moment in which Eileen searches herself online at work and swiftly closes the tab, as if seeking assurance she exists. Tellingly, we can’t be certain what she’s up to, because even Rooney won’t grant herself the privilege of knowing; where Conversations With Friends was told in the first person and Normal People in the close third (observing Connell and Marianne but able to access their thoughts), here the narrator stays on the outside, guessing with the rest of us: “Was he thinking about her, or about something else, someone else? And… was Alice thinking about him? Did he exist for her in that moment, and if so, in what way?”

Is this Rooney’s way of shrugging off the “voice of a generation” tag? Certainly, this is her most self-consciously awkward book to date. When Alice worries that fiction depends on making us forget the “brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species”, it grinds against Rooney’s gift for eliciting the emotional investment of which the novel seems so wary; it’s as if McDonald’s insisted on showing customers footage from the abattoir as they tuck in to their Big Macs.

Hectoringly ambivalent about her own pleasures, Rooney seems to be saying that what she has to offer as a writer isn’t enough, but that it’s also all there is. Will the readers who love her care about any of this? Ultimately, it’s hard not to feel her greatest artistic challenge isn’t retooling the romcom for an era of political crisis, but the simpler, if no less tricky, task of just getting on with her work.

• Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply