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Sally Rooney's ‘Intermezzo’: Adulting through grief and love
Summary
The millennial sensation’s new novel makes an unexpected move, but lacks the assured quality of her earlier bestsellers
Thirty-two-year-old barrister Peter Koubek and his brother Ivan, a competitive chess player a decade his junior, share a crippling loss in Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo. Their father, who immigrated from Slovakia in the 1980s, dies of cancer, and the vacuum beneath the placid surface of their quotidian lives in Dublin and West Ireland becomes only too apparent.
Following the funeral, the brothers reconsider how they are living their lives and who they love; Peter is medicating himself to sleep while living an outwardly successful life, and Ivan is struggling to pay his rent and transition to adulthood.
This grief is the immediate source of much introspection and attempted realignment of the status quo, but there are older wounds at play here. Both men know little about each other, and have had troubled relationships with their mother and her second family—which could explain their attraction to dignified, soothing beauties. Desire becomes the lens through which they progress through this difficult passage in their young lives.
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Peter is caught between the brilliant academic Sylvia, an old yet elusive love, who suffers untold damage following an accident, and Naomi, a risk-taking 23-year-old college student and illegal squatter who is evicted. Ivan is drawn to troubled Margaret, an arts centre manager who is 14 years older and has an alcoholic ex-husband.
The result is a sometimes frustratingly long-winded novel (about a hundred pages too long), lifted by lovely moments of open-hearted self-examination and lots of enjoyably ubiquitous Irish rain. At times, the pace lags and the central dramatic tension around the fraught relationship between the siblings is stretched too thin. Luckily, like most of Rooney’s work, this novel is still readable, thanks to the vivid, breathless quality of her prose and its exacting idiom, particularly in its typically well-articulated sex scenes.
Intermezzo offers a change in register from the millennial sensation’s previous novels. It is as compelling at the line level as Conversations with Friends and Normal People, her first two best-selling novels, yet feels less robust. It feels more sophisticated than her third novel, Beautiful World, Where are You?, with its stymied writer contemplating the point of art in a socio-politically doomed world.
Intermezzo ups the stakes, but is less gripping. Its key players, weirdly, seem too full of judgement for a generation we wouldn’t expect to consider what the rest of the town thinks of their consensual relationships. There is a lot of this looking over the shoulder, which feels odd, even if the setting is presumably a less cosmopolitan Ireland.
Importantly, do we still judge this “Salinger for the Snapchat generation" (as Rooney’s publisher anointed her early on) by tougher standards than those applied to novelists like J.D. Salinger, who depicted the woes of young people of his time? Maybe.
Millennials are often stereotyped as self-obsessed, and Rooney, a 33-year-old woman living in rural Ireland, may suffer via association. Regardless, if you are one of those Gen-Xers who struggle to relate to millennial angst, the sociopolitical milieu of this novel offers a gentler reckoning. It bridges generations in its accommodation of small-town morality, especially the way in which it allows one of its protagonists to be scandalised by the idea of a “throuple" (Peter eases into the idea when his girlfriends “unionise", negotiating the terms of their relationships together).
Intermezzo is strongest when it considers how the accident of birth can force dissimilar individuals into the most consistent bond of their lives.Ivan is wonderfully geeky and conscientious in a way that is easily assimilated with others of his generation (Gen Z, typically more anti-establishment). He obsesses over every interaction with the same intensity he applies to his movement of a rook, buys only second-hand clothing except for underwear, and does not fly, out of concern for the planet. But his beliefs are not such a big deal for the other chess geeks and normies he hangs out with—they affect his brother, perhaps, the most.
Peter is intent on fitting in with the Irish elite and their commonly held notions of success, aware that he has to strive for what most of his peers took for granted. Any neat notion about which sibling is more certain of himself is upended when they spar, or open themselves up to us, in heartfelt stream-of-consciousness monologues. The novel is full of poetically ungrammatical fragments, which speak much louder than the terse bits of dialogue that are actually voiced. Yet, the hints of unpleasantness in both men’s characters seems less nuanced. There are mentions of Ivan’s incel-adjacent tendencies, and a suggestion that Peter gets off on uneven power dynamics. Still, the former’s quirks are well-established, while the latter’s suicidal tendencies are not quite believable.
Similarly, questions of race and class, always at the forefront of Rooney’s fiction, raise themselves only briefly through the brothers’ Slovakian ancestry. Naomi’s vulnerable social standing is raised, again in too slight a manner. She is evicted from the building she is squatting in, and she makes a living partly by selling pornographic photographs of herself. However, the nuances of these realities—usually exploited to the point of melodrama in Rooney’s novels—are not fully explored as they were, quite beautifully, in the central couple’s dynamic in Normal People.
This could be because of an adult, intermediate effect that Rooney strives for. When their father dies, these young men find themselves at a juncture in their lives—the “intermezzo" of the title could signify an interlude in an artistic work or, given its somewhat contrived theme, an unexpected chess move. Contrived, because none of the characters really seem to make much progress on the chess board.
The novel also asks us to be our own witness to change: “Easier to perceive the way the years accumulate in others. For Anne there must be such a Margaret, who has been one thing and is now another, while Margaret looking at her own life sees only the onwardly flowing blur of all experience." How far, Intermezzo stresses, can we stretch our self-imposed boundaries to live our best life?
It would be interesting to see Rooney explore this theme again and with more unfettered energy. This novel, one hopes, is just an unexpected parry before a more characteristic gambit by the writer, whose endgame many are watching with interest.
Rajni George is a writer and editor based in south India.
