There is nothing like death to set the teeth of the living on edge. When Peter and Ivan lose their father, their lives begin to unravel in ways that are both unexpected and unnerving.
Ivan, a data analyst and gifted chess player, starts losing competitive games and then becomes involved in a relationship with Margaret, a woman many years his senior. Peter, a successful human-rights lawyer, finds himself involved in an increasingly complicated triangular relationship with Naomi, a student 10 years his junior, and Sylvia, a college lecturer, who is his exact contemporary and former partner.
Sally Rooney’s latest novel applies her formidable emotional intelligence to tracing the aftershocks of grief in the lives of two brothers, united in their often unacknowledged sorrow, but deeply divided by their forms of engagement with the world. Ivan is socially awkward and intense while Peter is unfailingly suave and driven.
Complex human entanglements are an abiding concern of Rooney’s, as is intergenerational contact. Her very first novel, Conversations with Friends (2017) saw two students, Frances and Bobbi, become involved with an older couple, Melissa and Nick. In Intermezzo, the conversations continue but are darkened by the knowledge of irrevocable loss. In Normal People (2018), Marianne and Connell were lost in the pressing emotional demands of the present whereas time in Intermezzo is no longer a remote horizon. The death of the father marks a before and an after, with Peter and Ivan struggling to come to terms with what this “after” tells them about what came before.
What marks Sally Rooney out as a writer is her consistent interest in the possibilities of form. In Conversations with Friends, and Normal People, it was the move away from the lushness of a poeticised prose that had often characterised Irish writing in favour of a sparer, more direct engagement with language. In Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), the emails exchanged between Alice and Eileen were a contemporary take on the older form of the epistolary novel.
In her latest fiction, Rooney employs a stream-of-consciousness technique to capture the inner turmoil of Peter as his world becomes fragmented and gradually drained of meaning. There is a Bloom-like quality to Peter’s ramblings around Dublin, his eye for urban detail ghosted by anxieties around the nature of love and fidelity: “Past the old bank now towards Thomas Street and Sylvia’s reply vibrates in his pocket, against his hip. Used to have a different ringtone for her messages, didn’t he. In the old days, Dublin in the rare etc. Can’t remember now how it sounded.”
The formal experiments are never idle but always at the service of a desire for emotional precision, for a more satisfactory rendering of the boundless complexity of the inner life.
Putting sex on the page is a high-risk enterprise. It is no small part of Rooney’s achievement that she portrays physical desire with both tact and tenderness, without giving in to soft-focus sentimentalism
Alice writing to her friend Eileen in Beautiful World claims that: “Our ways of thinking and speaking about sexuality seem so limited, compared to the exhausting and debilitating power of sexuality itself as we experience it in our lives.” The nature and prerogatives of sexual experience have long been a source of wonder in Rooney’s fiction, from the crossed lines of Conversations with Friends to the tentative couplings of Normal People and the deliberate reflectiveness of Beautiful World. Intermezzo maintains this curiosity and is remarkable for its deft and moving handling of desire and physical intimacy.
Putting sex on the page is a high-risk enterprise. Parody is the always unwelcome guest at the feast of the flesh. It is no small part of Rooney’s achievement in her latest novel that she portrays physical desire with tact and tenderness, without giving in to soft-focus sentimentalism. As male writers – Tolstoy, Flaubert, Lawrence – have characteristically had no qualms about describing female encounters with the sexual, it is a welcome change to have a female writer explore the nature and figures of both male and female sexual experience.
Of course, the characters in Intermezzo have minds as well as bodies. For Ivan, who is intensely cerebral, this duality is indeed a recurrent puzzle for him – how to make the life of the mind cohere with the desires of the body. In Rooney’s evolving fictional world, the two most recent novels differ from the earlier ones in their explicit incorporation of ideas.
Climate modelling, formal logic, ecological aesthetics, the Napoleonic wars, are all topics that cross the radars of the different characters, at different moments; and stitched into the novel itself are lines from, among others, Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Keats, Sontag, Eliot and Joyce. However, this is not a gratuitous display of erudition, a vanity fair of learning; it reflects a clear wish to give the characters in Intermezzo fully realised lives, where they do not simply emote but have a legitimate desire to make sense of the abstract systems that also govern our existence.
That one of these systems might have more to do with the divine than the secular is picked up by Ivan towards the end of the novel, when he is standing outside the Pro-Cathedral on Marlborough Street, and asks his brother directly, ”'You believe in God?’” Ivan’s question echoes a preoccupation in the novel with the role and value of religious belief in the present moment, echoing the troubled piety of Simon in Beautiful World.
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In a society recovering from the brutal machinations of clericalism, having a serious conversation about religion can seem like its own form of heresy. Rooney, however, is determined to think through how humans look for a moral compass and larger structures of meaning in their lives and the different kinds of resources they draw on to do this.
Resources come in material as well as spiritual forms, and Rooney is as attentive as ever to what happens when these material forms end up in the hands of the few rather than the many. The fault lines of entitlement that run through Normal People, with Connell’s mother working as a domestic cleaner in Marianne’s house, emerge in Peter’s uneasy relationship – part envy, part disdain – with his colleagues in the Law Library in Intermezzo. The narrator notes: ‘What they were born to be, he has to work for.’ His girlfriend, Naomi, is violently assaulted during an illegal eviction where, predictably, she, rather than her assailants, is arrested for troubling the peace.
The dark stain of dispossession runs through the novel as the host of twenty- and thirtysomethings constantly grapple with the native inheritocracy and see their futures repeatedly mortgaged to corporate greed. The precariousness that haunts their lives is material as much as it is emotional.
Rooney’s particular genius lies in a kind of conversational drama where her characters tease out every facet of a predicament
Chess, for Ivan, is a bulwark against precariousness. The game seems to afford the mind powers that exclude vulnerability. Yet, as the novel progresses, he realises how intensely emotional the game is, his feelings inseparable from the stakes involved in winning or losing. Life takes on the allure of the game: “Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you knew how to live.”
How to live is a question that has always pursued Rooney’s characters, but the question takes on a new edge in Intermezzo as events bring suffering and grief in their wake. Sylvia, one of the two women in the love triangle, has a serious car accident at the age of 25, which condemns her to a lifetime of chronic pain. Margaret, Ivan’s lover, has gone through a painful separation from an alcoholic husband, and has to endure her mother’s tut-tutting censure. The remembered freedoms of college days are just that: memories.
How to live, then, when so many are quick to judge and decree what “normal people” look like and how they should behave? Rooney’s particular genius lies in a kind of conversational drama where her characters tease out every facet of a predicament. Motives and assumptions are carefully sifted through, and the reader is compelled to follow the shifting logics of the different characters. There are no grandiose conclusions, only tentative arrangements to work out how to continue the business of living while preserving the dignity of all involved.
One meaning of “intermezzo” is a movement coming between major sections of an extended musical work. Conversations with Friends and Normal People might be seen as the treatment of the major section of youth and college. Beautiful World, and now Intermezzo, are bringing the reader towards the middle years. This is the period – before the second major section of maturity and death – where, even as certain options narrow, responsibilities are assumed, but where everything still remains tentative, on this side of possibility.
Intermezzo starts with a funeral but does not end in a wedding. In the ultimate choices made by Peter, Ivan, Margret, Naomi and Sylvia, social norms are quietly contested rather than triumphantly reaffirmed. This bold, adventurous and captivating novel is a major addition to a body of work that never fails to surprise and engage.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
Further reading
The Amendments (Picador, 2024) by Niamh Mulvey. An absorbing and profoundly persuasive journey through generations of Irish life in search of the often traumatic forces that continue to shape contemporary Irish society. Mulvey is particularly adept at tracing the corrosive power of secrets and the ability of the unspoken to contaminate the public and private lives of a people.
Close to Home (Penguin, 2023) by Michael Magee. In this engaging, moving, and inventive novel, Michael Magee traces with forensic precision the trip wires of social class and the toxic afterlife of conflict as the hero, Sean, figures out what happens when you get closer to what home might mean in his native Belfast.
This Happy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020) by Niamh Campbell is a compelling account of a relationship between a younger woman and older man that is animated by the author’s incisive intelligence and beguiling prose. Campbell is unsparing in her depictions of the forms of hypocrisy that colour the social relations in the lives of her characters.
