There’s little that sends the literary world into overdrive like when Sally Rooney announces a new book. For avid fans, the publication day is marked in calendars, and scraps of information about the characters and plot pored over. The hype around the release of her fourth book, Intermezzo, has been hard to miss. But after the success of her previous work, such as Normal People and Conversations With Friends, the wait is always laced with slight trepidation. Will it live up to expectations? Can she triumph again?
Intermezzo is set in Dublin and follows two brothers in the aftermath of their father’s death. Peter is a 32-year-old barrister whose life, from the outside, seems like the image of success; he is affluent, sociable and admired by his peers. Ivan, his brace-wearing younger brother, is the complete opposite. Geeky and socially awkward, Ivan’s life revolves around chess, and at twenty two has experienced next to nothing in the way of sex or romance.
The brothers’ already strained relationship deteriorates as they struggle to come to terms with their loss, while each navigating complex relationships with the women in their lives. Peter is battling an inner conflict over his desire for two different women: his ex-girlfriend, Sylvia, with whom he is still in love but is no longer able to have a sexual relationship with due to her life-changing injury, and Naomi, a student with an OnlyFans account who he is propping up financially. In the early chapters, we witness the beginning of Ivan’s love affair with Margaret, an attractive 36-year-old woman who has recently divorced her alcoholic husband.
Many of the themes that have become synonymous with Rooney appear again in Intermezzo: undefined situationships, sex, ethical dilemmas and our place within capitalist society. But there is a lot in the book that feels like an evolution. Dealing with issues of grief, chronic pain and failed long-term relationships, Intermezzo is imbued with a sense of growing older and the ever-multiplying burdens of life.
It is also the first time that family relationships have been a central focus of Rooney’s writing. Through the dynamic between Peter and Ivan, Rooney reveals the extent to which our identities are constructed through sibling relationships, as well as how resentment can fester when we feel like those closest to us don’t see us for who we really are. For the entirety of Ivan’s adolescence, Peter has defined him as a loner, devoid of empathy and emotional intelligence. Ivan is jealous of Peter’s social and sexual ease, but feels bitter towards him for failing to understand the quiet form of love expressed by Ivan and his father.
In the crucible of grief, these tensions simmer to the fore, and culminate in a violent outburst between the brothers. By the end, both come to understand how they’ve failed each other. Peter concludes: “Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either […] And then in other people’s lives you do the same, you’re the person who lets everyone down, who fails to make anything better.”
One of Rooney’s towering strengths as a writer remains her ability to depict loneliness, both the loneliness of stumbling in life and temporarily losing your way, as well as the profound, existential kind that engulfs your entire being. All the characters in Intermezzo are lost in one way or another. Ivan is grappling with losing his father so young and figuring out his identity outside of chess. Margaret’s divorce has set her apart from her peers, and she is crippled by self-judgment over her age-gap relationship with Ivan. But it’s Peter who is the furthest adrift, drowning in guilt and self-loathing over his absence as a son and brother, and his departure from sexual norms brought about by his desire for Naomi.
It’s the palpable loneliness of her characters that make the moments of connection they experience with one another so tender and poignant. The first time that Ivan, awkward and inexperienced, has sex with Margaret, he feels the world opening up, a new dimension revealing itself and giving his life new meaning. He reflects: “Other people might experience these feelings all the time, whatever they are. Strong, powerful feelings of happiness, satisfaction, protectiveness. It could all be very ordinary, in the aftermath of mutually pleasant episodes like just now. Or even if it’s rare, to have a few times in life and no more, still worth living for, he thinks. To have met her like this: beautiful, perfect. A life worth living, yes.”
Rooney’s prose throughout is characteristically simple and pared-back, each sentence doing only what it needs to. The restraint she employs in her writing enables her to catch the reader off guard with these moments of profound pain and tenderness, leaving them emotionally disarmed. Her pace and sentence structure change depending on which character’s perspective she’s showing. Telling Peter’s story, she experiments with a third-person stream-of-consciousness to convey his tormented, self-destructive state: “Three in the morning, four, another Xanax, open a new browser tab to type out: insomnia psychosis. psychosis average age of onset. can’t sleep going insane.”
Intermezzo is a forceful reminder of Rooney’s ability to capture the complexity of everyday life, and to articulate the feelings which most of us don’t have the words to express. As the layers of each character are skilfully revealed, this book will pull your heart in a hundred directions, and break it with its tenderness. It could just be her best one yet.
Words by Rachel Fergusson
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