Fiction

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 464 pp. Hardback, $29.00.

Expectations were running high for Sally Rooney’s fourth novel. The author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends has been dubbed by some the first great millennial author and has been feted in critical and popular circles. Rooney is known for her understated style and ability to capture modern romantic and sexual encounters with startling naturalism, and I would guess that most readers will read Intermezzo for its treatment of complex romantic entanglements. But to read the novel only in this way would be a mistake.

The novel follows two brothers in the wake of their father’s death. The younger brother, Ivan, is a one-time chess prodigy and recent college grad who finds himself in a relationship with Margaret, who is more than a decade older. Peter, the elder brother, is a successful lawyer in his early thirties who is navigating a complex situationship with his former college girlfriend and best friend, Sylvia, and a more transactional, seemingly casual relationship with Naomi, who is Ivan’s age and seems to show up most often when she needs money.

Intermezzo is far more experimental and narratively adventurous than Rooney’s earlier novels.

Rooney’s characters can be exasperating and magnetic in equal measure. Perhaps because she writes so often about younger people, emotional immaturity and problems with communication drive many of the central conflicts in her books. This is initially true of Ivan, the chess player who is self-conscious about his own social awkwardness. (Rooney suggests that he may be on the autism spectrum.) But Peter is self-aware, competent. Musing about his brother at one point, Ivan thinks: “Peter is the kind of person who goes along the surface of life very smoothly. He talks on the phone a lot and eats in restaurants and says that schools of philosophy have been refuted.” But of course, the irony of Ivan’s impression of his older brother is that it is fiercely contradicted by what the reader knows to be the roiling inner consciousness of Peter, who is neurotic, intellectual, and plagued by the moral conundrum of his unconventional relationships. This frustrating interior life is made possible by an innovative shift in Rooney’s style.

Unlike Sally Rooney’s earlier novels, Intermezzo does not open itself to the reader easily. For pages, it is unclear who is narrating, where we are, or what we are meant to make of the figures coming into view. It took reading the first chapter twice before I could identify what would become the familiar rhythms of Peter’s train of thought. Who is this chummy-sounding narrator who seems to be a character in the story—but also not? Only through re-reading the opening chapter could I see that the novel begins not at a funeral, as its opening paragraph seems to suggest, but rather as part of a stream-of-conscious memory filtered through the focalized perspective of Peter as he walks through Dublin. This is perhaps a flaw, but once one gets past it, the novel rushes forward with addictive force as the chapters mostly alternate between Peter and Ivan, following their loosely connected lives.

In this regard, Intermezzo is far more experimental and narratively adventurous than Rooney’s earlier novels. Sure, other Rooney novels move back and forth between different narrative points of view, as in Normal People, but the chapters that follow Peter in Intermezzo feel much more like the fragmented streams of consciousness of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. That Peter is so often walking the streets of Dublin lost in thought makes the Joycean connections that much more pronounced; Brandon Taylor has recently called this “Rooney in her modernist drag.” But drag suggests a kind of performative aspect that doesn’t quite fit. And while the leap into this new voice is jarring at first, once one finds its rhythms, it feels a natural extension of the rich characterization that has been Rooney’s trademark all along. When we’re in Ivan’s chapters, the view of the world is much more linear, much more logical—as befits the chess-playing physics student.

Perhaps because Ivan’s chapters are much more transparent and realist, they feel more similar to the style one finds in Rooney’s other works. For this reason, and also because we are privy to Margaret’s perspective as well, readers of Intermezzo seem to find Ivan’s romantic and emotional arc to be the central one of the narrative. Indeed, Rooney excerpted a part of Ivan and Margaret’s narrative in the New Yorker prior to the novel’s publication and in interviews has revealed that the story began as one about Ivan and Margaret; the addition of Peter’s narrative only came later. But these are red herrings.

Does this novel showcase complicated romantic relationships, sex, and gut-wrenching scenes of desire? Yes, and they’re important to the emotional development of the characters. But ultimately, this is a novel about brothers and about the tricky nature of grief—grief over the loss of their father but also over relationships and futures that did not turn out as they had hoped.

Rooney’s attempts to confront these different kinds of grief mark a more mature turn in her writing, even as certain hallmarks of her writing remain the same. That Peter finds himself in a relationship with two women at once, who both seem fine with the polyamorous situation, while he remains deeply conflicted about it, seems like an overly complicated, contrived plot device until we learn the reality of Peter and Sylvia’s past. And while characters in the novel constantly remind Peter and Ivan that they are “grieving,” they are referring only to the loss of their father, not to the myriad other forms of grief that this more visible loss makes palpable.

At other points in the novel, we come to understand that the more superficial strains on the romantic relationships (age differences, love triangles) are small in comparison to the deep tensions between the brothers that cause them to be estranged for much of the book. Divorce, parental inadequacies, personality differences, and finally the death of their much-loved father have forced Ivan and Peter into an impossible situation and caused deep rifts. Ivan thinks his brother is a superficial asshole; Peter sees his brother as an inept chess genius who is still essentially a child. The novel’s most climactic moments involve their confrontations, their attempts and failures to communicate. The age gap between the brothers and the power dynamics that result prove to be far more trenchant than those between the different romantic pairs. In the end, the central suspense of the novel is not about whether the romantic relationships will work out but about whether the relationship between Peter and Ivan will.

Sally Rooney’s popularity is no doubt due to her ability to write about modern love, but in Intermezzo she expands her lens. While the novel is perhaps not as tight in its craft as her earlier works (some parts feel too long; some of the characters retread the same thought terrain), it satisfies just the same.