Young people trying to make sense of life

I read Sally Rooney's third novel,  Beautiful World, Where Are You to learn, if possible, why she is so popular.

The publisher's precise sums up the book's plot, such as it is, nicely: "Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a breakup, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young―but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in."

All right on, but then the blurb asks two questions to induce sales: "Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?"

I don't know about the characters standing in the last lighted room, but the text does read as the four, all around 30 years old, are trying to make sense of the world and their lives. Alice, who has had phenomenal success with her first novel, now has more money than she knows what to do with and, apparently, is recovering from a mental/emotional crisis by renting a house in rural Ireland.

She meets Felix who works in a warehouse and spends most evenings with drinks and darts with the lads at a pub in town. Except for the sex, which Rooney describes in titillating detail (Philip Roth has a lot to answer for), he and Alice do not seem to have much in common. Neither do Eileen and Simon, perhaps because they are so uncertain who they are they do not even know how they hope—or want—to live. 

The book's title is the literal translation of a phrase from a 1788 Friedrich Schiller poem. By implication, it is a question Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are asking. It implies, of course, that there is a beautiful world to find. My guess is that Rooney is so popular because many, many readers can identify with the characters and are asking the same question. 

Disappointingly, the characters do not find the (or a) beautiful world, perhaps because there is none.