BookBrowse Reviews Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

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Grief, remorse, and the complexity of human relationships are at the center of Intermezzo, the fourth and longest novel by Irish author Sally Rooney.

In 2022, Sally Rooney delivered a lecture that later ran in The Paris Review, in which she stated that Ulysses could be placed in the literary tradition of Jane Austen, adding that her reading of James Joyce's masterpiece "might sound suspiciously like a novel about attractive young people in their twenties and thirties hanging around Dublin, doing no work, and thinking about sex"—that is, like any of Rooney's own novels. Rooney is the contemporary link in this literary chain: she writes novels in which the characters matter more than the plot and feelings take precedence over action, like Austen, and she describes a palpable, almost tangible Dublin and Ireland, like Joyce.

Intermezzo takes place in this setting, a Dublin mired in job insecurity and a housing crisis, enveloped in rain and winter darkness, literature and debate. At center stage stand the protagonists, the Koubek brothers. Peter, 32, is a charming and successful lawyer. Ivan, 22, has just graduated from college and is a chess expert. "My brother, the genius," Peter says of Ivan on more than one occasion. However, their relationship is far from perfect, and becomes poisoned and strained after the death of their father. That is the starting point of Intermezzo: the funeral. Over the following pages of her longest novel to date, Rooney takes us into the brothers' lives in the aftermath of this event. As in her previous works, sexual and emotional relationships and their blurred boundaries are at the center: Ivan begins a relationship with Margaret, a 36-year-old divorced woman; Peter is torn between his feelings for Naomi, his college girlfriend, and Sylvia, his great love thwarted by an accident: "The image of that life: how beautiful, how painful, to believe it could after all be possible."

These are the central themes of Intermezzo: mourning and, above all, regret. A death sheds light on the life of the deceased, but also on the lives of those close to him; it invites them to question their past. The siblings are suddenly aware of the brevity of life and how disappointing it can be. They recall the times when Peter won debates at university and Ivan dominated chess tournaments. One says, "I wanted my life to be like that." The other replies, "Me too."

Rooney delves into the characters' complex minds with acuity: that of Ivan, who may be autistic if Peter is to be believed, and that of Peter, who is depressed and suicidal. The latter's perspective, that of someone who is "losing his mind" (as they say in the novel), is expertly outlined. The author draws us into a dark dimension, a spiral of dangerous thoughts. She employs with ease a third-person narration that intrudes, blends, and confuses itself with the inner voices of the characters.

Intermezzo is not Rooney's most enjoyable novel, but it is perhaps her most mature. The themes are, and so is the narrative style. Yet when you close the book—and sometimes you need to close it—you don't wonder what Peter and Ivan are up to, as you might have done with Marianne and Connell from Normal People (2018) or Frances from Conversations with Friends (2017): mastery has annihilated the attractive innocence of those early characters. Over the course of the books, the characters have grown older, as has the author. They were college students in Conversations with Friends and Normal People, on the cusp of 30 in Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). In Intermezzo, three of the main characters are in their mid-30s, although Rooney continues to connect with the younger generation through Naomi, who is Generation Z (and talks like it). Again, the writer demonstrates her mastery of voice, especially through the dialogue, always without speech marks, one of her hallmarks.

We do not enter into Naomi's or Sylvia's perspective, although we do enter Margaret's, which could be considered a questionable decision. Would it not have been more coherent to focus only on the two siblings, the protagonists? However, Margaret functions as Peter's counterpoint, his reflection. When they meet, he feels "as if seeing in a mirror, himself but not." Both are past 30, have experienced loves frustrated by illness, have entered into relationships with much younger people, and carry with them the weight of regret.

The book's ending provides forgiveness and acceptance, but not resolution. In her novels, Rooney lets us peek into moments of her characters' lives. She opens a window and shows us a fragment, an interlude, an intermezzo. Then, when the blinds fall, life goes on, as unpredictable for readers as for characters, "more and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more life."

This review first ran in the October 2, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.