SALLY ROONEY Intermezzo. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

Irish writer Sally Rooney is known for her succession of bestselling literary novels. Intermezzo is her best yet.

In her first novel, Conversations with Friends, a young woman, Frances, enters into an obsessive affair with an older man, a jaded, not overly successful actor. Published in 2017 when Rooney was in her mid-twenties, the protagonist’s naivety is understandable, though this older reader found her difficult to empathise with. In Intermezzo, her commentary on permissible forms of love has matured. Also featuring relationships between men and women with large age gaps, it explores more fully gendered hypocrisy and the policing of moral standards: controls imposed by society and those we put on ourselves. Set in contemporary Ireland, between Dublin and the countryside, it speaks to the enduring power of shame.

Two brothers, Ivan and Peter, are separated in age by a decade and riven also by their different relationships with their parents: their mother, Christine, distantly cool, busy with a second family of unfriendly stepchildren, and their father, with whom Ivan has been close. Their father’s recent death presents a void through which they must find new, adult ways to relate to each other. 

Ivan, the younger brother, is a chess prodigy. He has been competing in internationals since his teens when he earned his FM, becoming a chess master, and is working through the rankings towards grandmaster. However, he’s in the doldrums when the book opens, and wondering if he peaked too early. He earns a subsistence income as a data analyst and from chess exhibitions where he plays ten simultaneous games, moving between players seated in a u-shape in a hall. It is at one of these that he meets Margaret, a local arts administrator. She is 36 to his 22, and divorced; she is also distinctly attractive, the kind of woman around whom men behave differently, ‘showing off in front of her, he realises’.  They begin something he sees as wondrous, a marvel, and which she embraces for the present, a simple intimacy denied for too long.

A desperate sadness surrounds Peter, the elder brother, a human rights lawyer. He is deeply enmeshed with a woman, Sylvia, yet their relationship is odd. He cares for her in all manner of ways, but something is wrong. ‘Quietly they look at one another. Love at times indistinguishable from hatred. What they represent to one another: unsatisfiable desires.’ The gradual unfolding of their history keeps pace perfectly with our understanding of their lives and empathy with their situation. Peter’s simultaneous entanglement with a woman he meets in a bar is a counterpoint. Naomi supplies both the drugs to calm the cacophony in his head, and sex. ‘No job, no family support, no fixed address, no state entitlements, no money to finish college. Owner of nothing in the world but her own perfect body.’ Evicted from her squat, she comes to live with him temporarily.

An intermezzo is both an unexpected move in chess, changing the play, and also a short interlude of music, usually light entertainment between the acts of a more substantial work. Rooney’s title asks us how to consider relationships that may disrupt, and those that are between the acts of the (serious) business of living and working as equal and valued partners. The opprobrium of Margaret’s family when she enters a relationship with a man barely out of college, is real. Her mother asserts she is no better than Margaret’s alcoholic ex-husband, last seen urinating in the street. Peter, despite his own ‘intermezzo’ with Naomi, also reacts negatively to his younger brother’s relationship: Margaret must be out for something, desperate. She recoils at this assessment:

To see herself as the brother must see her, a middle-aged woman taking advantage of a naive, grieving boy, and for what, for her own gratification, her own pleasure … Inside her, a sick feeling, poisonous. Deep down, Ivan had probably come to hate her, she thought: and she could even sense in herself the potential to hate him, for the selfishness he had brought out in her, for the life of decency he had interrupted.

Though the brothers are the fulcrum around which events take place, the women are compelling figures – their differences vivid. Sylvia is beloved by all but, through tragedy, is alone and determined not to bring those she loves down into her personal hell. Margaret has been kept in her place by a judgemental community and her surprise at finding herself in love with Ivan after giving her best years to a drunk is exquisite. Naomi is the wild child – young, alive and free.

Rooney’s prose is an undulation of these distinct voices; her long paragraphs of thoughts, remembrances and dialogue, both internal and spoken, are a bricolage of their desires, those met, yearned for, and impossible.  The complexity of the different relationships is convincing: Ivan lashing out at Peter, whose protection of his younger brother must give way to a new role that acknowledges Ivan’s maturity; Peter, in turn, is grappling with his changing love for Sylvia, and his feelings for Naomi. Each character is forced to examine what it means to love and be loved. Ideas of traditional romantic love, fidelity, and filial duty, to name a few, are challenged by concomitant human needs of giving and receiving support in a shared life, through its different stages. In this, I was reminded of Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby, which poses similar questions around unorthodox relationships and families. The choices Rooney’s characters must make are all credible and make Intermezzo her most engrossing novel to date.

Sally Rooney Intermezzo Faber & Faber 2024 PB 448pp $34.99

Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.

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Tags: chess, Conversations with Friends, Irish writers, relationships, Sally | Rooney