Review: Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo

Written by Nina Follows

Black and white and Yves Klein Blue, you’ve probably seen it all over Instagram. From among carefully curated what’s in my bags, to hypnotising snaps of Intermezzo-themed chess boards and dog bowls in Waterstones Piccadilly, I certainly have. With the help of hoards of ‘booktokers,’ Faber and Faber put in a serious shift marketing this one. Before it had even been published (on the 24th September), I felt like everyone and their sleek grey whippet had read and was singing the praises of Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s fourth novel.

33-year-old Irish writer Rooney hardly needs introducing, having shot to fame a few years ago with her bestselling second novel Normal People (2018) and its 2020 hit BBC TV adaptation starring heartthrobs Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones. The ensuing 2022 adaptation of her celebrated debut novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), met with more ambivalent reviews, however, as did her much-anticipated third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). While the latter’s characters grappled self-consciously (and often over email) with writing, success and their ethical implications, its experimentation with aesthetics and lyricism often felt like something of a supplementary afterthought. Though skilfully written, the novel cast doubt on the ethics of writing and reading fiction, a gratuity in an age of global catastrophe, and yet … still existed as a novel, leaving readers and writer in a slightly uncomfortable limbo.

Thankfully, with Intermezzo Rooney leaves this neo-epistolary mode behind and casts off any awkward self-consciousness to produce a pleasurably emotionally involved, stylistically satisfying, and refreshingly fictional novel. Her typical fixation with tormented genius is refracted from the sphere of writing and academia into two new spheres — law and chess — as we follow the separate Dublin-based lives of brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek in the wake of their father’s death. Not only must they navigate grief, but also their fraternal relationship fraught with assorted long-brewing complexes. Also at play is a messy relationship with their mother, various complicated networks of sex and desire, and intermittent substance abuse. From the opening page, Peter, a brilliantly successful lawyer, ‘thirty-two [with] a graduate degree in philosophy,’ regards twenty-two-year-old Ivan, a chess prodigy with ceramic braces and limited social skills, with pitying distaste. But things are, of course, more complex than it may at first seem. Peter finds himself racked not only by grief, guilt, and existential uncertainty, but also incongruous loves for two radically different women, while Ivan embarks on a passionate affair with a thirty-six-year-old married one.

Romantically, Peter is in something of a pickle. Previously half of a glorious ‘Rooneyan’ academic power couple, his relationship with charismatic Sylvia ended on ambiguous terms after a traffic-accident left her with debilitating chronic pain. Since then, he has casually seduced numerous women but fallen, to his slight embarrassment, for Naomi, a nonchalant college student selling explicit images online to make ends meet, whom Peter now financially supports to no small degree. Sylvia’s forced abstinence highlights the sometimes onerous intersection of disability and desire, while Naomi’s overt sexuality, casual sadomasochism and general precarity call into question the nature and implications of today’s sexual culture of internet porn and OnlyFans — where body positive, liberated feminism intersects with capitalist exploitation and violent misogynistic undertones. Despite an initial emphasis on lust and financial transaction, a tender relationship evolves between this pair, which only complicates Peter’s situation. As he reckons with his love for both Naomi and Sylvia (a societally unacceptable, yet crucially still existent duality), Rooney articulates with deft, tragic lyricism his lonely paralysis under the weight of nostalgia, indecision and self-loathing. Young Ivan, on the other hand, though still struggling with grief, troubled maternal relations, a fruitless job search, and the problem of housing his beloved dog, Alexei, falls quite simply and rapidly head-over-heels for Margaret, the manager of a small-town community arts centre where he performs at a chess event. By contrast to the complex web in which Peter finds himself caught, Ivan’s immediate and absolute devotion might feel somewhat inauthentic, but then again, perhaps in this Rooney articulates exactly the dizzying naive adoration of a first love. Margaret, meanwhile, deliberates at length, weighed down by paranoia about the potentially disastrous social implications of such a scandalous dalliance, but also desiring intimacy and affection after a strenuous relationship with her alcoholic husband.

While also fitting in its musical evocations, Intermezzo’s title refers to a tactical chess move which forces one’s opponent to react immediately to an unexpected modulation in play. This slightly cryptic metaphor seems fitting as the plot follows characters navigating various tumultuous intersections of grief and tense familial relations, desire and social taboo, loneliness and despair but also joy and companionship, financial precarity and dependency. To say nothing of the recurring, overarching existential questions about what ‘meaning' might be found in all of this. The novel offers a strikingly nuanced psychological study, but thankfully one in which characters actually interact in the evocatively tactile flesh — a comforting proximity following some of Rooney’s previous long-distance relationships sustained over text or email. And these are, as ever, relationships of authentic complexity. Moments of tension and pain are felt in their compelling tenderness, and not ‘resolved’ by any wave of an indulgent magic fictional wand. Miraculously, however, the novel somehow remains optimistic and uplifting. In the wake of loss, characters seem acutely aware of the fleeting beauty of life, and the value of spending time with loved ones. Though perhaps lost within life’s ‘bigger picture,’ Rooney’s characters take existential comfort in moments of emotional and physical intimacy. Ivan’s encounter with Margaret takes on existential significance — ‘Strong, powerful feelings of happiness, satisfaction, protectiveness. … To have met her like this: beautiful, perfect. A life worth living, yes’ — while Margaret also glimpses a possible liberated philosophy in their ‘improper’ but pleasurable encounter: ‘And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?’ Intermezzo repeatedly proposed that such moments might be enjoyed in their intricate tensions and sensorial satisfactions, rather than needing to be scoured for any ultimately non-existent coherence or resolution. This appreciative compulsion also applies to aesthetic pleasures, as are repeatedly foregrounded in redemptive moments of peace amidst a world in decline. Grief perhaps unexpectedly casts everyday moments in resplendent sensorial delicacy: ‘it is a pleasure, isn’t it, on a crisp September night in Dublin to walk with long free strides along a quiet street. In the prime of his life. Incumbent on him now to enjoy such fleeting pleasures. Next minute might die.’ Such glimpses of solace might on their own seem transitory amidst otherwise pervasive despair, but become powerful in their accumulation.

Never far from her trusty Trinity College backdrop, Rooney undeniably still writes the world she inhabits. And yet Intermezzo feels more fictional than her prior works in its variety of more fully psychologically developed characters and their interactions. This is not to say that the self-proclaimed Marxist foregoes her characteristic meditations on pressing social issues, however, in fact seeming to defend fiction as a tool with which to ‘handle’ reality: ‘To imagine also is life: the life that is only imagined.’ Her usual engagement with social inequalities, capitalist exploitation and climate disaster can still be found, if more subtly integrated in the narrative than previously: Ivan neither travels by air nor buys new clothes, while Peter, desperate to assimilate into the posh TCD crowd, has previously been ashamed of his Slovakian surname. Naomi’s eviction serves as a more subtle indictment of Dublin’s housing crisis and the inequalities of the rental market than, for example, Marianne and Connell’s conversation in Normal People about the unfairness of a housing development left unfinished. Through Margaret’s work at a rural arts centre, meanwhile, the novel meditates on the value of arts in communities beyond capital cities, and offers a glimpse of a valuable and fulfilling work, rather than only impractical reflections on the ethics of all kinds of labour.

Amidst contemplation of broader issues, however, Rooney’s spare yet elegantly indulgent prose never leaves far behind the novel’s primary triumph of aesthetics. Particularly evocative are movements through the city mapped out via streams of consciousness, intervals of diaphanous exchange between subjects and their surroundings which situate the novel as a contemporary continuation of Dublin’s rich Joycean tradition. Intermezzo achieves a liquid flow of introspection, with a style artfully adapted to articulate different characters’ perspectives and mental states. While Peter’s tormented racing thoughts are expressed by brisk syntax frequently eliding subjects or verbs, the narrative voices associated with Margaret and Ivan shift to articulate their more measured, logical approaches. Rooney’s dialogue is generally smooth and natural, so integrated into the general narrative that lines between thought and speech are often blurred. Some conversations, deliberations and detailed narrations of chess games might drag on slightly, but this is counterbalanced by the fantastic speed and gratification of Rooney’s romantic intrigues and frequent sex scenes. Her continually gliding prose briskly disbands any accumulating sense of over-indulgence, however. For me, Intermezzo’s most profound achievement lies in its strikingly meditative mode. This is an accumulation of rhetorical questions rather than answers about the various evoked elements of contemporary life. But if all remains unresolved in Rooney’s characteristic fashion, this seems justifiably so given how tangibly irresolvable her compelling realism show life itself to be. And the book manages to make such an inconclusive openness reassuring, rather than nihilistically daunting, drawing to a close with a life-affirming acceptance of life’s fragile uncertainty: ‘Nothing is fixed … It doesn’t always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.’

Also remarkable is Rooney’s lyricism and the work’s rich intertextuality. Her matured, delicate prose is strewn lushly with literary and philosophical allusions, from Wittgenstein to Hamlet via dashes of Eliot and Yeats. From the get-go, snippets of poetry elevate even mundane moments into objects of aesthetic meditation. Naomi’s musty flat summons a Larkin line in Peter’s mind (‘Fragrance of perfume, sweat and cannabis. In whose blent air all our compulsions meet.’), while a Keatsean allusion to Sylvia ‘Forever warm and still to be enjoyed’ suggests a certain universal poignance in Peter’s fantasies. It might seem a little soon to put Rooney on a par with Shakespeare, but Peter’s lamentation of his grey, grief-shrouded surroundings — ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’ — resonates just as fittingly in twenty-first century Dublin as in Hamlet’s sixteenth-century Elsinore. By means of such allusions, Rooney’s characters and emotions become transhistorical, universally recognisable in their fraught humanity. There is a lingering sense of truth in the work, if paradoxically only in fleeting moments of aesthetic resonance. If Rooney’s own evident writerly skill wasn’t enough, this ultra-literary dimension also serves to defy those who have tried to brush her work off as some kind of ‘chick lit’ — most famously Will Self’s bitter dismissal of her earlier novels as ‘very simple stuff with no literary ambition.’ Such criticism feels entirely misogynistic, demonstrating a persisting patriarchal inability to admit the talent and success of a young, female and — God forbid — Marxist writer.

Rooney has somehow once again managed to placate demand for both easy-reading fiction and something more profound and aesthetically striking. And to explore both depths of misery and ecstatic heights of sensorial and intellectual pleasure. After all, as her characters realise, ‘That is life as well as loss and pain.’  Intermezzo is rich and thought-provoking, offering an attentive vision of our age, but also a degree of escapism in moments of sensuous pleasure. Yes, it might feel a little long (437 pages! a modern rarity!) and somewhat protracted in parts, but abundant thrills suffice to make the reading almost always gratifying. If perhaps occasionally over-indulgent, it offers a reassuringly recognisable, lyrically therapeutic, yet socially aware companion to the young reader navigating the sometimes irresolvable complexities and precarities of contemporary life. I’m sure it could be turned into another hit TV series — it certainly has enough sex, and gorgeously complicated characters — but this might sacrifice what is most delightful about the novel: its fluid streams of consciousness, its spare but close attention to details of bodily warmth, pleasing textures, and passing thoughts. Rooney’s brilliance lies in precisely in the sense of subjectivity contained within and expanding miraculously beyond her succinct sentences. At times depressively catastrophising, at others upliftingly life-affirming, Rooney ultimately hints at an alternative approach to life, savouring isolated moments of peace, beauty and pleasure amidst chaos and contradiction, rather than having to ‘work everything out.’ Beyond resolution, she rather recognises a comfort in the sheer inextricability of her characters: ‘All of them loved and complicatedly needed, for better or for worse. Inextricable. The tangled web.’ The questions raised in her previous work (i.e. how we can write and enjoy escapist fiction in an age of pressing global crisis) remain largely unresolved, but it seems that as long as people are making and reading fiction, Rooney ought to keep writing. I wouldn’t be surprised if she eventually offered us an ‘answer’ of sorts, an ultimate philosophical meditation on ethical modes of human interaction and cultural consumption.