For a writer with limited press engagements and a staunch refusal of air travel, Irish novelist Sally Rooney seems to pop up everywhere in the book space. Her popularity reached heights with the release of her 2019 smash hit “Normal People” and its subsequent adaptation into a TV series. Despite her fame, she does little to capitalize on it.
Maybe “capitalize” is the wrong word, since Rooney considers herself a Marxist.
Nevertheless, the Rooney tidal wave continues to sweep the literary landscape after her fourth novel “Intermezzo.”
Sitting on the longer side of Rooney’s work at 437 pages, the book braids the lives of two Irish brothers: the eldest, Peter, a wealthy barrister, and Ivan, 10 years younger, a geekier and slightly awkward competitive chess player, who are both grieving the recent death of their father. It is their lives, love, and desire that let the novel coast softly forward, her pacing like a gentle sailboat rocking back and forth in the wind.
Her books represent what is colloquially described as having “no plot, just vibes.” Very few actual events happen in this novel—and that’s not the main reason Rooney is so widely read anyway. Her characters, who explore the complexities of modern relationships, are what resonate so deeply with readers.
Her writing style is like a concentrated stream of consciousness, flowing yet restrained and composed, and always authentic. We are inside the minds of these characters, following their thoughts and speech moment by moment, wherever it takes them. It might feel this way because of Rooney’s trademark lack of dialogue formation, omitting quotation marks altogether.
“Intermezzo” is a gentle floating cloud, encompassing readers in its easy world before piercing them with its poignancy.
Peter, the elder brother, is torn between two women, his ex-girlfriend Silvia who broke up with him after she was in a car accident, and a younger, wilder college student Naomi. Unlike most books with this trope, there is not a clear winner to this love triangle. Both connections mean something different to Peter, and yet their equal importance is what renders him undecided.
Ivan, the 22-year-old chess genius, becomes quickly enamored with the 36-year-old art center director and divorcee Margaret. Their relationship unfolds in awkward but passionate encounters, hidden from the rest of their families and colleagues. They’re earnest, a bit awkward, and desperate not to say the wrong thing, hoping the other knows the depth of their feelings somehow, though they dare not say everything.
The two meet over their mutual involvement with chess, the game at the focal point of Ivan’s character. Though not overtly present in the story, Rooney’s few descriptions of chess provide context behind Ivan’s decisions.
If there is anything to know about Rooney, it is that she is no stranger to politics and global issues. As a Marxist, she often slips commentary on capitalism, climate change, and religion into her work. Readers can point at an assertion a character makes and think, “That’s Rooney coming through.”
Ivan has a “refusal, environmentally motivated, to travel by air,” which can’t be a coincidence given that Rooney has the same principle.
Above all, “Intermezzo” is an indulgence. It’s a sink into a silk pillow of all that Rooney does so well with her writing. This a novel about desires, connection and reconnection, age differences, romances, and the changes they carve out in our lives. It’s about what is said and what isn’t, how a sibling relationship changes, for better or worse, through shared grief. We can see this musing on experience in Margaret’s love-induced reflections:
“Margaret feels that she can perceive the miraculous beauty of life itself, lived only once and then gone forever, the bloom of a perfect and impermanent flower, never to be retrieved. This is life, the experience, this is all there has ever been.”
