Review: Sally Rooney’s ‘Intermezzo’ is occasionally interesting, frequently frustrating and ultimately insufficient
Sally Rooney in an undated photo (Wikipedia Commons).Grief is a discontinuous thing. Even when a death can be anticipated, as at the end of a long illness, the sorrow can arrive suddenly and just as suddenly ebb, erupting into our lives at unexpected moments, set off by unlikely stimuli. We go on with our lives, our dramas and loves, yet with that absence lingering always in the wings.
This irregularity characterizes Intermezzo, the occasionally interesting, frequently frustrating, ultimately insufficient fourth novel from the Irish writer Sally Rooney. It begins soon after the funeral of Mr. Koubek, a Slovak immigrant and late father of Peter and Ivan. Peter, the eldest, is a Dublin lawyer who works humanitarian cases and is very handsome. Ivan, 22, is a decade younger, a chess prodigy who, it turns out, is also quite handsome. (In Rooney’s books, good people are never ugly or even plain.) Peter is arrogant, Ivan antisocial, and for some years their relationship has been cordial at best; their father’s death pushes them even farther apart. “At one time Ivan’s feelings towards [Peter] were more negative, even approaching full enmity, but he would now characterize the feelings as neutral,” Rooney writes.
Rooney mirrors this division in her narrative structure, alternating their perspectives with each chapter. While occasionally speaking to one another, their stories very rarely intersect. Ivan, with a “certain kind of panache in his absolute disregard for the material world,” falls for Margaret, a 36-year-old divorcée, while teaching a chess clinic in the west of Ireland. Awkward and, at least at the beginning, described as if he is on the autism spectrum, Ivan is depicted as having an intense awareness of social codes, with his interior monologue unspooling with an objectified inner logic, as if seeing himself from without.
“He begins to experience,” while looking at Margaret, “an involuntary mental image of kissing her on the mouth: not even really an image, but an idea of an image, sort of a realization that it will be possible to visualize this at some later point, what it would be like to kiss her, a promise of enjoyment simply to picture himself doing that.” Not for nothing does his brother consider him a kind of machine.
Margaret also gets her say. For some years she was married to a local drunk, whose malady she feels received much more sympathy than her own suffering. Where Ivan cannot notice social norms, she is hard in their grip, and even as their relationship turns to love, she lives with the anticipation of someone in her small community discovering them. “To offer an explanation,” she reflects early on, “would suggest that something is in need of explaining, raising the spectre of other, alternative explanations, which have yet occurred to no one.” Her duty is to make sure they never do.
Meanwhile, Peter begins to self-destruct in Dublin, cycling among the courts, his much-younger girlfriend Naomi, and Sylvia, a professor and onetime love of his life, now suffering from incurable chronic pain. Peter’s chapters proceed with a staccato stream of consciousness, threading together thoughts, references, conversation fragments and sense impressions. In the Ivan and Margaret sections, Rooney’s prose is dutiful, controlled; but her sympathies are with Peter. His conversations with Sylvia are fluid, allusive, philosophical; his sex with Naomi playful and jagged. He wanders a Dublin that Rooney knows well, and even his concerns—debate club, the Irish housing crisis, God—reflect her own. When he notices how the Liffey is “dissected by the glitter of sunlight,” or how the sky above Trinity College can seem like “a glass bowl struck and resounding,” you sense Rooney wandering the city, gathering details.
These themes—social codes, generational gaps, the irresolvable problem of love—run through the entire novel. Peter looks with disgust on Ivan’s relationship with the much older Margaret, even though he is entangled with the equally young Naomi. Rooney mines their relationship for observational comedy, the millennial making note of the zoomer who only makes video calls and leaves her friends long voice memos. It’s funny, for a while. But the novelist’s heart just isn’t in it, and though both Margaret and Peter fret about their age, it doesn’t lead to significant tension within their own relationships. The conflict comes from outside: what the community will think, what their families will say. Though Rooney is ostensibly interested in the relationships among people in the novel, very little of interest happens in the present, in those moments they spend together.
This results in a genuine dramatic problem. In Intermezzo, the most interesting and significant things have already happened, deflating any potential tension. This is especially true regarding the two brothers. Ivan, we are told, had a bit of a men’s rights activist phase, leading to fights with Peter, the strident leftist. Late in the book, the remembrance of how Ivan used to “sit there saying feminism is evil, or women make up lies about being raped” sets off a major fight between them. Yet Ivan no longer believes these things; and however hypocritical his moral posturing, Peter’s politics are not undermined by his self-righteousness.
This point of real substantive conflict is smoothed over, being safely in the past, along with almost everything in their lives of dramatic or thematic weight. You could read this as the hangover of grief, how in their desperation to avoid looking their loss in the face, the brothers are dredging up a comfortingly familiar conflict. But the decision also seems a fearful one, as if Rooney is worried we will not believe either brother worthy of love should their souls become too compromised.
From the natural details to character traits, much of this feels like adornment, neither deepening the themes nor furthering any narrative. Does it matter that “for environmental reasons [Ivan] stopped purchasing new clothes at the age of nineteen”? It has no impact on his conduct, or how he treats Margaret, or what she thinks of him. It’s a description that feels accurate to a type of person you meet in life, but not true to the character Rooney is constructing. So, too, the discussion of Dublin’s housing crisis, which serves largely to drive Peter and Naomi under the same roof.
This serves Sylvia the worst. A professor and onetime debate champion, Sylvia was once essentially married to Peter until, following a horrible, unspecified accident, she broke things off. Rooney writes movingly of their past relationship, their literary conversations, and Peter’s persistent feelings. Though emotional, this ends up serving a largely descriptive purpose, signifying the depth of their relationship without really plumbing it. When Rooney juxtaposes “her sincere and transcendent love of Christ” with “his ironic sort of joking but then at times terrifyingly real and serious fear of Christ,” you expect that this might lead somewhere. It does not, reducing these ultimate questions to mere color, as if they were a flock of seagulls or the scent of a woman’s perfume.
The result is a novel in which very little happens, and when something does—as when Ivan blocks Peter’s telephone number, or Peter confronts his brother at their dead father’s house—it feels oddly disconnected from Rooney’s thematic concerns. Perhaps she means to structurally reflect the discontinuity of grief, in which mourning can supercharge the most mundane situations, freighting them with unexpectedly shattering emotions before ebbing away, leaving us only with the everyday. Their father remains an absent presence; we learn more about his cancer treatment than his personality. His death is ostensibly at the center of their lives. But like so much in this surprisingly light novel, it ends up on the periphery.
In opera, a musical intermezzo serves to connect one act to another. Rooney’s novel ends up as an overlong interlude, poised between significant moments, not substantial enough to compose its own movement. Much of life is like this, of course: petty, insignificant, banal. But literature ought to be full, symphonic, more than life, and Intermezzo is only the intermission.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Rooney Returns,” in the November 2024, issue.
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