PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe novel’s treatment of sex trades on old tropes—the simmer of the sacred and the profane. But Rooney’s signature idiom—frankly erotic and insistently romantic—carries these scenes ... Many critics have compared Rooney’s straightforward prose to Hemingway. But the emphasis on spare language belies a certain narrative tenderness that I more closely associate with writers like Shirley Hazzard or Natalia Ginzburg, who supplies the novel’s epigraph. Emotional registers that in Hemingway’s hands would be schmaltz are in Rooney’s disquietingly taut ... If Beautiful World, Where Are You feels out of time, that’s because it’s an elegy for the era in which it occurs. If it isn’t a perfect novel, it is a tender one. Its retrospective gaze kindles its potential futurity. And believing in the future is, after all, an act of faith.