It's not every author who could by turns inspire a book launch party complete with book-themed jigsaw puzzles and a celebrity guest list, and also wield her substantial platform as a force for good, writing about social issues ranging from the housing crisis to the Israel-Gaza War.
With fame like this, it’s conceivable that Sally Rooney faces each new project with a version of the question, 'How should I proceed?’ With Intermezzo, her latest work, the author has found the universal within the personal once more, asking instead through her characters, ‘How should we live?’
The novel follows two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, as they grapple with the recent death of their father. Peter is an outwardly impressive 32-year-old junior barrister who self-medicates with alcohol and pills and volleys between two romantic interests, while Ivan, a 22-year-old chess champion, struggles to reclaim his stature as a competitor, and finds himself falling for an older woman.
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In the dust of their shared grief, the brothers’ long held rivalries are stirred up, as the two are punted headlong into a new phase of adulthood: becoming two men their father will never know. Living up to her status as the great chronicler of the millennial experience, Rooney plumbs this new phase of life, mining it for all its terrible, transformative and mundane power.
This is a very different Rooney novel - not least because it concerns two brothers, rather than friends or lovers. While Conversations with Friends and Normal People built her reputation for long, fraught silences, spartan prose and almost clinical social analysis, Intermezzo babbles beautifully with speech - both internal and spoken. Rooney allows us access inside both mens' heads, revealing wildly differing lived experiences.
Cultured, ambitious and devastatingly insecure about his background, Peter is a portrait of young disillusionment. Driven by "the white light of his own righteousness", he’s grappling for meaning in a job he feels increasingly cynical about.
No longer knowing what to fight for, he romanticises his past, particularly his relationship with Sylvia: his college girlfriend who insisted they break up after a terrible accident left her unable to have sex. His thoughts are sharp, staccato statements, freewheeling from one into the next, or curtailed by self-opprobrium or disdain for others.
Ivan's, on the other hand, are broad and logical, his speech often endearingly flat and direct. He is the socially awkward outcast who longs to be seen as "normal" and grown up by his brother. Relatively inexperienced in love, his understanding of human relationships blossoms once he meets Margaret, a 36-year-old divorcée who works in an arts centre in Leitrim, where Ivan plays an exhibition chess game.
Margaret’s own life thrown into disarray by their affair. Although conflicted by their sizeable age gap, her former life comes to feel "misshapen" once their romance begins, offering a glimpse at a non-traditional way of living that she had not envisaged.
Though the broader reading public still associate Rooney with sparse, emotionally precise prose, here she lets her well-honed literary sensibilities loose. Rooney has spoken about the influence of James Joyce on her work and this novel in particular, and the mark of Joyce is there in certain sentences. The sentences alternate between complex, circular puzzles and resonant Impressionistic paintings in words that bounce off the page.
As in her former books, her depiction of sex and sexuality raises more questions about millennial life than it answers.
The sight of the Four Courts is rendered as, "copper stepped saucer dome over Portland stone balustraded parapet, dirty green cap in daylight", a musical construction so joyous in her application of language that it verges on sprung rhythm, the exultant poetic meter developed by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Her dialogue is, as ever, compulsively addictive, from Ivan's simple 'Ahs' and 'Rights' that express volumes, to Peter's acerbic talent for arguing, to the casual bargaining of his girlfriend Naomi, recently homeless and getting by on cash injections from Peter.
What was almost most surprising, however, are the moments of restraint Rooney does exhibit, a wise sense of where to let the reader’s imagination kick in. When Ivan and Margaret go to bed for the first time, he thinks, "Who can explain such a thing, and why even try to explain: an understanding shared between two people." It’s a deeply satisfying sign of confidence from a writer who is well able to ‘eff’ the ineffable, should she so wish.
Naturally, she does ‘eff’ that particular ineffable experience elsewhere: can it be a Rooney novel without at least one sex scene? Intermezzo’s are some of the most endearing, thought-provoking ones rendered in recent years, full of tenderness and endearing vulnerability.
As in her former books, her depiction of sex and sexuality raises more questions about millennial life than it answers. Her saintly depiction of Sylvia, a lauded academic with a literal band of "disciples", an almost endless capacity for compassion and an inability to have sex due to her accident, is a curious one. Margaret, meanwhile, actively avoids thinking about "the profound and so carefully concealed sexual personalities of others".
They stand in contrast with Naomi, Peter’s casual girlfriend who sells X-rated photos online, who begs for degradation in bed and embraces her sexuality. As disparate as these three women can seem, it could be that Rooney is showing how much scope there is for variety in human relationships, other ways of being.
Rooney has built a career off of asking difficult questions through her characters: Can love overcome class divides? Can we ever be creatively, morally and emotionally fulfilled under a late capitalist system? Do you even fancy me?
Here, she asks a far simpler one: How can we live the right life for ourselves? It’s a meaty question and Intermezzo is a meaty answer, and although at times it runs on a bit too much, it is certainly one that will reward rereading. In this way, the novel itself lives up to its title: a disruptive interlude between what came before and what will come from one of the most important writers of our time.
Intermezzo is published by Faber
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