Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World Where Are You, takes almost its full length to suddenly snap its many disparate pieces — unlikely and reluctant lovers, strained friendships, questioned careers — into place in a coherent whole. You don’t think the moment when the book reveals its essence will come, but then it does, an aha! surfacing slowly enough to allow you to enjoy its arrival but then quickly revealing itself to be so robust and fully formed that you wonder how you didn’t see it coming all along.

Beautiful World is a love story. It is also a novel about class and crisis, and how these phenomena that rule our world shape our relationships with one another. Rooney seems to be grappling with questions about her own life and work: “Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?” one of our main characters, Eileen, asks her college friend in an email. She continues: “I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse.”

Rooney also seems to be wrestling with the huge question of how to live — as in, how to carry out a day-to-day life — as a Marxist, a person at once fully aware of the depths of the world’s rot and yet still optimistic about the fate of humanity. Beautiful World’s characters grapple with these questions, too, transiting in and out of cynicism, hopefulness, resignation, and fulfillment. They struggle with that ultimate of questions — will I ever find and keep true love? — the answer to which will trump the answers to any of their other queries.