Intermezzo, by Sally RooneySupplied
- Title: Intermezzo
- Author: Sally Rooney
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Knopf Canada
- Pages: 448
Few authors incite a frenzy like Sally Rooney, despite the intensely private novelist’s ambivalent relationship to fame. Her acclaimed debut novel Conversations with Friends, published in 2017 when she was just 26, was a revelation: a luminous depiction of desire; a generation-defining portrait of sardonic millennial youth; and a literary feat of thrillingly confident, crystalline prose. Each of her subsequent novels has heightened expectations: Normal People, which has sold more than a million copies in the U.K. alone, and Beautiful World, Where Are You, which turned yellow bucket hats emblazoned with the title into a status item. So it’s an understatement to describe her fourth novel, Intermezzo, as hotly anticipated. Like her previous novels, it takes a microscopically intimate view into the romantic lives of clever, melancholic and extremely attractive Dubliners. But for the first time, Rooney relegates the female perspective to the periphery, pivoting the novel around the axis of uneasy brotherhood.
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Already separated by a decade – Peter is 32, a charismatic and successful Dublin lawyer, while awkward 22-year-old Ivan has just graduated from college – the Koubek brothers drift further apart after the death of their father. Peter self-medicates with Xanax and alcohol, seeking solace in his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, a brilliant academic, and Naomi, a bombshell college student who pays for her textbooks by selling nude photos online. Ivan, once hailed as a chess prodigy, competes unhappily in middling tournaments while freelancing listlessly as a data analyst. Then he meets Margaret, 14 years his senior and not quite divorced, and embarks on a passionate, unexpected romance.
Sally Rooney
Rooney takes her novel’s title from a chess term for a move that throws off the expected progression of the game. At the novel’s outset, the Koubek brothers are at loose ends, the expected narrative of their respective lives having unravelled. Ivan worries that he is past his prime and has wasted his life on a game, while Peter ruminates obsessively about his halcyon romance with Sylvia, which ended after a car accident left her in debilitating chronic pain. As they mourn what might have been, Intermezzo contemplates the potential of the unexpected detour. The first time Ivan kisses her, Margaret wonders, “And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
In her early novels, Rooney’s prose was clear and precise, deceptively simple in its directness. But Intermezzo, which shifts between the brothers’ perspectives, sees her experimenting with voice. Ivan’s sections are unvarnished and orderly, except when he’s in bed with Margaret, when they race and blur with ecstasy. Peter’s are characterized by fragmented prose that mirrors his distressed mental state, a literary effect amplified by Rooney’s habitual abstention from speech marks. “If anyone he knows. Peter is that you. Oh yes, I’m sorry. I was just thinking about my father. He died, you see. Not knowing. That I still. That we both, he didn’t know.” More compelling is Rooney’s choice to render grief as a void, forgoing flashbacks or descriptions of Ivan and Peter’s father; instead, the reader perceives their loss as a negative space, which shapes the story with its absence.
Rooney is also a frank, lucid writer of sex, and Intermezzo lingers in the bedroom – in Peter’s tortured longing for Sylvia and carnal lust for Naomi, and in the rapturous and tender exchanges between Ivan and Margaret: “You’re sure it’s nice? And again she says yes, yes, and he’s happy, even laughing. Okay, he says. For me as well. You look insanely beautiful, by the way.” At times, her command of realistic dialogue can make the reader squirm – not from prudishness but sheer vicarious embarrassment.
But while her characters are frequently overwhelmed by lust, the basis of their connection is more cerebral. Peter idolizes Sylvia’s command of a lecture hall, and his attraction to Naomi snaps into focus not when her friends tease him with her titillating photos, but when they lock eyes. “Flashing him a glance then: animal intelligence. Just between the two of him, he knew.” After meeting, Margaret and Ivan gaze at each other at a crowded pub table, “Belonging, it could not be clearer, to the same camp, separate from the rest.” In relationships, Rooney’s fiction advances the provocative position that discrepancies in age or power are neutralized by a pure intellectual connection. Still, the novel grapples with gendered expectations, as Margaret weighs her fear of embarrassment against the magnetic attraction she shares with Ivan, correctly assuming how it will be perceived. “I’m not trying to be disparaging,” Peter tells Ivan, “but do you think a normal woman of her age would want to hang around with someone in your situation?” This statement, delivered with devastating gentleness, obliterates the brothers’ tenuous relationship.
Not everything in Intermezzo works. Rooney, who has penned compelling and articulate arguments for Palestinian liberation and abortion rights, imbues her characters with equally progressive political views that are conspicuously weightless. Naomi’s entanglement with Dublin’s crushingly expensive housing market functions primarily as a plot device, propelling her into Peter’s apartment when she and her roommates are forcibly evicted from their illegal rental; throughout she remains a beautiful cipher, unbothered by her economic precarity. Though the novel occasionally detours into Margaret’s perspective, it never extends beyond Peter’s perceptions of Sylvia or Naomi, and as such the characters feel like stereotypes: suffering saint and manic pixie dream girl.
Though at times it falls short of its ambitions, Intermezzo reaffirms Rooney’s ability to capture the thrill and desperation of blooming romance, and to portray a microcosm of human existence with precision and insight. (An offhand mention by Peter of Simon Costigan, a character from Beautiful World, Where Are You, offers the intriguing suggestion of a cohesive Sally Rooney fictional universe). To say that Rooney’s novels are about relationships is true but incomplete; what she excels at is the study of uncertain, complicated romance. “Why not allow him, why not allow herself, at least the idea, the image, the future, at once impossible and not, enveloping them both in its mystery in the dark stillness of her quiet bedroom,” Margaret thinks. In Intermezzo, Rooney offers a compelling argument for choosing love over certainty.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article defined "intermezzo" in a musical sense; however, the book's title refers to chess term for a move that throws off the expected progression of the game. This version has been updated.