The main charge that Rooney seems to be addressing is that her favoured subject matter is inherently footling, a mere welter of first-world problems. Everything that is cherishable in the book, and everything that is botched and baffling, comes from the ways in which Rooney has pushed herself and risked falling short.

From the grandeur of the title to the obtrusiveness of its technique and the more or less equal attention accorded to a pair of couples instead of just one, Beautiful World, Where Are You, though recognisably the work of the same author, marks a self-conscious advance on Conversations with Friends and Normal People.

The subject is raised by various means, in dialogue, narrated backstory and the email correspondence between Alice and her friend Eileen, but emerges most resonantly in the ambition of the book as a whole. It’s at once another instalment in her serial portrait of the bookish, fidgety, sexually avid Irishwoman born circa 1990 and a reckoning of sorts with doubts about Rooney-mania – her own as well as those expressed in what the narrator, describing the reception handed out to the not un-Rooney-like heroine, a superstar novelist named Alice, calls the ‘negative pieces’ produced in reaction to ‘the fawning positivity of the initial coverage’. She could hear a child crying somewhere-part of the soundtrack of shopping malls the world over.” As settings for and symbols of disintegration it seems that our retail cathedrals will always remain open.Sally Rooney’s new novel, her third in four years, is a passionate, earnest, vulnerable, often affecting and above all dysfunctional piece of work. Less apocalyptically, one of the most memorable scenes in Kate Atkinson’s work is that of the protagonist in “Started Early, Took My Dog” (2010), facing her workday at the end of her tether: “Tracy caught sight of herself in the plate glass of Ryman’s, saw the wild-eyed look of a woman falling over the edge.

Yet both writers alighted briefly on that synthetic terrain and made it their own Saramago in his 2000 novel “The Cave,” which conjured up a vampire-like shopping complex that sucks life out of the surrounding countryside, and Ballard in his final work, “Kingdom Come” (2006), set in the English midlands, which revolved around a vast Metro-Centre patrolled by fascist gangs. It is hard to picture the late Portuguese master José Saramago at the mall, or the very British J.G.

Review beautiful world where are you