Rooney, Sally. Intermezzo. Faber and Faber, London (etc.) 2024. F; 10/24. 

I liked but was not blown away by Conversation with Friends and Normal People, Rooney’s other two novels I’ve read and reviewed. She seemed to me to be improving between the two and I imagined things might get even better, and here I think they really have. There is a consistent depth and charm to this story, although because of a bit of pace and character awkwardness I thought it wasn’t quite in my first-prize category. But it’s very good. 

It follows two Irish brothers about ten years apart in age shortly after their dad dies. Each of them is full into romantic love in different ways but with a strange reverse symmetry between them. Ivan the young one is presented as a chess-champion schlemiel who meets pretty ten-years-older Margaret at a tournament. They fall in excited love, Ivan for the first time and to his relief and astonishment, Margaret after a divorce from an alcoholic husband, but she’s distressed by her conviction that there is no future with Ivan.  

Older Peter looks like a cross between Mark Wahlberg and Atticus Finch: brilliant successful lawyer winning prizes in foreign countries, urbain, handsome, wealthy and of course magnetic to women. But Peter has split up with his soulmate academic partner Sylvia after she’s injured in an accident, and started dating ten-years-younger Naomi who is every man’s dream to the point of selling pictures of herself online. Yet somehow for all his assets and success, in the shadow of his father’s death and the confusion in his love life Peter is drinking heavily, taking sedatives and is deeply unhappy: 

(…it felt like) remembering something embarrassing you did years ago and abruptly you think: that’s it, I’m going to kill myself. Except in his case, the embarrassing thing is his life. 

I’m sorry. Everybody I love has to suffer. There’s something wrong with me. I don’t know how, I don’t know how to live. 

The story follows the brothers through each of their griefs about their father, their very different experience of romantic love and their relationships with one another. There is something moving and disturbing about Sally Rooney’s handling of these stories. I’ve said before her writing is “transparent”: she just objectively tells what’s going on. But this transparency is artifice, and not like the other novels how she tells about characters and events changes with those characters and the circumstance. This I imagine is a look at literary confidence and self-consciousness in the best sense. Inviting insouciant showmanship that’s been earned by telling it like it is. As well as narrating she’s showing she knows what she’s doing. We see it as she works stream-of-consciousness reminiscent of Joyce into Peter’s, Ivan’s and Margaret’s emotions, and then gently cuts to cool illuminating description like she’s outside of any emotional excitement: 

… outside the chill wind of October moves through the leaves of trees. Wide grey streets around the Green, buses slowing to a stop, wheel and cry of gulls overhead. Leaves rustle over the park gates. Barred windows of Ship Street then and the vans reversing. 

… those vans reversing…

Ivan’s quiet thoughtful reason comes wrapped in Rooney’s syntactic logic: 

The idea of borrowing money from Peter has never occurred to him before: maybe because Peter’s aura of wealth has always seemed more like a personality trait than a transferable item of property. Asking to borrow his money would have been like asking to borrow his sense of humour: it wouldn’t even have made sense as a request. Ivan can see now, however, that Peter’s money is not a personal characteristic, but literally just money. 

The shock of Peter’s loss of former order jumps out as fragments including point of view, setting outrageousness and insignificance together: 

I did everything that could be done. Don’t blame me. I was there. While his father sat timidly beside him, embarrassed probably by his peremptory manner. Afraid of alienating the doctors. Why even think about that now. The suffering of another person. Which he failed to stop. False show of competence only disguising the fact of his uselessness, his failure to do anything, to make anything better, to make any difference at all. 

I did find Peter’s awkward ambivalence about his girlfriends a bit out of sync with his sophistication, but that may have been a literary device too. I sense there might be a bit of a (to me somewhat justified) antipathy to powerful men for Sally Rooney. But there are also those sex scenes dancing invitingly just above the dirt. 

I would say Sally Rooney has really tuned in to her powerful imagination in this twisted and layered family and romantic love story. The ending may surprise some people but I found it just right. This is captivating Irish storytelling and style. I might even try to have a go at Joyce’s Ulysses which I never got through in university.

I hope you like Intermezzo as much as I did. 

9.2/9.4