Sally Rooney’s new book is an exquisite return to form
Intermezzo, the first new book by Sally Rooney in three years, comes freighted with expectations. What will our first great millennial novelist do next? Will her new offering leave readers as emotionally wrecked as her previous works?
Rooney, who is Irish, writes elegant, emotionally rich novels, mostly about young people in Dublin struggling to navigate their endlessly fraught love lives under late capitalism. Her first two novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), were both runaway successes. They were adapted into hit TV shows and launched the careers of their young stars. Professionally beautiful people kept getting photographed carrying the books around, with covers in strategically prominent places, like they were the hot new handbag of the season. With her last offering, 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You?, her publishers took the accessorizing literally: Big-name influencers could score a Beautiful World bucket hat and a Beautiful World tote bag to wear with their Beautiful World book.
Rooney is that rarest of creatures, a unicorn of the 21st century, a celebrity author of literary fiction. Any new book by her faces a certain amount of unavoidable scrutiny: After all this time, does she still live up to the hype?
I’m happy to report that Intermezzo is exquisite. While the experimental and polarizing Beautiful World stayed largely out of the minds of its characters, with occasionally chilly results, Intermezzo is all rich inner monologue, as deeply felt as Normal People.
What’s more, it offers something for which Rooney seems to have been looking for a long time: a new way forward through the central concerns of her work. Here, love is played out through familial relationships rather than just romances, with male characters rather than dry intellectual women — and Rooney appears, for the first time, to be ready to stop apologizing for the romanticism of her work.
Rooney’s previous novels played with Austen/Brontë tropes. In Normal People, college students Connell and Marianne are clearly meant for each other, but they keep breaking up in part because of their class differences. In Conversations with Friends, young Frances has to navigate her love for older, married Nick. This is the stuff of the marriage novels of 19th-century England, updated with texting and Marxism.
Intermezzo, in contrast, is a play on the great Russian novels. It’s interested in questions about God, how we care for each other, and what gives life meaning.
At the center of Intermezzo are two brothers, Peter and Ivan, lapsed Catholics who are struggling with the recent death of their father. Peter is 32, a lawyer, fastidious about the cut of his suits and the fabric of his scarves and the way he smiles at strangers, so as “to convey to the world at large a genial disposition.” Ivan is 22 and painfully awkward, still wearing braces, and considers himself almost incapable of interacting with other people.
“Certain kind of panache in his absolute disregard for the material world,” Peter thinks of Ivan. “Peter is the kind of person who goes along the surface of life very smoothly,” Ivan thinks of Peter. As a pair, they form a kind of study in different ways self-hatred can manifest: through either indifference to the outside world or meticulous attention to it.
We meet Peter and Ivan in the immediate aftermath of their father’s funeral, but both of them have other problems to deal with. Peter is still in love with his ex-girlfriend Sylvie, but after a vaguely-described traumatic injury has left her unable to have sex, she’s broken things off with him. (The plot devices you can get away with when you’re Sally Rooney!) Now he’s entangled with a college student and camgirl named Naomi, and fears he might be falling in love with her, too.
All this Rooney narrates in textured, impressionistic sentence fragments, thoughts flitting across Peter’s mind like birds you see flapping across a window pane, there and then gone. “The old life of pleasure gone and never returning,” Peter thinks as he waits to meet lost Sylvie: “accept, or else delude yourself, all the same in the end. The will to live so much stronger than anyone imagines.” He thinks about suicide, and whether God would ever forgive him for it.
Meanwhile, Ivan, a once-precocious teen chess prodigy who has seen his ranking drop in recent years, lives his life in complete sentences, clauses piled upon clauses, his inner monologue so sweetly innocent as to become transparent. “He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind,” Ivan thinks of himself. “He has his good qualities, kind of, but none of them have much to do with living in the world that he actually lives in, the only world that can be said in a fairly real way to exist.”
The plot devices you can get away with when you’re Sally Rooney!
Ivan finds himself steadily more depressed to be living a life organized around chess, as he feels he probably hit his peak at age 15. His life starts to turn around when he meets 36-year-old Margaret, an elegant divorcée living in a small town where Ivan plays an exhibition chess game. Margaret becomes the third point-of-view character of Intermezzo, thinking in sedate, polished sentences about her confusing attraction to Ivan and how, playing chess, “his hands look precise and elegant, like the hands of a surgeon or a pianist.”
Their developing relationship is redemptive for Ivan, who has always considered himself beneath the attention of women, but ruinous for Margaret’s reputation in her conservative town. And while Peter is himself dating a college student, he doesn’t think it plausible that a “normal woman” of Margaret’s age would want anything to do with Ivan. The fight the brothers have over Margaret spirals out of control to be about their entire lives: how they cared for their father, how they should care for the family dog, what they owe to one another.
One of the big questions in this novel is the question of God. Ivan thinks that he can find God when playing really good chess: “It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all.”
Margaret, meanwhile, says that she doesn’t think about God in terms of beauty. “I suppose my idea of God is more to do with morality. What’s right and wrong,” she says. This binary between beauty and morality is traditionally at the center of Rooney novels. Her books are obsessed with whether or not it’s all right to live a life focused on aesthetic pleasure — playing chess like Ivan or writing stories like Connell in Normal People— when so much is wrong with the world and there’s so much political work to be done. By extension, they are obsessed with novels as an art form that exists so that their readers can experience beauty.
“It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another,” thinks Connell in Normal People when he finds himself in “a state of strange emotional agitation” over Jane Austen’s Emma. Meanwhile, celebrity novelist Alice declares in Beautiful World that the problem with Western contemporary literature is that it relies on “suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth,” disowning her own work as insufficiently engaged with real human suffering.
Her books are obsessed with whether or not it’s all right to live a life focused on aesthetic pleasure when so much is wrong with the world
Is it all right, Rooney novels tend to wonder, fretfully, to devote your life to the beauty of novels when, after all, probably the only morally correct thing to do in our current society is to start a Marxist revolution and blow up pipelines?
Strikingly, though, in Intermezzo, Rooney introduces this binary and then collapses it almost immediately. “To me, it seems like it might be all related,” Ivan says. “Like, I don’t know, to find beauty in life, maybe it’s related to right and wrong.” As the novel goes on, Rooney continues to develop this idea: that perhaps the things in our lives that are beautiful and bring us joy should be embraced, even if other people might think that they’re wrong, and that perhaps this will lead us to goodness as God understands it.
In chess, an intermezzo is an “in-between” move that turns a game in an unexpected direction. One way of reading Rooney’s Intermezzo might be as a bridge piece between the books she wrote in her 20s and what’s coming in her 30s: the novels that wondered if they had the right to exist, and the books that are done apologizing for what they are: richly realized novels about love and friendship and the way that both can make us whole as human beings. In the meantime, Intermezzo works beautifully as a book all its own. It’s as tender and lovely as you could ask for, and beneath the elegant rise and fall of Rooney’s oceanic sentences, the waters go deep.