It’s publication day for Sally Rooney’s latest novel. Rebecca K Reilly reviews.
A new Sally Rooney book means it’s time for everyone to deliver their hot takes, as sadly for the author many people around the world have made both liking and disliking her work part of their personal brands. No one (besides poets) thinks that anyone gets into writing literary fiction for the fame and money but in this rare case this is what has happened to this author, for better or worse. Will Intermezzo receive the same level of acclaim and derision as 2018’s Normal People or is that a height that is never to be scaled again?
Intermezzo is Rooney’s fourth novel, and depicts the first year in the life of two Slovakian-Irish brothers after their father’s death— the 22-year-old Ivan Koubek and his older brother by 10 years, Peter. Ivan is a former incel struggling to find consistent work after graduation who feels his chess-playing career peaked when he was a teenager; and Peter is a lawyer who takes a lot of medications that don’t seem to have been prescribed to him to cope with his mental state. The book centres around the brothers’ relationship with each other and their respective love interests – Peter is still in love with his university girlfriend Sylvia, a 32-year-old university professor who pushed him away after she was involved in an accident some years earlier, but also has a 23-year-old sort-of girlfriend Naomi who’s studying part-time and was doing OnlyFans but now Peter gives her money whenever she needs it. She moves in with him when her flat is evicted. Ivan starts seeing a 36-year-old woman, Margaret, the manager of a regional arts centre where he plays an exhibition match for the local chess club.
Much of the text’s conflict stems from Peter’s reaction to Ivan’s relationship with Margaret, which is emblematic of his view of Ivan in general – he sees him as a child, which is partly to do with his age but mostly about how he doesn’t think Ivan is “normal”. Ivan has dealt with various social and sensory issues throughout his life, he had a limited palette and selective mutism as a child, struggled to make friends and joined men’s rights communities online after failing to find a girlfriend as a youth. These days, he has overcome or outgrown many of these tendencies, but like many autistic adults, he can’t find a job because he doesn’t perform well in interviews despite having high-level qualifications, he has to live in a flat because of his financial situation but spends most of his time hiding from his flatmates, and his strongly-held beliefs sometimes cause issues – he won’t travel by air for environmental reasons and he will only wear secondhand clothes, causing him to show up in an ill-fitting suit to their father’s funeral and embarrassing Peter who is all about appearances. For these reasons, Peter thinks an older woman who’d want to go out with Ivan must have something very wrong with her, which is naturally very offensive to Ivan who regards himself as an adult man.
The novel is told from three characters’ perspectives: Ivan, Peter and Margaret. Rooney has not written from just one narrator’s point of view since Conversations with Friends. Ivan’s analytical analyses of the situations he finds himself in are some of the text’s strongest passages – it’s interesting to see how he thinks and perceives things, whether or not the reader regards him to be correct in his summations, and Rooney’s ultra-precise technical style is perfect for this. Passages from Margaret’s perspective also sing more than some of the rest of the novel, and the author is, as always, really in her element when she’s writing about women’s relationships with each other and the world, although it’s difficult to say whether it was the right choice to include a third perspective in a book about two brothers. A third point-of-view can be very effective to convey an alternate version of events that the other characters aren’t privy to and expose angles or information that’s missing from the main narrative. However, Margaret only interacts with Ivan and lives in a different town than the rest of the characters who all live in Dublin and her scenes have mostly disappeared by the novel’s end. Any secrets she was keeping from Ivan are revealed very early on, making her perspective’s inclusion in the first place questionable.
Peter’s chapters are written in a frantic, piecemeal way, which works with his characterisation as someone with rapidly cycling and racing thoughts that take him to the edge of a breakdown. But on a sentence level, this style of often eschewing articles but never forgoing description leaves a lot of sentences that begin with adjectives, and sound charitably like versions of Salinger’s short story ‘Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes’, and uncharitably, quite Yoda-ish: “Damp softness in the crook of her elbow he touches”, “Damp his hands and a tingling sensation”,”‘Clean the soles of her feet are”. The descriptive effect is certainly atmospheric, although some readers may have already tired of hearing about the streets of central Dublin, but it’s probably better if you don’t notice the repetitive sentence construction.
The frequent comparisons between Peter’s two girlfriends are fairly uninspired: Naomi is young, sexy and submissive but she doesn’t know how to cook or do the dishes properly and sends nudes at times Peter regards to be inappropriate. She’s described as having thick, dark hair and heavy breasts. Sylvia is always wearing a tweed coat buttoned up to the neck and her accident, which we never find out the details of, has left her unable to have penetrative sex. This comes up a lot, as do the wrinkles around her eyes and forehead. She’s frail from the accident and has small breasts, bony ribs and hair the colour of wheat. Both Peter and Ivan regard the years before Sylvia’s accident to be the happiest times of their lives, particularly because she diffused the tension between the brothers and their separated parents, but now Sylvia rejects Peter’s attempts to reconcile because she thinks he’ll only be fulfilled with a more able-bodied woman.
Nevertheless, Peter loves Sylvia because they can talk about court cases and listen to classical music, whereas with Naomi he just watches YouTube and they order delivery. Sylvia also has her own place and knows how to cook – at one point it’s even mentioned that she has a friend who can make a salad. Margaret also spends a lot of time capitulating to the idea that one day Ivan will find a beautiful woman his own age with many years of fertility ahead of her and forget about her, a mid-30s divorcée, and saying that to him which he finds insulting. Meanwhile, Naomi repeatedly tells Peter he can do anything he wants to her and is always insecurely asking if he hates her. Three sexually or emotionally insecure women in one book is a lot, especially seeing as how much time they spend with their mouths “open”, “wet”, and “receptive”. Queer, trans or disabled readers, as well as maybe Christian teenagers, text-based situationships or people who forgot their pill prescription, may find themselves particularly perplexed by how much focus is given to Sylvia’s inability to be vaginally penetrated. Could they not simply think of something else? It’s difficult to see what the appeal of Peter is to these two women, aside from a few mentions of his good looks and the fact he’s always telling them he loves them and will help them in very desperate situations. Ivan doesn’t see the appeal of Peter either, but is told that he isn’t as bad as some of the other men out there, which is fine in general but here he’s found himself as the lead in a romantic novel where we would hope for higher standards.
Sally Rooney is known as the quintessential millennial writer, but many descriptions feel like they’re from a much earlier time. Sex is always described as “going to bed”, or “making love”. In sexual situations, characters are often saying “Thank you” or “That’s nice.” Sylvia is a tweed-encased professor at only 32 and is mentioned to wear a nightdress to bed. The characters are very resistant to the idea of polyamory and no one’s mentioned to be gay or have an awareness of neurodivergence, despite Ivan and Naomi being fairly young Gen Zs.
After the release of Beautiful World, Where Are You? the author responded to criticism of the characters communicating via long emails to each other by saying that she didn’t know other people weren’t doing that. Similarly, she gave an interview with the Guardian in which she says she didn’t know what “sad girl lit” is, and which mentions that in 2017 she had not heard of Snapchat. It’s totally fine for a fiction writer to be out of touch with the zeitgeist, but it can be jarring when the genre they work in is literary realism and in their three most recent books they’ve written from multiple perspectives. At one point Naomi sings ‘Born to Die’ in the shower, a song which was popular with uni students some 12 years ago. The men’s rights politics Ivan falls into sounds a lot more like the “feminist destroyed with facts and logic” 4chan-type politics from the late 00s, rather than the more recent podcaster, post-MAGA, homesteading stuff that you see today. If this is what millennial fiction is, then what are the hallmarks of that? Works described as such tend to be books written by women about women who live in cities and have iPhones that aren’t very plot-heavy. Is a book still millennial fiction if it’s about men of different ages? Or, does only the author’s age matter and not the characters’? Is a book ever considered millennial fiction if it’s written by a man?
It’s incredibly difficult to be a writer of literary fiction with this level of fame attached, because people are always going to demand something bigger and better, for you to build upon your previous works’ success as you continue on in your career and this author has never indicated any desire to do that or be famous at all. In the above mentioned article, Rooney says she only wants to write novels and for the novels to be good. She also says that she’s still able to write about people with ordinary lives because her life has not changed despite the firestorm of commercial success, and that she’s still in the same place with the same people. This, along with a mention in the New York Times that prior to her residency at the New York Public Library (which ended early due to the pandemic) she had never left Ireland for more than two weeks, really struck me. The world of Rooney’s characters sometimes seems too small and repetitive – everyone went to Trinity College, someone is always involved in debating, a working class person is moved by what they see in Italy in all four books – but if the case is that her real life is also that small, then what can we really fairly expect? The mass appeal of Conversations with Friends and Normal People lay in the fact that they truly touched on what it felt like to be a young person, particularly a young woman, struggling with the transition to adulthood — a widely shared experience. A book about being a lawyer who is kind of a dick probably touches on the lived experiences of some people, but not really in the same way, and certainly not in a way that you could make being a fan of such a work a keystone of your personality. Will Rooney’s audience grow up alongside her characters or is this where they will diverge?
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney ($37, Faber & Faber) is available for purchase from Unity Books.