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Sally Rooney is certainly a force to be reckoned with in the literary world. Establishing her authorial status back in 2017 with her debut novel Conversations with Friends (which remains my favourite of her books), she published the multi-award-winning Normal People the following year, which became a critical success as a BBC screen adaption. Three years later saw the release of Beautiful World, Where Are You, and, in September 2024, Rooney presented us with her fourth novel, Intermezzo. Met with widespread acclaim and hailed as ‘utterly perfect’ by critics, many consider this novel her most confident work yet.
And it is, undoubtedly, a moving tale – a plaintive cry to the complexities of grief and its aftershocks. It asks us how grief intersects with, and shapes, our relationships – romantic, familial, interpersonal or otherwise. I felt, too, that Rooney asks us how our acceptance of grief’s unpredictability – its lack of clear trajectory, its deeply individual impact – can bleed into, or inform, our understandings of the nonconformities of love and desire.
Yet, for all the anticipation I felt before reading, Intermezzo left me the least satisfied of all her novels. As ever, her characters are so fully realised it’s as if they exist alongside me, but the book itself failed to pull me in. Instead, I found I was often reading from a desire to finish, rather than any genuine investment in the plot. The prose, too, sometimes felt stilted. Split into three stream of consciousness narratives, Rooney’s signature style – clipped and unembellished – tipped into something harsher, more staccato. In embodying each protagonist’s mind, often too much was said
at once, as if the adage “show, don’t tell” had been momentarily set aside.
Intermezzo centres on the relationship between two brothers, united by the loss of their father. This shared bereavement, however, appears to be where their similarities end. Peter, a Dublin lawyer in his thirties, is financially secure, competent and outwardly self-assured. Amidst the throes of grief, he is trying to juggle two starkly contrasting romantic relationships: Sylvia, his first love, who broke up with him after a horrific traffic accident left her in chronic pain, and Naomi, a young, soon-to-be-homeless university student, who tends to Peter’s desire to feel needed. He oscillates between tiring solipsism and egocentric self-righteousness, seemingly at his most confident when he is measuring his good looks and aptitude against his younger brother, Ivan, who he labels – among many other
unpleasantries – ‘a dour little weirdo’.
Ivan, a 22-year-old competitive chess player, is awkward and introverted. He is a ‘frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter’. He also displays troubling misogynistic tendencies until he experiences falling in love: Margaret, an older woman in the midst of divorcing her alcoholic husband, meets Ivan at one of his chess competitions. Their relationship softens Ivan, humanises him – coldness gives way to tenderness. Yet I could not help but feel that, for all of Peter’s character
developments throughout the novel, Ivan often remained suspended in a state of arrested
adolescence.
There were times when Ivan’s naivety and impulsivity were so starkly exposed that my heart ached for him, as he faded from an agentic man into an impulsive child. A striking example is when he decides to take Alexei, the family dog, from his mother’s home with no plan for her forthcoming care – since Ivan’s Dublin accommodation is unsuitable for dogs. Spurred by an overwhelming tenderness and compassion towards Margaret, he reaches for Alexei in a strange, love-dazed stupor, leading her out of the house. ‘It will all be okay, he thinks. Margaret will understand: she understands everything’. In the absence of strong parental relationships, Margaret here functions more as a mother than a lover, endowed with omnipotent, God-like qualities. At times, I felt that Ivan needed her more than he loved her – a dangerous position for anyone to be in, not least a young man engulfed by grief. This is perhaps an unnecessarily pessimistic reading, though, especially when their relationship is so often characterised by adoration and tenderness.
The question as to whether the brothers are in mutually exploitative relationships remains a central theme throughout the novel, and Rooney asks us whether there can ever be such a thing as morally neutral exploitation. Are relationships not, by definition, exploitative? Are we not constantly engaged in transactions of need, desire and power, whether we acknowledge it or not? Despite both Sylvia and Naomi’s awareness of the other, and choosing to stay involved with Peter regardless, he remains tormented by his moral compass. Following an attempt at re-establishing a
sexual relationship with Sylvia whilst he is living with Naomi, he thinks:
‘Christ…what is he doing, what on earth. In the bath the other night, murmuring in her ear, I want you to be happy. Was he lying then: and for what possible reason. Strong, sudden impulse he feels to begin praying, already mouthing the silent words, and then frightened by himself he stops […] How capable he has been of holding in his mind with no apparent struggle such contradictory beliefs and feelings. The false true lover, the cynical idealist, the atheist at prayers.’
Everything, Rooney writes, is ‘lethally intermixed’. There is something of great significance here, and I feel this is where she excels. People are, at their core, countless vectors of desire, shaped as much by what happened ten minutes ago as by what happened ten years ago – all the time, all at once. Whilst Peter’s trite navel-gazing grated on me at times, particularly as he reflected on his actions with the question: ‘At least if you kill someone you have a motive’, I eventually had to concede. After all, are we not embodying an authentic experience of his mind? And who am I to say that my own stream-of-consciousness narrative would not consist of its fair share of trite navel-gazing, too?
Potential spoiler alert: Although I enjoyed the ending, it felt a little too cookie-cutter happily ever after. For all the psychological complexity we had been granted access to, for all the nuance, everything wrapped up a bit too neatly: communication triumphed over dysfunction in Peter’s romantic life; the brothers are suddenly reconciled. But, in that same vein, Rooney is challenging us to believe in a world where hope, against all odds, might just be worth holding onto. And whether or not I particularly enjoyed this book, it pushed me – to question, to think – and perhaps that is the
most valuable thing a novel can possibly offer its reader.
Words and Image by Lucy McLaughlin, she/her
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