Intermezzo
By Sally Rooney
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 464 pages, $29
Few writers in our time have provoked the hysteria, hype, adoration, and scorn that Irish novelist Sally Rooney has. And her latest, Intermezzo, is a bona fide publishing-world event that seems unlikely to lessen the controversy. It’s Rooney’s longest book to date and abundantly displays her trademark style, which some say is a genius remix of the 19th-century novel and others call souped-up young-adult literature. It’s also Rooney’s weakest work, and though it continues to develop her originality of form and provocative ideas, I’m not sure the provocation is controlled or deliberate. It’s clearer than ever in Intermezzo that the emotional core of the Rooney novels, and the reason they connect so powerfully with readers, is that she has resurrected Christian romantic love for the polyamory generation, even without quite believing in it. As someone who does believe in Christian love, I find the books interesting and worthwhile, but conceptually muddled.
Rooney’s perennial concern is human relationships, mostly romantic, though friends and families also appear. And she structures her books in alternating perspectives, a strategy whose aptness for the social-networking world has already been voluminously commented upon and rightfully praised. Intermezzo does the same: It’s the story of two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, and their relationships with each other and with the women in their lives. It’s also Rooney’s first novel written primarily from a male point of view, though this doesn’t seem to amount to much. The sections focusing on Peter are told in a risky, third-person stream-of-consciousness that’s clunky to read: “Used to have a different ringtone for her messages, didn’t he. In the old days. Dublin in the rare, etc. Can’t remember now how it sounded. What make or model the phone was, how it weighed in his hand.” Ivan’s sections are more classic, breakneck Rooney, narrated in her slightly alienated and robotic, close-third-person voice.
The chess-themed novel’s opening move is the death of Peter’s and Ivan’s father, an emotional loss that allegedly shocks both brothers into a response. (In reality, the event feels distant, tractionless, and somehow false.) Both have been in a kind of hibernation or stasis. Peter, a handsome and successful lawyer, “goes along the surface of life very smoothly” but is secretly self-medicating, alcoholic, and suicidal, relying on two women for imperfect forms of emotional and physical comfort. Ivan, a chess prodigy and recent college graduate, has been experiencing a long, slow failure to bloom—his game is stalled out; his deepest emotional relationship is with his dog. Peter refers to him as “almost spiritually alone, and perhaps best left that way.”
Much has been made of Rooney’s stock characters: unbearable millennials who check their phones a lot, self-analyze, have sadomasochistic sex, talk about “fascist aesthetics and the modernist movement,” and live in a state of primal, unspecified crisis that, in fact, does feel like most days of modern life. The details are wonderfully apt for the milieu and are presented fresh, without the self-protective layer of satire or nihilism that this generation tends to use to distance the author from the material. But the characters are also idealized—everyone is beautiful and uncommonly brilliant; or like Peter’s “platonic life partner,” Sylvia, an academic, they are so elegant that they make being beautiful seem tacky and so brilliant that audiences burst into applause when they finish lecturing.
Some—but not enough—has also been made of Rooney’s wish-fulfillment plots, poor characterization, and unrealistic emotional development. In Intermezzo’s early pages, Ivan, competing at a depressing regional chess exhibition, meets Margaret, the 36-year-old program administrator at the center where the event is held. Margaret is mild-mannered and wears regional-arts-director clothes but is also a stunning beauty: “white and pink her complexion like a flower.” Plus she is single, too, since she has recently separated from an alcoholic husband. Despite their age difference, Margaret and Ivan have an instant, powerful sense of “belonging, it could not be clearer, to the same camp.” In mutually uncharacteristic behavior, they have a one-night stand. It is slightly awkward but also hot; Rooney’s sex scenes are legendarily good. Afterward, Ivan reflects: “To have met her like this: beautiful, perfect. A life worth living, yes.”
Margaret and Ivan embark on a relationship wherein the force majeure attraction between them is threatened mostly by an external factor: the disapproval of others regarding the age difference. None of the real difficulties that accompany age-difference relationships arise—Ivan isn’t annoying or irresponsible; Margaret isn’t patronizing or controlling; they want to do exactly the same thing on the weekends, and so on. Without spoiling the ending, we can say that it doesn’t involve realistic change for either party or serious grappling with the potential obstacles, and that Rooney’s endings rarely if ever do.
Rooney’s painstakingly-detailed manner of writing about relationships makes some characters come off as poorly developed and their drama unconvincing, as they could probably be cleared up by a few frank conversations.
Such flaws, if this is what they are, have long been visible in Rooney’s body of work and, coupled with her obvious wild popularity, tend to be the source of claims that she’s actually writing YA or trash, or that her work is unserious as literature. But these books aren’t Twilight or Harry Potter; the prose is often wonderful (though again, Intermezzo is less controlled than previous novels), and it’s hard to believe that anyone who can write so well is making gauche elementary mistakes on plotting and characterization. By her own lights, Rooney has ambitions for serious cultural commentary. A Marxist critique of consumerism and capitalism is a thread running through her books.
Intermezzo opens with an epigraph from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and is seeded throughout with quotations and references to the philosopher’s ideas on language.
I don’t find these themes well-developed in the text, but it seems that Intermezzo may be messily struggling with the insufficiency of language to capture reality and, on a larger level, the insufficiency of meaning in our lives. Peter, she writes, “had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved questions and conflicts leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously under-examined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning.”
Here is a particularly nice passage that suggests a word is a placeholder covering a more complicated reality and demonstrates why Rooney can be so much fun to read. Margaret worries during an early exchange with Ivan:
Why did she say the word ‘passionate’ to him when they were talking? And why did he repeat it so many times, three or even four times? Is the word ‘passionate’ or is it not, basically an obscene item of vocabulary? No, it isn’t. But is it like a small bandage placed over an item of vocabulary that is in fact obscene? Maybe, yes. A word with blood running through it, a red word. In casual conversation, it’s better to use words that are grey or beige.
In this vein, the choice to write Peter in a stream-of-consciousness perspective is possibly intended more as a revelation of the limited qualities of language than as an attempt to capture some truth about consciousness.
I would suggest that instead of writing obviously bad fiction, Rooney is deliberately building idealized romance characters and invoking genre elements as a new form of myth-making and cultural commentary, developed for her new form of contemporary epic novel. If such tropes aren’t respectable and are tarred with the traditionally female … whatever. She seems to believe that these classic romantic forms are necessary to salvage reasons for living from a world of chaos and darkness. Rooney’s Marxism, environmentalism, and pro-Palestinian politics are well known, and she and her characters share the catastrophic mindset of the global left. Intermezzo, in its way, is her least political book, but its characters’ primal woundedness is the same. Readers, obviously, appreciate her efforts and relate.
Intermezzo contains Rooney’s two most traditional and adult love stories and appears to be grappling with how her form of romantic love might look in modernity—i.e., between couples who aren’t socially sanctioned (Ivan and Margaret), or who aren’t monogamous (Sylvia, Peter, and his less-platonic partner, Naomi). In a late-breaking scene, she invokes Wittgenstein on language to help resolve Peter’s plot line and allow him to continue his relationship with both Sylvia and Naomi. Peter laughably poses his relationships as “an obscure philosophical problem” that are defined by chosen words like girlfriend that “may be both correct and incorrect at once.” He goes for a third way—the ménage. As per Wittgenstein: “Here saying, ‘There is no third possibility’ or ‘But there can’t be a third possibility!’ expresses only our inability to turn our eyes away from this picture.’”
I find it telling that this is the best Rooney can do. The novel doesn’t solve the problems posed by either relationship on the level of character development and events because it can’t. And it can’t, because the kind of powerful and compelling romantic love Rooney invokes so well operates by older rules, most probably those of her Irish Catholic cultural heritage. A defining factor in Rooney love stories, at least the best ones, is the sense of true love and forever love that has developed from the Christian tradition. Couples, like Peter and Sylvia, or Connell and Marianne in 2018’s Normal People, meet young and bond so intensely that no one else can ever match up. Ivan and Margaret come together as soul mates, despite their differences. The book’s dramatic tension is entirely centered on the reader’s wish that these people should get together and stay together; Intermezzo is a marriage plot in all but name.
“Intermezzo covertly endorses old-fashioned Catholic forms of sexual morality.”
As a marriage plot, Intermezzo covertly endorses old-fashioned Catholic forms of sexual morality, plus some old-fashioned gender constructions. Sex in Rooney books is almost always awful or traumatizing—unless it’s with the soul mate, in which case it’s mind-blowing. Connell in Normal People can get any girl he wants but finds promiscuous intimacy so distressing, he often feels nauseated afterward. In Intermezzo, Ivan, prior to Margaret, has found sex to be so awkward that it isn’t worth it. Peter is perhaps comfortable sleeping around, but he is also the character experiencing suicidal despair. He feels that his sexual desires, “even when instantly and gorgeously gratified [by Naomi] only make him increasingly unhappy and insane.”
As for gender, both Peter and Ivan feel “protective” toward their female partners. And Naomi, like Marianne in Normal People, offers a kind of lavish and total submission in bed. The S&M dynamics in Rooney’s work often seem to allow her female characters to express a form of submission that isn’t culturally allowed, but dovetails nicely with traditional heterosexual gender roles. (“Wives, submit to your husbands. Husbands, love your wives.”) At other times, the S&M represents the character’s personal and psychological decline—hardly a liberal, sex-positive viewpoint.
Rooney’s enormous popularity, I suspect, is due to the fact that she allows modern liberal audiences to enjoy the enduring appeal of old-fashioned, Christian, and specifically Catholic romantic forms without realizing that is what they are doing. And her books’ great conceptual flaw is that it isn’t exactly clear that she realizes this herself.