The Rooneyverse Comes of Age

A few pages into Intermezzo, Peter, a 32-year-old Dublin lawyer, is lying in bed with his 23-year-old girlfriend, Naomi, touching her underarm and thinking about how she “hardly ever shaves anywhere except her legs, below the knee.” He doesn’t mind—he likes it, actually; there’s “something sensual in her carelessness.” But her grooming practices are notable as a marker of the couple’s nearly decade-wide age gap: “He told her once that back in his day, the girls in college used to get bikini waxes. That made her laugh.” Naomi herself, “the image of youth and beauty,” is still in college. “Those Celtic Tiger years must have been wild,” she tells Peter in response, a reference to Ireland’s pre-2008 economic boom—which she is too young to remember.

From the start, Intermezzo—the fourth novel by the Irish author Sally Rooney, who’s known for chronicling love and friendship among a certain bookish, vaguely political cohort of Millennials—is preoccupied with questions of age and age difference; questions cosmetic, practical, ethical, and existential. Writing in the close third person, Rooney tells a story of grief, guilt, and love in chapters that alternate between following Peter and his brother, Ivan. Ivan, 10 years younger than Peter (around Naomi’s age), is a former chess prodigy who worries that his best playing years are behind him. Gen Z has officially entered the Rooneyverse—and they’re making the Millennials feel old.

Peter and Ivan, whose father has just died of cancer, have a strained relationship that turns adversarial as the novel proceeds. Peter thinks Ivan is “a complete oddball,” “kind of autistic.” Ivan, well aware of his own social shortcomings—he’s “often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts,” berating himself for his difficulty reading other people—thinks Peter is aloof and self-important. The one thing they can agree on is that they love Sylvia, Peter’s ex-girlfriend, who has become a kind of older-sister figure to Ivan and an intermediary between the brothers. (That Peter still loves Sylvia is, naturally, an obstacle in his relationship with Naomi.)

Both brothers regularly attribute their mutual antipathy to the age gap. But that doesn’t deter Ivan from embarking on an unlikely romance (his first ever) with Margaret, a woman some 14 years his senior who is separated from her alcoholic husband. “We’re at very different stages in our lives,” Margaret warns Ivan. “It can’t go on forever.” Or can it?

What does it mean to love someone whose experience of the world has been fundamentally dissimilar to one’s own? Are sexual relationships by nature exploitative? If so, who’s exploiting whom? Can two people ever really understand each other? Rooney has repeatedly explored these puzzles in her fiction by spinning a web of interconnected characters—friends, family members, lovers, ex-lovers. Frances, the 21-year-old narrator of her debut novel, Conversations With Friends (2017), has an affair with a married 30-something male actor. The two protagonists of Normal People (2018), Marianne and Connell, partake in a years-long will-they-or-won’t-they dance made all the more dicey by their starkly opposite class backgrounds. (Marianne also contends with a cruel older brother.) Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) has two primary romantic pairs, each complicated by divergent pasts and trajectories.

Intermezzo features a laundry list of other signature Rooney ingredients as well: Catholicism; socialist politics; dysfunctional families; chronic illness; intense friendships marked by love, envy, and mutual caretaking. There’s a reason Sally Rooney has become shorthand for, in the words of the actor and Gen Z favorite Ayo Edebiri, “emotionally stunted Irish ppl going thru it.”

But something big has shifted here. The main players in Rooney’s first two novels were college-age, busy wondering when their real life would start; even the protagonists of Beautiful World, approaching 30, asked earnestly what kind of person they wanted to be. Rooney’s latest characters, newly alert to the weight of years, are as attuned to regret as to anticipation; they’re preoccupied with what kind of person they have already been. Looking more warily in the mirror, they don’t always like what they see.

[Read: The hazards of writing while female]

Since she arrived on the Anglophone cultural scene at 26, Rooney, now 33, has been hailed—and disparaged, in some corners—as a generational portraitist, and Intermezzo’s emphasis on aging reads in part as a reflection of the evolving Millennial group-consciousness. Boomers said that 40 was the new 30; Millennials, we’re told, act as though 30 is the new 70. “Hark, the Millennial Death Wail,” a New York Times headline announced earlier this year:

Could it be a shtick? Remember, millennials are the first generation who learned to mine their lives for social media content, and “aging” may be a category that is too robust to leave on the shelf.

In tapping into 30-somethings’ self-serious cries of mortality, Rooney is examining that impulse to wail—and gently mocking it. She has also set out to probe something deeper and more enduring, more universally human: grief itself. On this larger canvas, Rooney’s characters aren’t the only ones who can’t decide how dark or hopeful to feel. Neither, a reader might conclude, can their author.

In novels, as in chess, openings are crucial. Here are some things we learn right away in Intermezzo: At their father’s funeral, Peter gave the eulogy and was offended by the “resplendent ugliness” of Ivan’s suit. Ivan, who still wears braces, feels that he was closer with their father than Peter was, and regrets not having given the eulogy himself. Peter neglected to tell Naomi about the death; he didn’t want her coming to the funeral, didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why the younger woman was there. Instead, he invited Sylvia.

Readers can discern a lot about the Peter-Ivan, Peter-Naomi, Peter-Sylvia relationships from this fact pattern. The opening also contains hints that, though the death has occurred offstage, it may well be the central event around which everything else orbits, the point from which there is no return. Where to next? How to make meaning of one’s life, of life itself and the evanescence of memories, in the midst of pain and suffering?

Time haunts the novel. Peter realizes that he is half the age his father was when he died, “already middle-aged by that calculation. Frightening how quickly it all falls away.” “Trapped in claustrophobic solitude,” drinking too much and swallowing pills in order to sleep, he googles things like “panic attack or am I dying how to tell.” Ivan, who has been singularly focused on his chess career, thinks “maybe I’ve really wasted a lot of my life” (and he’s only 22!). His thoughts, too, are obsessive, a cesspool of “debilitating dark regret and misery.” The brothers can’t help but take it out on each other. ’Round and ’round they go.

Sylvia, beloved and trusted by both, is a deft emissary but can do only so much for them, self-possessed and empathetic though she is. The end of her youth came swiftly: A terrible traffic accident when she was 25 left her in chronic pain. She broke up with Peter, we learn, not wanting him to feel burdened—or to be, herself, the cause of that burden. She carries on, stoic almost to the point of martyrdom.

At least, that’s how it looks from the outside. Rooney carefully guards Sylvia’s perspective, along with Naomi’s. Everything we learn about them is filtered through Peter’s wounded-child inner monologue, which has a way of reducing them to pawns he plays off against each other—Naomi, the manic pixie dream girl who makes Peter self-conscious about his age even as she makes him laugh; Sylvia, the tragic friendly ghost who represents all that’s been lost.

[Read: The small rebellions of Sally Rooney’s Normal People]

If the women’s opacity can be frustrating (clearly they’re a lot more complicated than he seems to recognize), Peter’s yearning, his anguish, can sometimes feel over the top, verging on what we Millennials might call “emo.” Here is Peter buying a bottle of vodka after a fight with Sylvia, fantasizing about what he’d like to tell the young store clerk:

I too was twenty-five once, and even younger, though I readily concede that for you at this moment it must be hard to imagine. Life, which is now the most painful ordeal conceivable, was happy then, the same life. A cruel kind of joke, you’ll agree. Anyway, you’re young, make the most of it. Enjoy every second. And on your twenty-fifth birthday, if you want my advice, jump off a fucking bridge.

But the melodrama is perhaps the point—grief, Rooney recognizes, rarely unspools at anything like a measured pace or intensity. Elsewhere, Peter’s jittery existentialism is almost modernist in its expressive sparseness: “The man helps Sylvia into her coat as Peter looks on. Calmer now. Attuned to the quieter feelings. Under what conditions is life endurable? She ought to know. Ask her. Don’t.”

For Ivan’s grief, Rooney finds a register of raw earnestness that proves unexpectedly affecting. “Nothing will ever bring his father back from the realm of memory into the realm of material fact, tangible and specific fact,” he thinks, “and how, how is it possible to accept this, or even to understand what it means?”

Rooney’s proposition in Intermezzo that love is the surest antidote to disorienting loss won’t surprise her readers. She has often been read as a kind of Millennial Jane Austen; though she’s by no means confined to the conventional marriage plot, she has been loyal to a less traditional happily-ever-after ethos. Her first two novels end on hopeful notes, with much-desired reunions between bruised lovers, for the time being at least. To have implied any certainty of lifelong monogamous bliss for her 20-somethings would have rung false. In Beautiful World, which also ends with a reunion, Rooney upped the ante by zooming ahead to a tidy domestic scene—marriage and babies on the horizon—that left many readers (me among them) afraid that she’d lost her edge.

What the chorus of complaints about that ending missed, though, is the fundamental continuity in her fiction so far: Sally Rooney loves love, romantic and otherwise, and she is endlessly drawn to stories that scope out different ways of redeeming it. In Intermezzo, as she surely intends, I found myself rooting most fervently for the pairing—Ivan and Margaret—that seemed to most defy the odds. Margaret (the one woman in the book whose interiority we do gain access to) has known a dark side of marriage, and Ivan stands to benefit from her clear-eyed resilience. At one point, he tells her that he wishes he were her age. “With painful fondness she replies: Ivan, that’s your life. Don’t wish it away.”

Once again, in this novel, Rooney seems prepared to grant her characters a slightly off-kilter yet still harmonious ending, this time against a backdrop of personal grief and family strife.

That she has managed, mostly, to have it both ways in her fiction—her Millennials may feel adrift, but they can count on a hefty share of good luck—is precisely what irks her fiercest critics. It’s also surely a very conscious choice, and the way she supplies tidy closure, even as she subverts it, is a testament to her skill as a novelist.

In the context of a book so concerned with matters of aging, death, and despair, this habitual ambiguity takes on new meaning. How hopeful should a person be? One line from Ivan toward the end of the novel encapsulates Rooney’s own apparent ambivalence. “We’re both young, in reality,” he tells Margaret. Then he adds, “Anything is possible. Life can change a lot.” His observation is romantic, sentimental even, intended to reassure her that their bond can last. Yet Ivan’s words are also bracing in their realism, a reminder that nothing is guaranteed. If his Millennial elders can figure out a way to sustain hope in the face of acute doubt, they might find that they’re not just aging; they’re growing up.