Locked in an embrace, allowing herself a moment to “feel good,” a woman asks herself, “what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?” It’s a trademark moment of yearning in “Intermezzo,” best-selling Irish novelist Sally Rooney’s fourth book. Anticipation for the novel is high and not just because we all need a sophisticated break from reality.
Readers immediately connected with the fresh candor of Rooney’s debut novel. “Conversations with Friends” offered the fantasy of romantic escape grounded in a cynical landscape. “Normal People” took this to the next level with a coming-of-age romance charged by class conflict. “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” a somewhat meta perspective on labor and love, interlaced with email correspondence, revealed a more complicated tableau. Rooney excels at creating an authentic experience of striving within a frenetic, ever changing world. With her sociopolitical and emotional intelligence, Rooney raises the question: is there ethical heterosexuality under late capitalism and imminent climate collapse? She has captured the ennui of our moment. Gripped with anxiety over any number of pressing issues, why is that romance continues to dominate our lives?
In “Intermezzo,” that same all-encompassing focus remains true, but Rooney’s scope has expanded. She’s moved from the tight familiarity and steady pacing of her earlier novels to a larger narrative scale as her characters age and their worlds grow more complex, with bigger casts and slower pacing. Estrangement, as much as desire, is the overwhelming human condition in the book. Her characters lack mobility. The reader feels it as well.
At the heart of “Intermezzo” is a pair of brothers. Although both mourn the loss of their 65-year-old father, theirs is no shared grief. Suave Peter Koubek is 32 years old and works as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan, his socially awkward 22-year-old brother, sits at a personal and professional crossroad. Once considered a “chess genius,” since college and his father’s illness, he’s fallen in his professional rankings and is scraping by with freelance work in a shared flat with roommates. While polished Peter exudes a certain “social brilliance” by contrast, in truth, Peter’s personal life is a mess.
Emotionally, Peter remains devoted to Sylvia, a literature professor and his former longtime girlfriend whose chronic pain keeps their relationship entirely platonic. The demise of that physical relationship creates space for Peter’s heady entanglement with a housing-unstable 23-year-old student and sometimes cam girl named Naomi. Saintly Sylvia is his formal companion at Peter’s father’s funeral, but, after weeks of silence, he retreats to Naomi’s supple embrace. Collectively, he enjoys their “brains and beauty,” but a love triangle like this is also a time bomb. It’s a matter of time before complications ensue. And they do.
Meanwhile, lonely Ivan finds himself utterly besotted with Margaret, a 36-year-old arts center coordinator in a remote Irish town who is separated from her alcoholic husband. Both are ecstatic with their fresh, dynamic connection, but Margaret is careful to conceal their May-December romance from her friends and family who feel that she abandoned her marriage too quickly. She’s afraid to couple up again — and with someone so green and unsettled. Peter, projecting his own insecurities about age and sex, throws cold water onto Ivan’s budding romance. After that, Ivan blocks him — from his phone and from his life.
This very contemporary act speaks to the novel’s overarching elements. On the one hand, “Intermezzo” is a knotted, romantic melodrama that offers extensive insight into the rattled neuroses and intimate desires of its characters along with a substantial array of steamy love scenes. On the other hand, it’s a layered book about the displacement of grief and the noise of modern life. In both respects, Rooney skillfully keeps her finger on the pulse of characters. She seamlessly integrates technology into the lives of her characters, nailing home the fact that despite all the connectivity in the world, we don’t — and perhaps can’t — fully hear one another.
So the book carries on beyond this fraternal rupture. The brothers brood and spar with one another while pursuing their lovers, minds and hearts rambling. In this moody, vibes-driven novel satisfaction is hard to find, but everyone has an excess of opinions and feelings. At this stage of her career, Rooney negotiates a more expansive emotional palate, fraught with family jealousy and misgivings that can never be repaired — no matter how exuberant the sex is. And there’s a lot of it. Readers who come for her physical honesty will be pleased. But I was struck by a certain sticky compulsion around goodness, prettiness, and physical beauty. It is also worth noting that physicality takes on a jarring meaning in this book where one character has no sexual life and the main sensation she experiences is pain. Though it’s entirely plausible that grief has flattened her desire, her selflessness goes unquestioned by the man who claims to love her.
“Intermezzo” is studded with shimmering moments of pastoral stillness that offer an alternative to life on an urban career track or a conventional path to domestic bliss, but there’s an overwhelming air of resigned doom in this novel. Circling back to Ivan’s talent for chess, despite Rooney’s efforts to avoid making obvious comparisons to living life as a pawn in a game, one wonders if the world is indeed rigged to curb autonomy. The ballasts of friendship and travel that brought the magic of possibility into her previous books is missing from “Intermezzo.” For a compulsively readable book that even states, “We don’t want any more melodrama,” it can be a challenge to transcend that condition. Though Rooney is one of our most earnest and passionate contemporary writers, one hopes that this saga framed by lust and grief is an interlude between great acts.
INTERMEZZO
By Sally Rooney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 464 pages, $29
Lauren LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
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