Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Faber, 2024
Reviewed by Harper Cleves
Last September, at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, Sally Rooney stood before an audience of dedicated readers, about to be interviewed about her latest novel, Intermezzo, which was due out later that week. Before beginning, she spoke about Palestine, solemnly calling into the auspicious venue the “40,000 people confirmed dead, each one a precious and irreplaceable life, each one loved and mourned.” She went on to say, “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are witnessing an unfolding genocide.” It is this, Sally Rooney’s unflinching honesty, even with the potential for backlash, and her care for all that is human, that most defines her writing. As came to be evident in her thoughtful interview, and later that night, as I cracked open my advanced copy for the first time, Intermezzo is no exception.
Intermezzo centres around two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, who are navigating grief in the months after losing their father to cancer. Peter, who is 32, is a successful barrister; handsome and well-liked, and someone for whom life seems to be a breeze. Ivan, 22, is more insular and awkward; a chess prodigy whose income comes from working as a freelance data analyst very much ensconced in the unpredictability of the gig economy.
The brothers’ relationship feels delicate from the outset. An early unspoken conflict which arises for Ivan is the fact that Peter insisted he deliver the eulogy at their father’s funeral – which occurs shortly before the novel begins. To Ivan, this is proof of Peter’s arrogance.
However, in the portions of the novel that are written from Peter’s perspective, the facade of his confidence and togetherness is cracked wide open. In what has been described as ‘Joycean’ prose, Peter’s inner voice trips over itself. There is a profound loneliness in the contrast of his outward projection of success and his inner turmoil; nailing deadlines for a high profile workplace discrimination case while also subsisting on Xanax and alcohol. In one particularly fraught moment he thinks to himself: “Thoughts rattling and noisy almost always and then when quiet frightening unhappy. Mental not right maybe. Never maybe was.”
There is an arrogance to Peter; he internally ridicules Ivan for his strangeness. But even this is laced with envy and no small amount of affection, both for his younger brother’s intelligence, but also his apparent comfort in simply being himself. This is something Ivan slowly untangles in his own internal dialogue as the novel progresses. Despite a prevailing anger at his older brother, even in his own recollections he is confronted with times in which Peter was very loving and advocated for him.
Beyond the central fraternal relationship, both Peter and Ivan also navigate romantic entanglements. When Rooney was interviewed in the National Concert Hall, she spoke about why her novels tend to always have romance as their nexus – something for which she has received, in my opinion, a plethora of misogynistic criticism.
The novel, in its original popular form, came to prominence in the 18th and 19th century, and was considered distinctly feminine and middle class, and therefore, not intellectually rigorous or meaningful. The novels from this timeframe often centered around what is colloquially known in academic and literary circles as ‘the marriage plot,’ where the driving narrative force of the story was a heterosexual romance, usually ending in nuptials.
Rooney cited the 18th and 19th century novel as a direct reference point for her work, and romance as a driver of plot is certainly a feature of her novels. The relationships Rooney explores though are distinctly modern, exploring the power dynamics and inequalities rampant in an increasingly crisis-ridden and unequal capitalist reality.
For Ivan, this takes the form of a budding relationship with Margaret; a 37 year-old based in the west of Ireland as a community centre director where Ivan is playing a chess tournament. Margaret has recently separated, guiltily, from her alcoholic husband, and feels self-conscious about her relationship with the much younger Ivan, despite the tenderness and attraction they feel for one another.
Peter remains very much in love with his college girlfriend, Sylvia, who ended her relationship with Peter after being gravely injured in an accident six years prior, which placed limits on her ability to be romantically intimate. This relationship, full of comfort, and familiarity and stability contrasts with Peter’s relationship with Naomi, aged 23, whose youth, spontaneity and sexuality are forefronted as a counterweight to Peter’s rigidity. In the end, Peter is confronted with embracing the non-conventional, as he balances the idea of a polyamorous relationship with two very different women, both of whom he has grown to love.
The inequalities that exist in these romantic relationships; age gaps; income levels; differences in ability and health – none are definitively resolved, and there’s no telling whether the relationships will survive with any longevity. Sally Rooney does not make it her mission to gloss over the real dynamics which divide us in the ‘love-conquers-all’ narratives that often did feature in some of the earliest examples of the marriage plot. But rather, she seems to say, ‘but isn’t it incredible that love persists anyway?’ For all of its messiness, its potential for miscommunication and pain, for it to fall apart disastrously in this frightening world full of division and hate, of war and genocide – isn’t it a miracle we love at all? I think it is. And I think Rooney thinks so too.
